I've been getting nonstop ads for Gundam model kits. Too lazy to build them anymore so I haven't bought anything, but I click and ogle the kits every now and then (current gen Master Grades are damn near as good as perfect grades were when I was a kid, just need to add the LEDs yourself).
what they're really looking at is how good a customer you are.
That sounds innocuous until it's not. As the data improves and as companies continue to consolidate and share data (possible because we've completely removed the breaks on mergers and anti-trust law today) the companies will start doing the same sorts of things China plans to do with its "Social Credit" system. We've already seen a bit of this where web sites track you and show higher prices if they think you'll pay it. Sprint also rather famously made a list of the customers who cost the most due to customer service calls and "fired" them.
Whether it's a mega corporation or a fascist government doesn't matter to me. I don't care if the jackboot on my throat is a public or private one, I don't want a jackboot on my throat. That said I'm not so naive as to think I can avoid powerful government institutions. The anarchist or libertarian route doesn't work, it just makes a power vacuum. If I don't form a government with my fellow citizens a mega corp will fill that void.
The time is now to either start enforcing anti-trust to prevent these kinds of power concentrations (while making sure voter suppression stops so we don't end up with the public option Jackboot). Either that or heavy regulation, especially for "natural" monopolies (think Google, or your cable company).
is there's way more wage theft (not, "I got paid less than I deserve" but "I got paid less than I was legally owed") than robbery but we've got around 1000 cops nationwide pounding that beat and several hundred thousand on robbery.
For this you can't even argue there's the risk of violence. Package theft if done while no one is looking.
I mean, they blew up several planets, killed Han and Luke (yeah, I know they're ret-conning that last one) and the leader of the "Rebellion" made a complete mess of everything in the second movie out of sheer, maddening stupidity. Nobody's getting stars and everybody's a complete screw-up.
There's a YouTube outrage machine you're probably picking up on that road the crappiness of the last Star Wars movie to a lot of free hits. But Step outside that and to plain old movie critics who break the film down and you'll find it's just a bad movie. The constant incompetence of the characters is because the director wanted a Strikes Back style "Everything's fucked" ending that didn't make any sense in the context of the Rebellion's victory. It's lazy writing because they don't know how to raise stakes without falling back on the tropes of the original trilogy. Politics doesn't enter into it, it's just incompetence.
he had "help" on Strikes back & Jedi and they're better films for it. You're right about the yes men though. He had script writers for the prequels but they still came out meh and seeing the interviews with everyone involved it's pretty obvious they were too star struck to fix anything.
and a virgin birth got consulted. Good. Good. Let the Hate flow through you.
The trouble with the last couple Star Wars movies wasn't that it didn't stick to Lucas' ideas. The writing was just plain bad and the direction worse. The Last Jedi was just a bad movie. The plot didn't make sense. Nobody's motivations made sense. The fight scenes were badly, almost laughable choreographed and Rey's a Mary Sue character without an arc because the writers were in too much of a hurry to get to lightsaber battles.
they actively lobby for those State laws using bribery in the form of campaign contributions. When you say State Law makes it legal it's a bit like saying what Stalin did was legal since, well, he was doing it in the name of the state.
This isn't just a matter of "If you don't like it, change the law". This is a complete subversion of the mechanism of Democracy. We've got Voter Suppression, consolidation of media into propaganda arms (e.g. Sinclair Media), outright voter fraud (e.g. North Carolina's voter fraud, plus when happened in Georgia) and that's before we talk about how the American Senate was a reaction to populist uprisings from the cities done to give rural areas where the landed genrtry lived disproportionate power (remember, if you didn't own land back then you couldn't vote, so no, the Senate wasn't created to keep cities from overwhelming poor rural voters) and the god damned Electoral College.
What I'm saying is that when Democracy is as weak compared to moneyed powers as it is in the United States then you lose the right to appeal to "But what they did was legal".
is why New York told Amazon to go pound sand. This is what happens when you just make it rain cash to get a company to bring some jobs. Once they've got you over a barrel like that they can keep pushing and pushing.
For one thing the politicians are going to be dependent on bribes^XCampaign Contributions to win since they just borrowed several billion dollars that'll have to be paid back for jobs that will probably never materialize (or pay less if they do). Now you're gonna have to stop investing in roads and schools to pay for all that, making your state less desirable for other employers.... and skilled employees who leave your state in droves. It's a race to the bottom.
States that tax their wealthy and use the money to invest in the working class do better because they've got the infrastructure and skilled employees companies need. Skilled Employees aren't going going to move to a shit hole just because they can have a decent house. What good does that do if there's no schools, no amenities, nothing to do and the water's full of lead? You can't raise kids in a place like that and you can't have a good single time. The only thing you do in a place like that is try to get out of it.
banks will not give you an account in America. It is very common for men post divorce to be unable to get an account. Alimony and Child support payments show up on your record and can hurt you because they are a debt that must always be paid before anything else. Also divorces are really, really difficult and expensive and you'll often be left in a bad spot financially.
My understanding is large parts of Europe have "Postal Banking" where you can open a public bank account at a Post Office regardless of credit worthiness. Countries often do this specifically to address the problem of private banks not wanting to take on the poor and disadvantaged as clients. In America the banks have a _lot_ more power than they do even in Europe, so they've blocked any attempt at such a system.
You have to properly indent, making the code more readable and better organized. If you get stuck maintaining somebody else's code it's a Godsend. But for me it drives me nuts since I hate worrying about space counting.
the difference is that Trump vs Hilary didn't matter to anyone with any real power. Despite what Glen Beck will tell you Hillary really doesn't have a global kill squad of female assassins with the "Can I talk to your manager" haircut. She's just a dumb broad good at manipulating inter-party politics to her advantage (but not good enough to beat a moderately charismatic black guy from Hawaii).
The Hillary stuff didn't impact the People Who Matter (tm) because whether it was her or Trump they still won. Hillary was a right of center candidate who wants to accelerate corporatism and outsourcing. Trump's all that with a bit more Evangelical crazy (thanks to Pence) and a $1 trillion dollar tax cut. The tax cut was a nice bonus, but it was just that, a bonus.
Now, those other docs he leaked let the world know where those rich were hiding their taxable dollars. Parts of Europe are busy cracking down. They'll fail, because their voters will get distracted by nonsense like scary Muslims, Brexit, and whatever passes for wedge issues and minorities over there, but it'll take some effort to right that ship and get back to eliminating the middle class. Assange screwed with the plans of the powerful. The People Who Matter (tm). He's going to jail. Probably for the rest of his life.
you didn't notice because several economic booms fueled by technology ( post WWII, Internet, Housing/Investment Bubble ) hid the effects from a lot of us. You didn't notice because the economy was doing so well that the scraps the 1% leaves us were, for a short time, some mighty tasty scraps. They've noticed how good those scraps are now and are taking those too. Because of that you're starting to notice shit like this again.
he helped give us Trump, and he should have known better. Trump is nobody's friend. Also he was irresponsibly leaking un-redacted documents. But the charges he fled were so obviously an excuse to get him into custody so that the US could extradite him as to be laughable. We don't need to ask if the US would have extradited him, the first thing the US did when he was no longer protected by Ecuador is file to extradite.
He's not a child throwing a tantrum, he's being railroaded because he crossed some very rich and very powerful people. His real crimes were those financial documents that got leaked and showed how much money was stored in offshore tax havens. It let us know just how much wealth the 1% has siphoned out of the economy and for anyone paying attention we now know why we're all living under austerity despite the biggest GDPs in history.
I just don't think Hilary had much to do with it. We all forget how much Wikileaks did before Hilary because he helped give us Trump. But Assange leaked mountains of documents from the wealthiest people on Earth. There was no scenario where he got away with that in the current oligarchy. The Hilary stuff is small potatoes. She was always just another bag man for the ultra wealthy. She never once threatened to upset their apple carts. What doomed Assange was getting on the bad side of people with unlimited access to money and power. That he escaped them for as long as he did is a minor miracle.
They're both members of the ruling class. And besides, if it's one thing The Mueller investigation did do it's show us Trump has a complete lack of gratitude for the folks who helped put him where he is.
If it did then helping Trump would have paid off. He exposed financial records of a boatload of rich and powerful. In America that didn't really matter but the tax man in Europe and Asia took notice. This isn't about which members of the oligarchy he pissed off. The oligarchy takes care of their own. The 1% is like the mob or any other form of organized crime. Mess with one and you've messed with them all, and a hot like Assanage did was never gonna be forgiven.
the problem isn't them blowing it, the problem is that a right wing, pro corporate and anti-worker regime has been in charge since Reagan. It's not about too much or too little, they've always done a lot, it's just mostly been bad. Tax cuts for the rich, attacks on Unions, deregulation (especially of banks who gamble with trillions knowing full well their losses will be covered by you and me) trickle down economics, austerity for the working class and opulence for the rich and endless war to support the military industrial complex.
We've been trying right wing politics for decades, whichever party was in charge. Folks have been trying to replace "The Establishment" without being able to understand who the establishment is.
Go look up opensecrets.org. That's a good place to start. Watch Secular Talk and Shaun. Read A People's History of the United States. Listen to what Bernie Sanders says about healthcare and what Liz Warren says about the banks. Do these things and it'll start to make sense. The problem is a wealthy elite who's greed and power hunger knows no bounds. You can't just look at parties or politician or who makes you feel good about yourself. What matters is policy and who does and doesn't take corporate PAC money. Oh, and watch out for guys like Beto O'Rouke, who seems to have gotten his money from the wealthy and hide that fact by having them bundle small donations.
We've let Disney and about 5 other companies buy up every single TV station, news station, media outlet and franchise on earth. And we're not stopping them from further consolidation. The point is that you won't have a choice unless you want to drop out of pop culture entirely. Which sounds good on paper but makes you seem like a weirdo who can't relate to normal people.
I actually remember it being a bit of a problem for my kid in high school. When all the other kids were talking about such and such TV show she couldn't watch it because we were too broke for cable. It made it harder for her to socialize. TV and movies are, for non-nerds, a social thing. I know it's hard to understand that on a site full of nerds. We nerds evangelize our favorite shows but we don't usually hop on bandwagons. I only saw it because I saw it so many times with my kid. I remember she hated Twilight but read the books and watch the movies just so she could stay in line with her friends. As an outsider that seems nuts, but it's the reverse, it's what the "normies" do.
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I've been getting nonstop ads for Gundam model kits. Too lazy to build them anymore so I haven't bought anything, but I click and ogle the kits every now and then (current gen Master Grades are damn near as good as perfect grades were when I was a kid, just need to add the LEDs yourself).
this is basically a private version of that. Same effect but palpable to Americans since it's not the government doing it...
what they're really looking at is how good a customer you are.
That sounds innocuous until it's not. As the data improves and as companies continue to consolidate and share data (possible because we've completely removed the breaks on mergers and anti-trust law today) the companies will start doing the same sorts of things China plans to do with its "Social Credit" system. We've already seen a bit of this where web sites track you and show higher prices if they think you'll pay it. Sprint also rather famously made a list of the customers who cost the most due to customer service calls and "fired" them.
Whether it's a mega corporation or a fascist government doesn't matter to me. I don't care if the jackboot on my throat is a public or private one, I don't want a jackboot on my throat. That said I'm not so naive as to think I can avoid powerful government institutions. The anarchist or libertarian route doesn't work, it just makes a power vacuum. If I don't form a government with my fellow citizens a mega corp will fill that void.
The time is now to either start enforcing anti-trust to prevent these kinds of power concentrations (while making sure voter suppression stops so we don't end up with the public option Jackboot). Either that or heavy regulation, especially for "natural" monopolies (think Google, or your cable company).
is there's way more wage theft (not, "I got paid less than I deserve" but "I got paid less than I was legally owed") than robbery but we've got around 1000 cops nationwide pounding that beat and several hundred thousand on robbery.
For this you can't even argue there's the risk of violence. Package theft if done while no one is looking.
I suspect he's lost his marbles.
I mean, they blew up several planets, killed Han and Luke (yeah, I know they're ret-conning that last one) and the leader of the "Rebellion" made a complete mess of everything in the second movie out of sheer, maddening stupidity. Nobody's getting stars and everybody's a complete screw-up.
There's a YouTube outrage machine you're probably picking up on that road the crappiness of the last Star Wars movie to a lot of free hits. But Step outside that and to plain old movie critics who break the film down and you'll find it's just a bad movie. The constant incompetence of the characters is because the director wanted a Strikes Back style "Everything's fucked" ending that didn't make any sense in the context of the Rebellion's victory. It's lazy writing because they don't know how to raise stakes without falling back on the tropes of the original trilogy. Politics doesn't enter into it, it's just incompetence.
he had "help" on Strikes back & Jedi and they're better films for it. You're right about the yes men though. He had script writers for the prequels but they still came out meh and seeing the interviews with everyone involved it's pretty obvious they were too star struck to fix anything.
and a virgin birth got consulted. Good. Good. Let the Hate flow through you.
The trouble with the last couple Star Wars movies wasn't that it didn't stick to Lucas' ideas. The writing was just plain bad and the direction worse. The Last Jedi was just a bad movie. The plot didn't make sense. Nobody's motivations made sense. The fight scenes were badly, almost laughable choreographed and Rey's a Mary Sue character without an arc because the writers were in too much of a hurry to get to lightsaber battles.
somebody threw out a perfectly good white boy
they actively lobby for those State laws using bribery in the form of campaign contributions. When you say State Law makes it legal it's a bit like saying what Stalin did was legal since, well, he was doing it in the name of the state.
This isn't just a matter of "If you don't like it, change the law". This is a complete subversion of the mechanism of Democracy. We've got Voter Suppression, consolidation of media into propaganda arms (e.g. Sinclair Media), outright voter fraud (e.g. North Carolina's voter fraud, plus when happened in Georgia) and that's before we talk about how the American Senate was a reaction to populist uprisings from the cities done to give rural areas where the landed genrtry lived disproportionate power (remember, if you didn't own land back then you couldn't vote, so no, the Senate wasn't created to keep cities from overwhelming poor rural voters) and the god damned Electoral College.
What I'm saying is that when Democracy is as weak compared to moneyed powers as it is in the United States then you lose the right to appeal to "But what they did was legal".
is why New York told Amazon to go pound sand. This is what happens when you just make it rain cash to get a company to bring some jobs. Once they've got you over a barrel like that they can keep pushing and pushing.
For one thing the politicians are going to be dependent on bribes^XCampaign Contributions to win since they just borrowed several billion dollars that'll have to be paid back for jobs that will probably never materialize (or pay less if they do). Now you're gonna have to stop investing in roads and schools to pay for all that, making your state less desirable for other employers.... and skilled employees who leave your state in droves. It's a race to the bottom.
States that tax their wealthy and use the money to invest in the working class do better because they've got the infrastructure and skilled employees companies need. Skilled Employees aren't going going to move to a shit hole just because they can have a decent house. What good does that do if there's no schools, no amenities, nothing to do and the water's full of lead? You can't raise kids in a place like that and you can't have a good single time. The only thing you do in a place like that is try to get out of it.
banks will not give you an account in America. It is very common for men post divorce to be unable to get an account. Alimony and Child support payments show up on your record and can hurt you because they are a debt that must always be paid before anything else. Also divorces are really, really difficult and expensive and you'll often be left in a bad spot financially.
My understanding is large parts of Europe have "Postal Banking" where you can open a public bank account at a Post Office regardless of credit worthiness. Countries often do this specifically to address the problem of private banks not wanting to take on the poor and disadvantaged as clients. In America the banks have a _lot_ more power than they do even in Europe, so they've blocked any attempt at such a system.
You have to properly indent, making the code more readable and better organized. If you get stuck maintaining somebody else's code it's a Godsend. But for me it drives me nuts since I hate worrying about space counting.
right here...
the difference is that Trump vs Hilary didn't matter to anyone with any real power. Despite what Glen Beck will tell you Hillary really doesn't have a global kill squad of female assassins with the "Can I talk to your manager" haircut. She's just a dumb broad good at manipulating inter-party politics to her advantage (but not good enough to beat a moderately charismatic black guy from Hawaii).
The Hillary stuff didn't impact the People Who Matter (tm) because whether it was her or Trump they still won. Hillary was a right of center candidate who wants to accelerate corporatism and outsourcing. Trump's all that with a bit more Evangelical crazy (thanks to Pence) and a $1 trillion dollar tax cut. The tax cut was a nice bonus, but it was just that, a bonus.
Now, those other docs he leaked let the world know where those rich were hiding their taxable dollars. Parts of Europe are busy cracking down. They'll fail, because their voters will get distracted by nonsense like scary Muslims, Brexit, and whatever passes for wedge issues and minorities over there, but it'll take some effort to right that ship and get back to eliminating the middle class. Assange screwed with the plans of the powerful. The People Who Matter (tm). He's going to jail. Probably for the rest of his life.
you didn't notice because several economic booms fueled by technology ( post WWII, Internet, Housing/Investment Bubble ) hid the effects from a lot of us. You didn't notice because the economy was doing so well that the scraps the 1% leaves us were, for a short time, some mighty tasty scraps. They've noticed how good those scraps are now and are taking those too. Because of that you're starting to notice shit like this again.
he helped give us Trump, and he should have known better. Trump is nobody's friend. Also he was irresponsibly leaking un-redacted documents. But the charges he fled were so obviously an excuse to get him into custody so that the US could extradite him as to be laughable. We don't need to ask if the US would have extradited him, the first thing the US did when he was no longer protected by Ecuador is file to extradite.
He's not a child throwing a tantrum, he's being railroaded because he crossed some very rich and very powerful people. His real crimes were those financial documents that got leaked and showed how much money was stored in offshore tax havens. It let us know just how much wealth the 1% has siphoned out of the economy and for anyone paying attention we now know why we're all living under austerity despite the biggest GDPs in history.
I just don't think Hilary had much to do with it. We all forget how much Wikileaks did before Hilary because he helped give us Trump. But Assange leaked mountains of documents from the wealthiest people on Earth. There was no scenario where he got away with that in the current oligarchy. The Hilary stuff is small potatoes. She was always just another bag man for the ultra wealthy. She never once threatened to upset their apple carts. What doomed Assange was getting on the bad side of people with unlimited access to money and power. That he escaped them for as long as he did is a minor miracle.
if the readers are contributing how is that any different than buying a subscription to a website, newspaper or magazine?
I think our best bet is UBI so that folks who want to do Journalism can just do it and not worry about making a living off it.
that's why you're not hearing anything. Never trust cats. Shoulda got a dog.
They're both members of the ruling class. And besides, if it's one thing The Mueller investigation did do it's show us Trump has a complete lack of gratitude for the folks who helped put him where he is.
If it did then helping Trump would have paid off. He exposed financial records of a boatload of rich and powerful. In America that didn't really matter but the tax man in Europe and Asia took notice. This isn't about which members of the oligarchy he pissed off. The oligarchy takes care of their own. The 1% is like the mob or any other form of organized crime. Mess with one and you've messed with them all, and a hot like Assanage did was never gonna be forgiven.
the problem isn't them blowing it, the problem is that a right wing, pro corporate and anti-worker regime has been in charge since Reagan. It's not about too much or too little, they've always done a lot, it's just mostly been bad. Tax cuts for the rich, attacks on Unions, deregulation (especially of banks who gamble with trillions knowing full well their losses will be covered by you and me) trickle down economics, austerity for the working class and opulence for the rich and endless war to support the military industrial complex.
We've been trying right wing politics for decades, whichever party was in charge. Folks have been trying to replace "The Establishment" without being able to understand who the establishment is.
Go look up opensecrets.org. That's a good place to start. Watch Secular Talk and Shaun. Read A People's History of the United States. Listen to what Bernie Sanders says about healthcare and what Liz Warren says about the banks. Do these things and it'll start to make sense. The problem is a wealthy elite who's greed and power hunger knows no bounds. You can't just look at parties or politician or who makes you feel good about yourself. What matters is policy and who does and doesn't take corporate PAC money. Oh, and watch out for guys like Beto O'Rouke, who seems to have gotten his money from the wealthy and hide that fact by having them bundle small donations.
did it on purpose, right?
We've let Disney and about 5 other companies buy up every single TV station, news station, media outlet and franchise on earth. And we're not stopping them from further consolidation. The point is that you won't have a choice unless you want to drop out of pop culture entirely. Which sounds good on paper but makes you seem like a weirdo who can't relate to normal people.
I actually remember it being a bit of a problem for my kid in high school. When all the other kids were talking about such and such TV show she couldn't watch it because we were too broke for cable. It made it harder for her to socialize. TV and movies are, for non-nerds, a social thing. I know it's hard to understand that on a site full of nerds. We nerds evangelize our favorite shows but we don't usually hop on bandwagons. I only saw it because I saw it so many times with my kid. I remember she hated Twilight but read the books and watch the movies just so she could stay in line with her friends. As an outsider that seems nuts, but it's the reverse, it's what the "normies" do.