It wasn't the boomer's McMansions that caused the crash. It was their desperate attempt to secure their finances after their pensions were raided by the Bain Capitals of the world.
I suppose there's a case to be made that the Boomers allowed the deregulation that made that kind of pension raiding possible, but well, there was just a Nobel prize given out for why people make bad decisions. For esoteric financial regulations it can be surprisingly hard to keep them intact, especially when you have multi-millionaires and billionaires attacking them non-stop.
What I'm saying is those boomers weren't necessarily any wiser, they were just lucky. A savings account was never going to see you through retirement. That's why folks came up with pensions in the first place. And that's why an entire industry sprouted up to raid those pensions...
at least not in the United States. Here it's our aging population who've had their pensions and retirement funds raided the last 20 years. They've still got their savings though and they're using those to buy houses to flip and/or rent. That's also what caused the 2008 crash and why it was so bad. It wasn't poor people buying houses they couldn't afford. Those folks tried tooth and nail to hang onto their homes. It was upper middle class who'd over extended themselves in the house flipping market. When it became clear they weren't going to make back their investment they just walked away because they had no emotional attachment.
Basically it's baby boomers. We've left them with just enough money to be dangerous but not enough to live out their lives comfortably. They're gonna wreck our shit for the next 20 years until they die off...
e.g. that they're truly random. But many of these conspiracy theories are really just far right wing propaganda meant to shut down any serious discussion on gun control and/or a national health service that covers mental illness (no, the guy didn't convert to Islam 6 months ago).
If you really picked 344 out at random then, yeah, eventually I'll guess it. But if you're goal was to make me pick a number out of a certain range (say to egg me on for gambling purposes) you'd settle on a rough pattern. Same thing with the theories that are taking shape out there. Go read Bruce Sterling's "Distraction". Great science fiction and all but it wasn't supposed to be a guide book...
the American revolution was started by wealthy farm owners who didn't want to pay taxes. The folks in charge were by and large in favor of it. Those weren't grass root memes, it was war propaganda.
Now, you can argue that you still agree with the message and that we're better off now than we would have been under British rule (I woulda like the NHS), but make no mistake, the Revolution was about as grass roots American as the Tea Party was 200 years later.
of the war on drugs, which is getting rid of undesirables.
Think of it like this. If you're poor odds are good you take some drugs to cope or know somebody who does. Now, ask yourself what happens if you wander into a a well-to-do neighborhood to say use their parks or send your kid to their schools? You get arrested. And with Civil Asset Forfeiture law you don't even have to be guilty of anything.
Don't believe me? Who were the biggest pot smokers around the time it was made illegal? Answer: Mexican migrants. Who do we associate most with opioid addiction? The Chinese.
And take a look at our current drug policy of 'legal on the state level but not on the federal'. It's the best of both worlds. You can still crack down on the poors while letting the rich toke up.
Basically, it's yet another example of class warfare. If you're paying attention you'll find plenty of folks denying that a class war's going on. That's because the best kind of war is one the other side doesn't know it's fighting.
wealth _is_ power. But you're also assuming their greed is unlimited. It's not. They get along just fine with each other and take care of their own. Why do you think Golden Parachutes and bail outs exist? Why are their loans always guaranteed by the tax payer?
They're the ruling class and they know it. They also know who their equals are and, unlike the working class, they take care of their own. It's why they're winning and we're losing.
buy security software instead of making it's own? Answer: Because none of this matters. The people who matter are global, not national. I saw a thing where Joe Biden said that rich people were as patriotic as poor. But that's just not true. Patriotism is a love of country. But the really wealth (not just the millionaires, but the multi-millionaires and billionaires) are no longer beholden to a country. They no longer depend on a country for anything. They global. And that means all this international intrigue is just pissing in the wind for them. At the end of the day they'll sit down with their fellow global citizens and hash it all out. Usually to the detriment of those of us still dependent on nation-states.
Cheap phones can. Tablets are really only useful for consuming content. Now, cheap laptops yes. A keyboard, word processor, spreadsheets, programming environment, etc. Eg a full on PC. The truncated experience you get on a tablet doesn't cut it.
it's just another seller. Big whoop. Disruption would be single payer healthcare or being able to buy from Canada. Given how few drug makers there are (especially for the important stuff) adding a few more places to buy meds from won't make a lick of difference.
it was a miserable compromise because the republicans controlled the legislature if you counted the 'blue-dog' Democrats who weren't really progressives.
as does everybody in the 50s and 60s when corporate and marginal taxes were much higher and we had record growth and prosperity. If anything it spurs them to work harder instead of hoarding cash and power.
a momentary blip in oil production shouldn't have caused 50 years of declining wages. Trickle down economics did. Here's a good list of reasons Reagan stunk on ice. And yes, I'm aware Clinton carried on Reagan's legacy to win the presidency. I never said I liked him either. A Republican's a Republican. Even with a D next to their name.
the folks I know losing sleep to work are doing it because the wage stagnation that started in the 80s and's been going strong since decimated their wages so that they work two jobs to make ends meet. Even the folks who don't have two jobs put in extra hours in a desperate bid to move up because companies stopped giving cost of living raises in the mid 2000s.
Sure, the extra work they do might not be the best but good enough is always good enough. People are losing sleep because they're being taken advantage of and made to work longer hours. As an added benefit if you're doing the work of 1.5 employees that's less people your company has to hire, meaning more competition for your job, driving your wages down further and leading to you working harder. See where this thing's going?
it's the mobos. Specifically the traces between ram & CPU or (more often) video ram & GPU. On a laptop board they PCB is often thinner and the heating/cooling causes the traces to break over time.
Intel's turned the i3's into i5s and i5s into i7s. They've shifted the entire product line in response to Ryzen from AMD. For the first time in a decade we're going to see significantly more performance on the lower end. Now if nVidia could get their 1050 laptop chipset down in price you might start seeing sub-$600 gaming laptops. Plus the lower power draw means they might not burn out in a year.
that this is all just a way for Musk to find & train engineers on the cheap. He spent $10 million out of pocket (give or take) and he's got every university and their student body falling all over themselves for it. Even if he didn't plan it that's what's happened.
IT people are not well liked. Maybe it's because lots of us are nerds. Maybe it's because the only time people interact with us is when something is broken. But either way, we're a perfect scapegoat in any company. Always have been too.
Regular people don't like us. They never have. When computers made it so they had to depend on us that didn't make them like us. It lead to resentment and deepened their hate.
that you can bet on in an effort to draw in the millennials. Ars Technica had an article on a 4 player pac man machine where you put money in a pot and winner take all (less the casino's cut, of course). Millennials aren't playing slots, which is where all the money really was. Poker/Blackjack/etc don't bring in nearly as much. They're looking for something to replace slots. And a bunch of kids raised on smart phones who know your odds after 6 seconds on google and grew up with 32 bit+ video games aren't impressed by slots.
they'll get eaten alive by a vulture capital firm in a leveraged buyout. Just happened to Toys-R-Us. I figure a few more retailers are next. Maybe one of the remaining sporting goods stores.
I've never once heard it mentioned on a major campaign. Nobody likes it, but when it comes time to vote the 'tough on crime' voters always seem to outnumber the civil rights voters.
Until folks start showing up at the polls and voting the Tough on Crime crowd out this is all just pissing in the wind...
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't the boomer's McMansions that caused the crash. It was their desperate attempt to secure their finances after their pensions were raided by the Bain Capitals of the world.
I suppose there's a case to be made that the Boomers allowed the deregulation that made that kind of pension raiding possible, but well, there was just a Nobel prize given out for why people make bad decisions. For esoteric financial regulations it can be surprisingly hard to keep them intact, especially when you have multi-millionaires and billionaires attacking them non-stop.
What I'm saying is those boomers weren't necessarily any wiser, they were just lucky. A savings account was never going to see you through retirement. That's why folks came up with pensions in the first place. And that's why an entire industry sprouted up to raid those pensions...
at least not in the United States. Here it's our aging population who've had their pensions and retirement funds raided the last 20 years. They've still got their savings though and they're using those to buy houses to flip and/or rent. That's also what caused the 2008 crash and why it was so bad. It wasn't poor people buying houses they couldn't afford. Those folks tried tooth and nail to hang onto their homes. It was upper middle class who'd over extended themselves in the house flipping market. When it became clear they weren't going to make back their investment they just walked away because they had no emotional attachment.
Basically it's baby boomers. We've left them with just enough money to be dangerous but not enough to live out their lives comfortably. They're gonna wreck our shit for the next 20 years until they die off...
massively outperform the US model.
e.g. that they're truly random. But many of these conspiracy theories are really just far right wing propaganda meant to shut down any serious discussion on gun control and/or a national health service that covers mental illness (no, the guy didn't convert to Islam 6 months ago).
If you really picked 344 out at random then, yeah, eventually I'll guess it. But if you're goal was to make me pick a number out of a certain range (say to egg me on for gambling purposes) you'd settle on a rough pattern. Same thing with the theories that are taking shape out there. Go read Bruce Sterling's "Distraction". Great science fiction and all but it wasn't supposed to be a guide book...
the American revolution was started by wealthy farm owners who didn't want to pay taxes. The folks in charge were by and large in favor of it. Those weren't grass root memes, it was war propaganda.
Now, you can argue that you still agree with the message and that we're better off now than we would have been under British rule (I woulda like the NHS), but make no mistake, the Revolution was about as grass roots American as the Tea Party was 200 years later.
of the war on drugs, which is getting rid of undesirables.
Think of it like this. If you're poor odds are good you take some drugs to cope or know somebody who does. Now, ask yourself what happens if you wander into a a well-to-do neighborhood to say use their parks or send your kid to their schools? You get arrested. And with Civil Asset Forfeiture law you don't even have to be guilty of anything.
Don't believe me? Who were the biggest pot smokers around the time it was made illegal? Answer: Mexican migrants. Who do we associate most with opioid addiction? The Chinese. And take a look at our current drug policy of 'legal on the state level but not on the federal'. It's the best of both worlds. You can still crack down on the poors while letting the rich toke up.
Basically, it's yet another example of class warfare. If you're paying attention you'll find plenty of folks denying that a class war's going on. That's because the best kind of war is one the other side doesn't know it's fighting.
wealth _is_ power. But you're also assuming their greed is unlimited. It's not. They get along just fine with each other and take care of their own. Why do you think Golden Parachutes and bail outs exist? Why are their loans always guaranteed by the tax payer?
They're the ruling class and they know it. They also know who their equals are and, unlike the working class, they take care of their own. It's why they're winning and we're losing.
buy security software instead of making it's own? Answer: Because none of this matters. The people who matter are global, not national. I saw a thing where Joe Biden said that rich people were as patriotic as poor. But that's just not true. Patriotism is a love of country. But the really wealth (not just the millionaires, but the multi-millionaires and billionaires) are no longer beholden to a country. They no longer depend on a country for anything. They global. And that means all this international intrigue is just pissing in the wind for them. At the end of the day they'll sit down with their fellow global citizens and hash it all out. Usually to the detriment of those of us still dependent on nation-states.
Cheap phones can. Tablets are really only useful for consuming content. Now, cheap laptops yes. A keyboard, word processor, spreadsheets, programming environment, etc. Eg a full on PC. The truncated experience you get on a tablet doesn't cut it.
it's just another seller. Big whoop. Disruption would be single payer healthcare or being able to buy from Canada. Given how few drug makers there are (especially for the important stuff) adding a few more places to buy meds from won't make a lick of difference.
Working in an Amazon distro center is much worse than Manning a cash register...
it was a miserable compromise because the republicans controlled the legislature if you counted the 'blue-dog' Democrats who weren't really progressives.
as does everybody in the 50s and 60s when corporate and marginal taxes were much higher and we had record growth and prosperity. If anything it spurs them to work harder instead of hoarding cash and power.
a momentary blip in oil production shouldn't have caused 50 years of declining wages. Trickle down economics did. Here's a good list of reasons Reagan stunk on ice. And yes, I'm aware Clinton carried on Reagan's legacy to win the presidency. I never said I liked him either. A Republican's a Republican. Even with a D next to their name.
the folks I know losing sleep to work are doing it because the wage stagnation that started in the 80s and's been going strong since decimated their wages so that they work two jobs to make ends meet. Even the folks who don't have two jobs put in extra hours in a desperate bid to move up because companies stopped giving cost of living raises in the mid 2000s.
Sure, the extra work they do might not be the best but good enough is always good enough. People are losing sleep because they're being taken advantage of and made to work longer hours. As an added benefit if you're doing the work of 1.5 employees that's less people your company has to hire, meaning more competition for your job, driving your wages down further and leading to you working harder. See where this thing's going?
it's the mobos. Specifically the traces between ram & CPU or (more often) video ram & GPU. On a laptop board they PCB is often thinner and the heating/cooling causes the traces to break over time.
Intel's turned the i3's into i5s and i5s into i7s. They've shifted the entire product line in response to Ryzen from AMD. For the first time in a decade we're going to see significantly more performance on the lower end. Now if nVidia could get their 1050 laptop chipset down in price you might start seeing sub-$600 gaming laptops. Plus the lower power draw means they might not burn out in a year.
that this is all just a way for Musk to find & train engineers on the cheap. He spent $10 million out of pocket (give or take) and he's got every university and their student body falling all over themselves for it. Even if he didn't plan it that's what's happened.
IT people are not well liked. Maybe it's because lots of us are nerds. Maybe it's because the only time people interact with us is when something is broken. But either way, we're a perfect scapegoat in any company. Always have been too.
Regular people don't like us. They never have. When computers made it so they had to depend on us that didn't make them like us. It lead to resentment and deepened their hate.
Mark my words, this'll work like a charm.
Your entire operation is one under paid and overworked sys admin away from disaster? Did I get that right?
that you can bet on in an effort to draw in the millennials. Ars Technica had an article on a 4 player pac man machine where you put money in a pot and winner take all (less the casino's cut, of course). Millennials aren't playing slots, which is where all the money really was. Poker/Blackjack/etc don't bring in nearly as much. They're looking for something to replace slots. And a bunch of kids raised on smart phones who know your odds after 6 seconds on google and grew up with 32 bit+ video games aren't impressed by slots.
Tibetan monks here on sabbatical? Dogs? The flea's on said dogs?
they'll get eaten alive by a vulture capital firm in a leveraged buyout. Just happened to Toys-R-Us. I figure a few more retailers are next. Maybe one of the remaining sporting goods stores.
I've never once heard it mentioned on a major campaign. Nobody likes it, but when it comes time to vote the 'tough on crime' voters always seem to outnumber the civil rights voters.
Until folks start showing up at the polls and voting the Tough on Crime crowd out this is all just pissing in the wind...
and you could get this setup for my Commodore 64 in 1988.