a big part of our government, of any modern government, is keeping people employed in the face of increasing productivity and automation. Our Military isn't that big to defend us. Hell, we had generals begging to get _fewer_ tanks because they didn't know what to do with the ones they had. In large parts of the country the government is the #1 employer and Wal-Mart's #2. We're running out of work that can be done by non-geniuses.
2006: "Hurricanes are going to be worse and more frequent!"
2007:
2008:
2009:
2010:
2011:
2012: Sandy
2013:
2014:
2015:
2016:
2017: "Told you so!"
There's also a lot of Hurricanes that just aren't making landfall so they're not getting coverage. And yes, we should care about the ones that don't make landfall since eventually one of them will, and if they're worse so are the ones that hit us.
but our CIA should. It's painfully clear our elections were substantially interfered with by a hostile foreign power. Even if you like the results you should still be wary of that.
And free speech is fine as long as it's out in the open. We used to have laws about that until our judiciary gutted them. Like it or not a substantial amount of the electorate is easily swayed. Even if you're not one of those people you'll get dragged down by them and their votes.
PCI-DSS is an industry standard specifically meant to prevent the government from stepping in and regulating. Equifax I'm sure complies with it in all respects.
I think the trouble here is Equifax has virtually no penalty here (save a few million paid out to lawyers in the inevitable class action, assuming the recent laws regarding mandatory Arbitration don't kick in which depending on when the breach happened they might). When you say regulation what you really mean are fines bigger than cost of actually securing the data. Short of that and it's just a business decision. It costs X to secure the data and we lost Y in a breach. If X > Y you let the breach happen.
since who else has the power to call Equifax to task? But I think it's safe to say the body politic has spoken. The party that espouses deregulation the most has the House, Senate, Presidency, is on the way to taking the Judiciary and has virtually all the State Legislatures and governorships. If you want to see any meaningfull action taken we'll need big changes to our political makeup.
class action is so the companies can pay a token amount and get perpetual indemnity for all future legal action. The best part? With recent changes in law making mandatory arbitration legally binding at the federal level (thanks, Republican Congress and Blue Dog Dems!) you don't even get that anymore.
Folks need to start putting left wingers into Congress if they wanna see this crap happen, but nobody wants to pay the taxes for it. Nevermind that just ending the 7 wars we're running would cover it. But then I'm not so sure folks want to end those wars. Our president's largest bump in poll numbers came after he dropped a $20 million dollar bomb on a bunch of Afghani goat herders with soviet era weapons...
until you're either paying for the streaming service or just not watching their stuff. And if you have kids you're pretty much stuck buying their stuff. Sure, you can skip it, but you're kids are going to be the odd man/girl out. They're gonna come off as weird because they won't have that shared culture everybody else has of which Disney is a part. Kinda like those oddball religious kids. We all had a few at our schools, maybe some of us where that kid. But I remember pretty much everyone keeping their distance not because there was anything wrong with them but because it was just hard for them to relate.
I've been putting it off because the APIs aren't completely settled and I don't much relish the thought of doing it twice (my app's a tricky beast thanks to some quirks of Windows pathing among other things). I think that's the biggest problem. Firefox is making all these changes but they haven't really settled them, meanwhile they're rolling them out to production. I'm guessing that since they just don't have the money they used to they haven't got a lot of other options besides what's basically an all inclusive beta program.
unless you can convince Americans and people in general that taxation without a direct benefit to yourself isn't theft. Note I said 'direct'. Not getting threatened with violence from poor people doesn't count. Most folks would prefer to counter those threats with greater violence if history is any indication.
86% of Americans are either not paying attention or not very bright. Ok, 85% (somebody's got to oil the robots).
Jokes aside the problem with robotic automation is that it'll chip away at the job market. It's not that your job's going away, it's your buddies. And now you're buddy is gunning for your job. For less pay. A lot less pay.
productivity gains result in job losses. They have in every industrial revolution. Then in 50-80 years tech caught up elsewhere and there were new jobs. In the meantime there were two or three lost generations living in abject poverty because in America if you don't work you don't eat. And it wasn't the New Deal that fixed that (it helped, but wasn't nearly enough) it was a global war, 80 million dying and basically the whole world getting blowed up and needed to be rebuilt.
History is basically the working class trying and failing to pry money out of the hands of the ruling class. Why the hell people don't see this is beyond me.
Grandparents point is valid and you're missing it. There's a powerful global apparatus for getting shit done, and it only seem to move when it benefits big business. Clean food and water aren't a local problem for people born in places that can't sustain the population. Which to be honest is most people. You benefit from them having these things though. You benefit from global stability. It's a lot cheaper to drop food than bombs.
The left whines about imperialism because 99% of the time that's the only thing that moves the US. We prefer dropping bombs to food. Trump's biggest bump in numbers was when he dropped a $20 million dollar bomb on about 500 angry Afghani goat herders with Soviet Era weapons.
We already know the things required to solve these problems. Food, education & birth control. Warmongers don't want to give out food and our religious nuts don't care much for education & birth control. Sure, it's only 20% of our populace, but they _vote_.
and they'll get slaughtered in their primaries if they come to DACA's defense. It's the same problem they had with Obamacare but worse since in that case they could at least try to repeal it.
That's what the working class needs. Right now we're getting picked apart fighting among ourselves. We need to start guaranteeing _everyone_ a good life. The trouble is that means sometimes people who don't do any work get to live OK. And that really, really rankles about 20% of the population. We need them to get over it and fast or we're heading for a dark age.
I live in California, one of the most expensive states, and spend $13K a year while maintaining an apartment and car. So don't tell me you have to live paycheck to paycheck on $30K.
Instead of asking yourself why you're only making $13/k a year you're looking down on folks struggling at $30k. That's exactly what your supposed to be doing, if you ask the ruling class. They've got you, me and everyone in the working class fighting among ourselves.
the lives of the working class are already so hard that anything would push them over the edge. That bottle of soda, that 6 pack of beer and that microwavable lunch are the bare minimum needed to see them through the day. That's life when you're working two full time jobs to keep a roof over your head and still not making it.
If I let the environment go to hell tomorrow so I can make it through today I'm still ahead by one day. By 'everyone's' problem you mean what's left of the middle class. That's the problem. The few people that held onto a middle class life abandoned the ones that didn't. Now they're upset that those people are trashing their nice lives and nice world. I see something similar with all these pundits asking "Why are White Men so angry?". They're angry because they don't have jobs or if they do those jobs can't support a family. Now we've got thugs organizing them to march lockstep chanting about jews replacing them...
of 30 years of outsourcing, automation and cheap work visas this is the least of my worries. That's sort of the problem. It's hard to get worked up about problems like this when 60-80% of us live paycheck to paycheck (depending on which study you want to believe).
If you're an environmentalist then you've got to take care of the economy first. Otherwise the vast majority of people will ignore it in favor of more pressing concerns (rent, food, etc). Does that make the working class short sighted? You damn well bet it does. It's hard not being short sighted when you live paycheck to paycheck.
when folks talk about "productivity increases" this kind of stuff is included. To society at large not printing close to 100 million books is a pretty big deal. That's a lot of resources that can go somewhere else. Thing is, will they? Will those cost savings every show up in the economy at large, or will they just be absorbed by the top? So far as I can tell it's been the latter. At least for the the last 20 years.
in this case the 'policies' were repealing several laws that kept various types of banks from interacting (Wall Street vs Main Street) and various accounting rules. This stuff started under the pro-corporate rule of Mr Clinton and reached it's apex under Bush Jr. Before that we had 70+ years without a major crash (80s S&L was small potatoes by comparison).
Cryptotokens aren't anything special. Their prices are high right now because of money laundering, drugs and ransomeware. If you doubt me ask yourself what you can buy with them. You're never going to pay your mortgage with bitcoin. Eventually the government will crack down not to stifle freedom but to control the sorts of crime most people agree should be controlled (I'm aware of the anarchists who think everything should be legal).
There are good reasons for a society to be controlled and regulated. There is such a thing as experts and people who have studied things. This isn't to say you can't be lied to by phonies. But it also doesn't mean you throw your hands up and declare anarchy just because running a society is hard.
in one case I'm buying ownership of the company. In another I'm buying a good (albeit an intangible one). The only real parallel is that in both cases you might be buying something completely worthless. But in the case of buying shares there's decades of case law and regulations about how that all goes down designed to protect small investors from being swindled out of their life savings (at least there are in the States, not sure about China).
China can and should control it. People can do dumb things in mass. The Housing crash of 2008 is a good example. Recent studies showed that it was mostly caused by upper middle class people buying houses to flip and inflated prices and not working poor buying McMansions. The crash happened because they weren't living in the houses so that when they eventually inflated the market too far to sell them they just let them foreclose and cut their loses. But that was only made possible by deregulation that made it profitable to sell risky house flipper loans to the upper middle class.
TL;DR;. You want the government to control what people can and cannot invest in. Otherwise you'll have massive economic crashes for no good reason.The economic equivalent to traffic jams on a clear highway.
because world wars no longer benefit the ruling class. I realized it when a bunch of Pakistani terrorist attacked India's capital, it leaked that the Pakistani gov't knew about it and then nothing came of it. Major countries aren't allowed to go to war because the oligarchs who actually call the shots don't want them too anymore. The little wars against the likes of Iran & North Korea are more than enough to keep the Military Industrial Complex going and big wars just break all the stuff the globalists own. So no, no wars for you.
I say this because I've noticed a lot of folks who seem to think of world war as an escape chute for the sorts of stagnation that led to the Dark Ages. It's not, and you'll regret it if you try relying on it for that. If you want to keep the world from going to shit nows the time to do it, and the way to do it is to make sure everybody's taken care of. That means socialism, and that means getting over everybody's squeamishness about paying for lazy people to sit around sometimes.
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a big part of our government, of any modern government, is keeping people employed in the face of increasing productivity and automation. Our Military isn't that big to defend us. Hell, we had generals begging to get _fewer_ tanks because they didn't know what to do with the ones they had. In large parts of the country the government is the #1 employer and Wal-Mart's #2. We're running out of work that can be done by non-geniuses.
and short of UBI or some such it won't be practical for bands to Tour unless somebody fronts the money.
2006: "Hurricanes are going to be worse and more frequent!"
2007:
2008:
2009:
2010:
2011:
2012: Sandy
2013:
2014:
2015:
2016:
2017: "Told you so!"
There's also a lot of Hurricanes that just aren't making landfall so they're not getting coverage. And yes, we should care about the ones that don't make landfall since eventually one of them will, and if they're worse so are the ones that hit us.
in 2012, cause I'm guessing the folks who got hit by it didn't.
but our CIA should. It's painfully clear our elections were substantially interfered with by a hostile foreign power. Even if you like the results you should still be wary of that.
And free speech is fine as long as it's out in the open. We used to have laws about that until our judiciary gutted them. Like it or not a substantial amount of the electorate is easily swayed. Even if you're not one of those people you'll get dragged down by them and their votes.
PCI-DSS is an industry standard specifically meant to prevent the government from stepping in and regulating. Equifax I'm sure complies with it in all respects.
I think the trouble here is Equifax has virtually no penalty here (save a few million paid out to lawyers in the inevitable class action, assuming the recent laws regarding mandatory Arbitration don't kick in which depending on when the breach happened they might). When you say regulation what you really mean are fines bigger than cost of actually securing the data. Short of that and it's just a business decision. It costs X to secure the data and we lost Y in a breach. If X > Y you let the breach happen.
since who else has the power to call Equifax to task? But I think it's safe to say the body politic has spoken. The party that espouses deregulation the most has the House, Senate, Presidency, is on the way to taking the Judiciary and has virtually all the State Legislatures and governorships. If you want to see any meaningfull action taken we'll need big changes to our political makeup.
class action is so the companies can pay a token amount and get perpetual indemnity for all future legal action. The best part? With recent changes in law making mandatory arbitration legally binding at the federal level (thanks, Republican Congress and Blue Dog Dems!) you don't even get that anymore.
Folks need to start putting left wingers into Congress if they wanna see this crap happen, but nobody wants to pay the taxes for it. Nevermind that just ending the 7 wars we're running would cover it. But then I'm not so sure folks want to end those wars. Our president's largest bump in poll numbers came after he dropped a $20 million dollar bomb on a bunch of Afghani goat herders with soviet era weapons...
until you're either paying for the streaming service or just not watching their stuff. And if you have kids you're pretty much stuck buying their stuff. Sure, you can skip it, but you're kids are going to be the odd man/girl out. They're gonna come off as weird because they won't have that shared culture everybody else has of which Disney is a part. Kinda like those oddball religious kids. We all had a few at our schools, maybe some of us where that kid. But I remember pretty much everyone keeping their distance not because there was anything wrong with them but because it was just hard for them to relate.
I've been putting it off because the APIs aren't completely settled and I don't much relish the thought of doing it twice (my app's a tricky beast thanks to some quirks of Windows pathing among other things). I think that's the biggest problem. Firefox is making all these changes but they haven't really settled them, meanwhile they're rolling them out to production. I'm guessing that since they just don't have the money they used to they haven't got a lot of other options besides what's basically an all inclusive beta program.
Now would be a good time to remind everyone that George Orwell's 1984 wasn't about governments it was about TV.
unless you can convince Americans and people in general that taxation without a direct benefit to yourself isn't theft. Note I said 'direct'. Not getting threatened with violence from poor people doesn't count. Most folks would prefer to counter those threats with greater violence if history is any indication.
If I already own everything I really don't give two shits whether there's anyone to buy it from me. That's how ruling classes work.
86% of Americans are either not paying attention or not very bright. Ok, 85% (somebody's got to oil the robots).
Jokes aside the problem with robotic automation is that it'll chip away at the job market. It's not that your job's going away, it's your buddies. And now you're buddy is gunning for your job. For less pay. A lot less pay.
productivity gains result in job losses. They have in every industrial revolution. Then in 50-80 years tech caught up elsewhere and there were new jobs. In the meantime there were two or three lost generations living in abject poverty because in America if you don't work you don't eat. And it wasn't the New Deal that fixed that (it helped, but wasn't nearly enough) it was a global war, 80 million dying and basically the whole world getting blowed up and needed to be rebuilt.
History is basically the working class trying and failing to pry money out of the hands of the ruling class. Why the hell people don't see this is beyond me.
Grandparents point is valid and you're missing it. There's a powerful global apparatus for getting shit done, and it only seem to move when it benefits big business. Clean food and water aren't a local problem for people born in places that can't sustain the population. Which to be honest is most people. You benefit from them having these things though. You benefit from global stability. It's a lot cheaper to drop food than bombs.
The left whines about imperialism because 99% of the time that's the only thing that moves the US. We prefer dropping bombs to food. Trump's biggest bump in numbers was when he dropped a $20 million dollar bomb on about 500 angry Afghani goat herders with Soviet Era weapons.
We already know the things required to solve these problems. Food, education & birth control. Warmongers don't want to give out food and our religious nuts don't care much for education & birth control. Sure, it's only 20% of our populace, but they _vote_.
and they'll get slaughtered in their primaries if they come to DACA's defense. It's the same problem they had with Obamacare but worse since in that case they could at least try to repeal it.
That's what the working class needs. Right now we're getting picked apart fighting among ourselves. We need to start guaranteeing _everyone_ a good life. The trouble is that means sometimes people who don't do any work get to live OK. And that really, really rankles about 20% of the population. We need them to get over it and fast or we're heading for a dark age.
Instead of asking yourself why you're only making $13/k a year you're looking down on folks struggling at $30k. That's exactly what your supposed to be doing, if you ask the ruling class. They've got you, me and everyone in the working class fighting among ourselves.
the lives of the working class are already so hard that anything would push them over the edge. That bottle of soda, that 6 pack of beer and that microwavable lunch are the bare minimum needed to see them through the day. That's life when you're working two full time jobs to keep a roof over your head and still not making it.
If I let the environment go to hell tomorrow so I can make it through today I'm still ahead by one day. By 'everyone's' problem you mean what's left of the middle class. That's the problem. The few people that held onto a middle class life abandoned the ones that didn't. Now they're upset that those people are trashing their nice lives and nice world. I see something similar with all these pundits asking "Why are White Men so angry?". They're angry because they don't have jobs or if they do those jobs can't support a family. Now we've got thugs organizing them to march lockstep chanting about jews replacing them...
TL;DR: Abandon your working class at your peril.
of 30 years of outsourcing, automation and cheap work visas this is the least of my worries. That's sort of the problem. It's hard to get worked up about problems like this when 60-80% of us live paycheck to paycheck (depending on which study you want to believe).
If you're an environmentalist then you've got to take care of the economy first. Otherwise the vast majority of people will ignore it in favor of more pressing concerns (rent, food, etc). Does that make the working class short sighted? You damn well bet it does. It's hard not being short sighted when you live paycheck to paycheck.
when folks talk about "productivity increases" this kind of stuff is included. To society at large not printing close to 100 million books is a pretty big deal. That's a lot of resources that can go somewhere else. Thing is, will they? Will those cost savings every show up in the economy at large, or will they just be absorbed by the top? So far as I can tell it's been the latter. At least for the the last 20 years.
in this case the 'policies' were repealing several laws that kept various types of banks from interacting (Wall Street vs Main Street) and various accounting rules. This stuff started under the pro-corporate rule of Mr Clinton and reached it's apex under Bush Jr. Before that we had 70+ years without a major crash (80s S&L was small potatoes by comparison).
Cryptotokens aren't anything special. Their prices are high right now because of money laundering, drugs and ransomeware. If you doubt me ask yourself what you can buy with them. You're never going to pay your mortgage with bitcoin. Eventually the government will crack down not to stifle freedom but to control the sorts of crime most people agree should be controlled (I'm aware of the anarchists who think everything should be legal).
There are good reasons for a society to be controlled and regulated. There is such a thing as experts and people who have studied things. This isn't to say you can't be lied to by phonies. But it also doesn't mean you throw your hands up and declare anarchy just because running a society is hard.
in one case I'm buying ownership of the company. In another I'm buying a good (albeit an intangible one). The only real parallel is that in both cases you might be buying something completely worthless. But in the case of buying shares there's decades of case law and regulations about how that all goes down designed to protect small investors from being swindled out of their life savings (at least there are in the States, not sure about China).
China can and should control it. People can do dumb things in mass. The Housing crash of 2008 is a good example. Recent studies showed that it was mostly caused by upper middle class people buying houses to flip and inflated prices and not working poor buying McMansions. The crash happened because they weren't living in the houses so that when they eventually inflated the market too far to sell them they just let them foreclose and cut their loses. But that was only made possible by deregulation that made it profitable to sell risky house flipper loans to the upper middle class.
TL;DR;. You want the government to control what people can and cannot invest in. Otherwise you'll have massive economic crashes for no good reason.The economic equivalent to traffic jams on a clear highway.
because world wars no longer benefit the ruling class. I realized it when a bunch of Pakistani terrorist attacked India's capital, it leaked that the Pakistani gov't knew about it and then nothing came of it. Major countries aren't allowed to go to war because the oligarchs who actually call the shots don't want them too anymore. The little wars against the likes of Iran & North Korea are more than enough to keep the Military Industrial Complex going and big wars just break all the stuff the globalists own. So no, no wars for you.
I say this because I've noticed a lot of folks who seem to think of world war as an escape chute for the sorts of stagnation that led to the Dark Ages. It's not, and you'll regret it if you try relying on it for that. If you want to keep the world from going to shit nows the time to do it, and the way to do it is to make sure everybody's taken care of. That means socialism, and that means getting over everybody's squeamishness about paying for lazy people to sit around sometimes.