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User: rsilvergun

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  1. if you take out temp work, 6 month contractor gigs and Uber. We need stuff like this to employ folks. These are the "jobs of the future" everybody keeps getting promised when talk of Automation comes up.

    The only downside to stuff like this (e.g. the "Green New Deal") is it benefits _everybody_. If you're one of the 1% that's no good. Also, if you're a bitter old "I got mine fuck you" coot (and to be blunt, /. is full of those, I might have turned into one myself if two major family illnesses hadn't opened my eyes).

    And besides, we better do something with those out of work coal miners. Trump hasn't helped them in the slightest (two more plants just closed) and they're gonna get more extreme with the next Demagogue they get behind. Meanwhile if Trump actually does anything with that national emergency besides declaring it then we're on our way to a dictatorship. I mention that because the "I got mine" crowd claims to abhor dictatorships. So now's the time to put up or shut up.

  2. Lame ducks proposing radical legislation on Chicago Mayor Releases Roadmap For Transitioning To 100 Percent Renewable Energy By 2035 (pv-magazine-usa.com) · · Score: 0

    is an important part of our political process. It's how progress happens.

    And we're going to switch to renewable soon one way or another. Besides dwindling reserves of the cheap, easy to get to oil (and you won't like what it does to the water table to get to the hard stuff) if we don't do something about climate change we're all gonna die. Not in the changed climate, but from the massive war over food and water that's gonna happen. If we're lucky we won't use too many nukes. But trust me, there will be nukes.

  3. That's not solving crime on Academics Confirm Major Predictive Policing Algorithm Is Fundamentally Flawed (vice.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    that's corralling it. Stick with me on this, it's long.

    I saw this in my old town (I live in an apartment full of Indian H1-bs now and while they do take my jerbs they're about the least criminal people on earth if you don't count them hacking my cheap router from time to time).

    I used to live in a cheap, working class neighborhood. Up the street were crack houses galore. Never once did they bother me. Only trouble I ever had was from a loser friend who's girlfriend robbed me.

    I used to wonder why and then I found out. "Broken Window" policing is actually "Busted Heads" policing. My bud lived in one of those crack house apartments following a bad divorce (only thing he could afford/get after getting his credit destroyed). Got robbed, they caught the guy when his apartment manager went into the apartment and recognized his stuff there. They released the guy a few days later and he was still living next door to my bud when he finally got his credit fixed and moved out.

    That was OK because they'd kept the crime inside. Every now and then one of them would venture out of their little hell hole and rob a liquor store or something.

    The cops would come down like a ton of bricks. Everyone got arrested. And since they all had at least some pot half were probably gonna do a year or two in the clink. Especially the Dads, who would take the rap for the pot so the mom could at least stay out of prison. And during the raid you better believe heads got busted like crazy.

    This kind of shit is used to force the lower caste to stay in their lane. Keep their head down. It's the nastiest form of oppression possible. It lets you and me ignore the problem of widespread poverty because when the poor make trouble there's a cop there ready to beat them the fuck down and a private prison system happy to lock 'em up for 3-5 years.

    This is also why the drug war hasn't ended. Locking up randos for minor drug crimes is how you keep those folks on edge.

    Now, you might be thinking, so what? They're criminals anyway. That's all well and good, but think about it. When Capitalism goes south what's suppose to fix it? The Answer is that Mr Factory Owner won't let the country go to shit because he lives in it. But Mr Factory owner and even his middle class servants can use tricks like this to control the populace why bother? What's to stop him from letting everything go to shit except where he lives? This is where oligarchy comes from.

  4. Doesn't this just show on Academics Confirm Major Predictive Policing Algorithm Is Fundamentally Flawed (vice.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    that violent crime is less common then we like to think? Of course a small percentage is responsible for all violent crime. There isn't enough to go around.

    Also, not sure about Sweden in the 80s but in America, even today, our prison system chews you up and spits out broken people. That's been equally well documented.

    Finally pre-90s is a bad place to get crime statistics from. Lead in the air was pretty obviously creating unhinged people. Again, there's plenty of studies to back this up because it's the only thing that can explain the across the board drop in crime.

  5. Yep, and I'm not Babylonian on Huge Study Finds Professors' Attitudes Affect Students' Grades (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    and neither are you. Ancient history is interesting, but Modern history has a much bigger impact on my life. The Dark Ages wiped out most of what the Babylonians did. And the progress in the last 200 years was so insanely rapid that it's almost moot.

  6. You're missing the point on Huge Study Finds Professors' Attitudes Affect Students' Grades (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    go read "A people's history of the United States" for a start.

    Anyway, yes, they came running for Alms. Got them. Left.

    The point was regimentation. Bells were just the most obvious example of that. The entire education was to get you ready to work in a factory.

    Yeah, Churches taught a bit too. Go look up pre-Industrial revolution literacy rates sometime. They were very few, very far between. A few religious kooks spreading the word of God. The ones who taught kids to read were sometimes killed because you're not supposed to teach the lower caste to read the bible. They might get ideas.

  7. My bro had a good year this year on Amazon Will Pay $0 in Federal Taxes on $11.2 Billion Profits (fortune.com) · · Score: 1

    landed a nice contract. It'll end though. Next year is probably going to be way worse. Doesn't mean he won't be paying taxes next year. He'll pay less, but no 0.

    Enough of this crap where we let companies go without paying taxes because they lost money ten bloody years ago. Not paying taxes while you're not making money? Cool. Once the money comes in it should be the same as me: Pay your damn taxes.

  8. I know folks bullied by their teachers on Huge Study Finds Professors' Attitudes Affect Students' Grades (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    for being nerdy or just plain weird & ugly. Growing up a nerd I hung out with nerds but I was relatively normal. I hadn't noticed it but a lot of the extreme nerds (or worse, the LGBTQ kids had it rough) were being actively shit on by their teachers... up to and including the school principal.

    It wasn't all the time. The Gym teachers almost always did it. I just happened to be at a school where it didn't happen much, but I was pretty horrified years later when some nerd friends of mine talked about it. It's one thing to get bullied by POS kids. It's a whole new world of hell when your teachers join in.

    Post Columbine at least the teachers seem to have stopped. But it literally took a near constant threat of mass murder to do it. Man, what a screwed up world.

  9. Not exactly on Huge Study Finds Professors' Attitudes Affect Students' Grades (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    the original purpose of institutionalized learning was to prepare farm workers to work in factories. They kept walking off the assembly lines because they couldn't understand the concept of a job that was never done. Plow the fields and plant the crops? Done. Build a widget? Build the next one. This is why we have bells in schools, btw. They're to condition you for factory bells.

    Over time education like I described above (intended for the working class) was mixed with principles of an entirely different branch of education: what the ruling class gets. This is where "well rounded" educations came from. The idea was to teach critical thinking skills to people who didn't think critically by nature. You typically did this with the liberal arts instead of STEM because while there's no value in getting a math problem half right there _is_ value in being half right on your critical understanding of a book.

    The "well rounded" education is used to make sure your offspring can go off and effectively run your dynasty when your old/dead. You needed them to think critically or they'd get killed by an ambitious member of your court.

    In an proper world without the constant meddling of the ruling class everyone would get both a practical (working class) education and the "well rounded" one that was usually reserved for the ruling class. You might not know this, but you want this. You want this a lot. Ignorant people make bad decisions. If you're a member of the ruling class you can exploit those bad decisions for your gain. If you're not those people become an angry mob and kill you. Or you join the mob, which sounds fun until you stop and think about the decades of poverty that lead up to you joining that mob.

  10. Germany's much smaller than the US on US Labor Organization AFL-CIO Urges Game Developers To Unionize In Open Letter (gamasutra.com) · · Score: 1

    with a more centralized workforce. You need a big organization like the AFL-CIO so that folks in one industry can strike and be supported by folks half a world away until the strike's over.

    And I mentioned this on another thread but the big wigs don't make all that much. It only sounds like a lot down in the trenches because we've lost so much ground over the years. Their president makes $300k/yr, which is ridiculously low for an organization the size of the AFL-CIO. The chick with a nice rack who hocks pharmaceuticals at doctor's offices makes that (seriously, I know one).

    $300k/yr doesn't make you anybody's master. What it does get you is access to a network of workers who'll support you when you strike and who you'll support when they strike. AKA "solidarity". You have to do it nationally or they just move to a new state every time you try it.

  11. The president of the AFL-CIO makes $300k on US Labor Organization AFL-CIO Urges Game Developers To Unionize In Open Letter (gamasutra.com) · · Score: 1, Insightful

    for an organization with 12.5 million (que Dr Evil pinky) members. That's 2.4 cents per person. If he's in it for himself he's doing a _terrible_ job of it.

    He'd be much better off going into Televangist work. Creflo Dollar's worth $27 million and has been doing his schtick for about 30 years (give or take). That's about $900k/yr. He did that on the backs of just 30,000 folks in his church.

  12. You should stop mischaracterizing his words on US Labor Organization AFL-CIO Urges Game Developers To Unionize In Open Letter (gamasutra.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    to fit your anti-Union narrative. Then you can believe that the AFL-CIO guy has the right idea. Does he have his own agenda? Hell yeah. So do I. I want to shift the country left so I can get single payer healthcare and my friends and family get guaranteed access to the stuff. Unions are part of that since it's hard to move left when the electorate is struggling to survive.

    An agenda isn't a bad thing when your interests align. Assuming you're not planing to make a career as a right wing troll ala Roger Stone or Karl Rove then your interest are aligned with mine. Heck, even then most guys don't make it to Stone or Rove's level. They get ground up into paste by the machine.

  13. Unionizing is the exactly opposite of divide and conquer. You might need to go look up what the word "Union" means.

    You're strawmaning. You're trying to redirect the conversation away from "Game devs are being taken advantage of and should organized for better bargaining power" to "The heads of the Union you form might be corrupt so don't form one in the first place". The Stawman here is a big, scary Union Boss.

    This has _nothing_ to do with negativity and everything to do with the fact that you, by yourself, do not have enough leverage to secure decent or even safe working conditions. This is a historic fact. It's not something that's up for debate. You by yourself cannot beat Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates in negotiations.

    Of course you're just parroting a long standing anti-Union straw man. Are you getting paid to do this or just trolling for fun? Either way you're the 20th century equivalent of this. Didn't work last time either.

  14. I saw a bunch of Fox news hosts on Amazon Will Pay $0 in Federal Taxes on $11.2 Billion Profits (fortune.com) · · Score: 1

    argue with straight faces that the reason for the 8% decrease was people didn't withhold enough.

    While technically true, these same sumabitches spent the last 2 years promising everybody big fat tax cuts.

    I'd like to think that even somebody watching Fox News can figure out that their taxes went _up_ under Trump.

  15. And while pocketing those tax cuts on Amazon Will Pay $0 in Federal Taxes on $11.2 Billion Profits (fortune.com) · · Score: 1

    they're, like all major corporations, gearing up for a recession. A recession partly _cause_ by said tax cuts. We pumped too much money into one side of the economy (the top 1%), so to prevent a bigger slowdown later the fed's jacking interest rates and slowing down other forms of stimulus (on the demand side, always on the demand side).

    Meanwhile my taxes went up substantially this year. Thanks Obama^XTrump.

  16. It's not just about lower merchant fees on Visa, Mastercard Mull Increasing Fees For Processing Transactions: Report (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    folks seem to forget that wages have declined non stop since the 70s. Folks are leaning heavily on credit. As a business that leaves you two options: Issue your own credit (and deal with all the fun that entails) or find somebody to issue it for you.

    It's easy to say "Just don't buy a fridge" but then we like to forget how many folks died of botulism back in the day. The folks I know aren't wasting a whole lot of money. Even that $5 Starbucks is down to once or twice a week, is mostly used to get them through the morning (hooray for caffeine & sugar) so they can work harder at their crummy jobs. Folks are eating out but they're doing it at "fast casual" which is to say fast food joint with nicer tile in their bathrooms.

    What I'm saying is with recession always on the horizon folks are gonna put necessities on credit cards, and that's gonna give the CC companies more leverage with their merchant fees.

  17. there's a lot of profit right now even though we're being driven into a recession. The recession is mostly a self inflicted wound, it's not an actual decrease in the amount of money out there.

    That means there's a lot of leeway in profit margins, and the only real question is who's gonna get all that money. In a down turn people turn to credit cards to get by, and businesses are under more pressure to keep taking them as a result. That's why Visa/MasterCard are looking into this.

  18. Of course there is on Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    the Green New Deal is what we're going to do with the out of work coal miners and other blue collar guys put out of work by automation. You know we've doubled manufacturing output in 20 years while cutting the workforce by 1/3? It's not outsourcing that's costing jobs at this point, it's robots.

    If you don't do something with those folks they're gonna go find themselves a strong man. Somebody like Trump but violent. And we're gonna have WWIII on our hands. You or your younger loved ones will die in trenches for their glory and to cull the herd. As an added bonus the Green New Deal will slow climate change and maybe keep us all alive.

  19. And where exactly is the city going to get on Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    the money to build the infrastructure Amazon needs? Or staff schools for their kids? Or Police to deal with the increase in crime from adding 25k workers (who'll speed, drive drunk, get robbed, etc just like everyone else)?

    If Amazon didn't need governmental services they could save a fortune building their HQ out in the Mojave Desert. And if Businesses didn't cost governments money we wouldn't need to tax them. Contrary to what you might have heard on talk radio we don't tax businesses to pay for steak and lobster and Cadillacs for welfare receipts....

  20. I've been playing Burnout 3 on OG XBox and I swear to God if it spawns a car right around the corner while another racer is on my tail shoving me into it I'm gonna get violent. I swear, I can't even bronze some of those races. And don't get me started on rail gunning spawn campers in Quake 3.

    Oh wait, I'm not a teen, I'm pushing past 40. Does that still count?

  21. Local gov'ts don't buy the line on Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus (nytimes.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    but their voters, who are desperate for jobs, do. Take the gig economy & temp work out of the equation and we're pushing 9% unemployment. Meanwhile the politicians figure they'll be out of office by the time the bonds used to pay for the subsidies come due.

    It's just another example of the rich plundering the commons. Robert Reich calls it a Switcheroo. It's older than that though. We used to say "Privatize the profits and Socialize the losses".

  22. It's pretty obvious what they're doing on Developers Accuse Sony of 'Playing Favorites' With PS4's Cross-Platform Support (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    if the community isn't big enough to support the PS4 players and the game is bringing in money for Sony they allow Cross Play.

    Also, if the game is big enough the publisher can threaten to pull the game they'll allow Cross Play.

    If you fall somewhere in the middle then you're SOL.

  23. Good for NYC on Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus (nytimes.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've had it with this race to the bottom where we're all falling over ourselves to see who can give the most of my tax payer dollars in direct/indirect subsidies in exchange for a handful of jobs (yes, 25,000 is a "handful" to a city the size of NY).

    I have to pay for roads and schools, let Amazon chip in. Last I heard they're the most profitable company in history (unless Apple's got it this week).

  24. A rust belt city doesn't have tons of money on Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus (nytimes.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    lying around for direct & indirect subsidies. That's what this is about. As near as I can tell NY was basically going to pay Amazon for the jobs (similar to what Foxconn did to Wisconsin). The likelihood is that Amazon would be gone as soon as the subsidies dried up.

    It's like a sports stadium without a team to watch. It doesn't make sense to pay companies to bring jobs. Spend the money making your state somewhere people actually want to live and the companies will have no choice but to bring the jobs because that's where the workers are.

    Now, you're right that this is leaving middle America behind. They haven't been investing in their land or their people and they're feeling it. Part of me, the bitter, angry part, wants to leave them to their fate (it's mostly their own political decisions that got them there) but the sane part of me knows that's bad juju for all. Folks usually double down on bad decisions in a crisis. Better to have the Fed move in with jobs programs like we did the last time things got this bad. That's what the "Green New Deal" is for.

    Bottom line, Amazon's pushing Supply Side (aka Trickle Down) economics on NY (pay us for the jobs and the money you give us will trickle down to workers). NY was smart enough not to buy it for a change. Here's hoping the rest of the country will tell Amazon to go pound sand and they'll have to pay for the services they want and need.

  25. Most do on Amazon Pulls Out of Planned New York City Campus (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1, Insightful

    if the median income is anything to go by.

    Of course it's down $4k since 2009. The working class never did recover from 2008. And best of all we're heading into another (self inflicted) recession. Hooray.