a retirement savings account & a college savings plan for their kids. It's trivial to exclude those things. In face we don't. We tax homes to pay for schools so the wealthy don't have to pay for poor kid's schools. Meanwhile we have "State Trust" lands where the state holds land "in trust" so that wealthy land owners don't have to pay property taxes while they're waiting for land to become valuable.
When people say "Tax Wealth" they mean rental properties. Nobody likes rent seekers. Other rent seekers don't like rent seekers. We're trying to figure out how to reign them in.
If you're poor you live and work where you're born. Moving is _expensive_ and risky. Unless you get a lucky break you're stuck and even then you better pray that job doesn't go away because you probably don't have the education & credentials to get another one like it.
this site. California's below $1 on the chart, meaning they pay more than they get back. That makes sense. Not a lot of natural disasters, not a lot of military bases, lots and lots of productive industries.
they're Global. They can live anywhere now. They might occasionally fly into a big city but they don't live there. You might know where the 1% of the 1% are because they're famous, but they're also protected by private militaries so good luck with that.
there's no way this can be done cheaply (simple physics tells you that); meaning it'll be the domain of the very wealthy. If this works It'll allow the rich to let the public transit system deteriorate completely while literally being held aloft over it all. If you think the roads & public transportation are bad now wait until the ruling class have no use for them personally.
Cricket/AT&T kept jacking up my rates. T-Mobile neglected to mention the "Regulatory Compliance Fees" that added $15/mo to my bill (and made them look like taxes when they're not, and no, they're not the fees for giving poor folks phone access, those have a separate line item). Verizon's expensive as hell and has overage fees like crazy (yeah, unlimited right now, but as soon as the pressure's off they'll start cancelling those plans). The little guys who resell for the big 3 have lousy coverage because they're deprioritized on the network.
Cellular is a God damned natural resource (Radio Waves) and we gave it away to businesses and let them rape us in the name of the "Free Market". A modest profit is one thing but this is nuts.
during the industrial revolution. Go read up on the Luddites. The term has more meaning that just an insult. It takes a long time for an economy to catch up to these kinds of changes. To the people who live through that phrase life is hell. We see it coming this time. We have education & telecommunications & democracy. There is zero reason why we should have to go through that again.
They're not going anywhere. The point is that they're 'real' people. I suppose it might cost second stringers their jobs, but then who'll rise through the ranks? It takes time to build star power.
It would be child's play to maintain artificial scarcity. If you're a member of the ruling class who's power, wealth and prestige depends on that scarcity it's in your best interests to maintain it. And history has shown you lack the scruples to recognize how horrible a thing that would be. Anyone else remember the Dark Ages?
if you hated somebody in the 1970s you got a bunch of your friends together and beat them to death. Social media and the Internet in general's made that a lot less OK.
I don't think we've changed, but technology let's us record how awful we are and that makes it a lot harder to be that awful. Not impossible, mind you, but harder.
regularly ratchet up their bandwidth and data caps
Makes you sound a bit like a battered housewife. It literally costs them about $9/mo to offer you your service; and I'm guessing you're paying about $50-$70/mo (depending on your region and how much competition you have). At the very least for a 5-7x profit margin you'd think you wouldn't have data caps to worry about. I'm on Cox and I don't.
they're spending money on customer service right now so they can get approval to buy up their competitors. Normally Americans don't think once let alone twice on letting companies merge until there's no alternatives, but Comcast took it too far and pissed off too many people. Even they couldn't buy off enough politicians to pull that one off.
Just wait until they're done with their merger and they'll go right back to making everybody hate them and Europe and Canada can go back to gazing on us Americans and wondering why the hell we let things be so awful. Just as God and Nature intended.
what's on offer here is Microsoft's cloud backup service & Skype, which were free with certain standalone copies of Office. Offsite backups of your Spreadsheets is a big deal for some users, especially small businesses. And if you're non-technical the monthly fees are made up for in less downtime and not paying the local tech to periodically recover lost data.
if you have a large vehicle with lots of safety features (most notably the one that forces you to slow down in turns so your SUV doesn't tip over). Now, if you're in an economy car hit by one of those SUVs...
you're just not deep enough in the guts of the app to know what they are. UI re-writes are seldom if ever for the hell of it. There's a few good ones:
1. Switching to a modern and more maintainable toolkit. e.g. going from Dojo to Angular or God help us all a table layout + custom CSS to Angular. Like it or not at some point you are going to have to add features to stay relevant unless you're IBM. Oh wait, they're revenue's the the toilet. Or maybe you want a web site that scales from iPhone to phablet to Tablet to 4k desktop? Guess what it's time for a new tool kit.
2. You'd like some new users, but our crusty mid 90s UI is turning them off. Yeah, time for a re-write.
who want a modern UI. You see this all over the web with pages flattening to fit with the iPhone look.
You're also forgetting about new tools. Writing a webpage with Angular is 10x simpler than Dojo. But if you're going to rebuild anyway you might as well modernize the UI.
If I'm writing software I want new users, not just the old ones. Unless those old ones are paying me enough to retire on an island, which they never do. Nobody likes paying for software if it's not a game.
I'm pretty sure the lungfuls of car exhaust will counteract that benefit. Hell, I knew a truck driver who had his chest cracked open looking for problems only to find it was just the build up of decades of soot from sitting in traffic so much.
The point is how the US Media portrayed it with a notable lack of gravity. The quote was in the headlines of every article. The point is you're being manipulated whether you care to acknowledge it or not.
that I didn't replace in 2 years when the hardware got flaky/crashy. The 5 overheats. A lot. I'm an Android guy because for $250 bucks I can buy a nice phone. But my kid's stuck on Apple because of iMessage (which is less a messaging app and more a sort of mini social network). Anyway, ain't nobody recycling the iPhone 5.
and like it or not millions of people get their news from those and choose how they vote based on that news. You should be utterly, balls to the walls terrified of this. Billionaires are going to sweep in and buy out the last vestiges of independent news. They're then going to subtlety manipulate people.
Here's a prefect example: The stories about North Korea's "Super Mighty" strike. The phrase Super Mighty in English sounds childish. It's meant to diminish the perceived threat from North Korea. The word "strike" is to make sure you know they're still a danger. In other words: You're being told it's just like Iraq. A weak enemy that'll roll over when we move in.
That's the kind of propaganda that'll be everywhere, not just on the major Cable networks. And that will suck, hard. Because dumb poor people will see it and vote you (and your draft age kids) into a war.
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a retirement savings account & a college savings plan for their kids. It's trivial to exclude those things. In face we don't. We tax homes to pay for schools so the wealthy don't have to pay for poor kid's schools. Meanwhile we have "State Trust" lands where the state holds land "in trust" so that wealthy land owners don't have to pay property taxes while they're waiting for land to become valuable.
When people say "Tax Wealth" they mean rental properties. Nobody likes rent seekers. Other rent seekers don't like rent seekers. We're trying to figure out how to reign them in.
If you're poor you live and work where you're born. Moving is _expensive_ and risky. Unless you get a lucky break you're stuck and even then you better pray that job doesn't go away because you probably don't have the education & credentials to get another one like it.
this site. California's below $1 on the chart, meaning they pay more than they get back. That makes sense. Not a lot of natural disasters, not a lot of military bases, lots and lots of productive industries.
I rate your post 4 Pinocchios. Fake News.
but you don't want to pay them enough to live where you do? You don't get to.
they're Global. They can live anywhere now. They might occasionally fly into a big city but they don't live there. You might know where the 1% of the 1% are because they're famous, but they're also protected by private militaries so good luck with that.
I thought there was still some question whether he really invented it or just took credit for it?
there's no way this can be done cheaply (simple physics tells you that); meaning it'll be the domain of the very wealthy. If this works It'll allow the rich to let the public transit system deteriorate completely while literally being held aloft over it all. If you think the roads & public transportation are bad now wait until the ruling class have no use for them personally.
Cricket/AT&T kept jacking up my rates. T-Mobile neglected to mention the "Regulatory Compliance Fees" that added $15/mo to my bill (and made them look like taxes when they're not, and no, they're not the fees for giving poor folks phone access, those have a separate line item). Verizon's expensive as hell and has overage fees like crazy (yeah, unlimited right now, but as soon as the pressure's off they'll start cancelling those plans). The little guys who resell for the big 3 have lousy coverage because they're deprioritized on the network.
Cellular is a God damned natural resource (Radio Waves) and we gave it away to businesses and let them rape us in the name of the "Free Market". A modest profit is one thing but this is nuts.
during the industrial revolution. Go read up on the Luddites. The term has more meaning that just an insult. It takes a long time for an economy to catch up to these kinds of changes. To the people who live through that phrase life is hell. We see it coming this time. We have education & telecommunications & democracy. There is zero reason why we should have to go through that again.
They're not going anywhere. The point is that they're 'real' people. I suppose it might cost second stringers their jobs, but then who'll rise through the ranks? It takes time to build star power.
It would be child's play to maintain artificial scarcity. If you're a member of the ruling class who's power, wealth and prestige depends on that scarcity it's in your best interests to maintain it. And history has shown you lack the scruples to recognize how horrible a thing that would be. Anyone else remember the Dark Ages?
if you hated somebody in the 1970s you got a bunch of your friends together and beat them to death. Social media and the Internet in general's made that a lot less OK.
I don't think we've changed, but technology let's us record how awful we are and that makes it a lot harder to be that awful. Not impossible, mind you, but harder.
it's a product with no downside on sales. After all, you're not likely to demand a refund because the service sucks.
Makes you sound a bit like a battered housewife. It literally costs them about $9/mo to offer you your service; and I'm guessing you're paying about $50-$70/mo (depending on your region and how much competition you have). At the very least for a 5-7x profit margin you'd think you wouldn't have data caps to worry about. I'm on Cox and I don't.
they're spending money on customer service right now so they can get approval to buy up their competitors. Normally Americans don't think once let alone twice on letting companies merge until there's no alternatives, but Comcast took it too far and pissed off too many people. Even they couldn't buy off enough politicians to pull that one off.
Just wait until they're done with their merger and they'll go right back to making everybody hate them and Europe and Canada can go back to gazing on us Americans and wondering why the hell we let things be so awful. Just as God and Nature intended.
what's on offer here is Microsoft's cloud backup service & Skype, which were free with certain standalone copies of Office. Offsite backups of your Spreadsheets is a big deal for some users, especially small businesses. And if you're non-technical the monthly fees are made up for in less downtime and not paying the local tech to periodically recover lost data.
if you have a large vehicle with lots of safety features (most notably the one that forces you to slow down in turns so your SUV doesn't tip over). Now, if you're in an economy car hit by one of those SUVs...
you're just not deep enough in the guts of the app to know what they are. UI re-writes are seldom if ever for the hell of it. There's a few good ones:
1. Switching to a modern and more maintainable toolkit. e.g. going from Dojo to Angular or God help us all a table layout + custom CSS to Angular. Like it or not at some point you are going to have to add features to stay relevant unless you're IBM. Oh wait, they're revenue's the the toilet. Or maybe you want a web site that scales from iPhone to phablet to Tablet to 4k desktop? Guess what it's time for a new tool kit.
2. You'd like some new users, but our crusty mid 90s UI is turning them off. Yeah, time for a re-write.
who want a modern UI. You see this all over the web with pages flattening to fit with the iPhone look.
You're also forgetting about new tools. Writing a webpage with Angular is 10x simpler than Dojo. But if you're going to rebuild anyway you might as well modernize the UI.
If I'm writing software I want new users, not just the old ones. Unless those old ones are paying me enough to retire on an island, which they never do. Nobody likes paying for software if it's not a game.
the cars driving like maniacs. Do the drivers in your city drift into the bike lane while making right turns too?
I'm pretty sure the lungfuls of car exhaust will counteract that benefit. Hell, I knew a truck driver who had his chest cracked open looking for problems only to find it was just the build up of decades of soot from sitting in traffic so much.
The point is how the US Media portrayed it with a notable lack of gravity. The quote was in the headlines of every article. The point is you're being manipulated whether you care to acknowledge it or not.
just buy more money?
that I didn't replace in 2 years when the hardware got flaky/crashy. The 5 overheats. A lot. I'm an Android guy because for $250 bucks I can buy a nice phone. But my kid's stuck on Apple because of iMessage (which is less a messaging app and more a sort of mini social network). Anyway, ain't nobody recycling the iPhone 5.
and like it or not millions of people get their news from those and choose how they vote based on that news. You should be utterly, balls to the walls terrified of this. Billionaires are going to sweep in and buy out the last vestiges of independent news. They're then going to subtlety manipulate people.
Here's a prefect example: The stories about North Korea's "Super Mighty" strike. The phrase Super Mighty in English sounds childish. It's meant to diminish the perceived threat from North Korea. The word "strike" is to make sure you know they're still a danger. In other words: You're being told it's just like Iraq. A weak enemy that'll roll over when we move in.
That's the kind of propaganda that'll be everywhere, not just on the major Cable networks. And that will suck, hard. Because dumb poor people will see it and vote you (and your draft age kids) into a war.