we're talking the ability to target neighborhoods. Individuals even. Crazy shit becomes possible when you've got a large state with nigh unlimited resources and a monstrous amount of data on their enemy.
to go with that, so they'd know where, based on financial data, people were in bad or good financial shape and therefore where they could foment anger, frustration and discontent leading to poor decision making.
People in bad shape do not make good choices. Pressure does not make diamonds, it makes garbage more compact. Take somebody who's financially desperate and push the right buttons and they'll do stupid things. Do it to a large number of people in a country where political decisions are made by margins of less than half a percent and you can wreck shit.
to disrupt our political system. A DB like that would be a goldmine for that purpose, and we know just about every hostile nation is meddling in our politics.
once said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that he wanted to take all the fun out of making video games and make it just another business because that's what would be the most profitable. I'm fairly certain that he was deeply resentful of the fact that he was running a video game company and not something more grandiose like an arms manufacturer.
Point is, these are not gamers. They don't think like gamers. They think like businessmen. Innovation isn't their thing. Let other's innovate and they'll be there to crank out a copy. Look at PUBG. They're doing alright, but the bigger companies are moving in (Epic with Fortnight and now EA with Apex Legends). Activision just fell behind on that curve, but the curve still works.
Let somebody else take the risk while you reap the rewards. This works because you can beat them to market on the consoles and release a better product because you can throw more money at optimizations. Again, PUBG needs a beast of a machine to hit a stable 60, but Fortnight does it on a Toaster.
you still got to see the game and you did it for $90 bucks off the ticket price.
If you're really clever (well, not that clever) you by the ticket, scalp it, try to guess which player is going to get injured and use that to try to make a killing on the scalped ticket.
It's absolutely gambling in that it can and will be used for exactly that purpose. Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck.
because you're not expecting to "win". Nobody buys insurance with the intention of using it (except scammers). You buy insurance hoping to never need it.
In fact when insurance companies get to the point when they can be sure people _are_ going to use it they pull out of the market. This happened in Florida where it's impossible in large swaths of the state to get hurricane insurance due to the frequency of claims.
Oh, there's one more time when you'll buy insurance: when you're forced to. Like car insurance or health insurance. Me? I'd like to see Single Payer kill both of those. Car Insurance was made mandatory mostly because of rising medical bills. This is another one of those cases where it's not really gambling anymore since it's pretty much inevitable. You're just letting a company skim 10-20% off you.
60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Where would they get the capital to live without a paycheck for the 3-5 years it takes to establish a business?
Also the job market's pretty bad across the board. They can find people to replace them pretty easily. Workers lack solidarity so it'd be easy to get "scabs" (google the term if you haven't heard it).
This is gonna sound harsh, but we shouldn't indulge in fantasy. And "Walking off the Job to compete with your Boss" is by far the most famous business themed fantasy. In practice your Boss has capital and market share and he either buries you in price cuts or buys you outright.
At the same time we shouldn't despair. There _is_ a solution, but you're not gonna find it in the current, heavily distorted, markets. We need to man up and start regulating again. Stop buying into Ayn Rand (you're post is pretty much John Galt). There's a reason nobody paid her much mind in her day. Her ideas don't work. Just ask Eddie Lampert and Kansas.
e.g. proof that certain ideas are just plain wrong.
When somebody throws nonsense like supply side economics or anti-vaxxer crap or anti-GMO crap in your face you need to be able to say "You're wrong" with no doubt. Faith doesn't work when you're trying to make it in the real world. Faith is too easily exploited. You need the certainty that comes from being factually correct.
the problem with these tech companies (and also the reason they're so popular with investors) is they "scale" too well. You can have a company with 10,000 employees bringing in $5+ billion a year with a $100 billion market cap. This means very little of the money they generate is making it into the community at large.
In the "old" days you'd just tax the income of the investors but they're hiding their money, so we have to get creative if we want to have a civilization around these folks. Otherwise they'll take everything for themselves while making you and me pay for the services they want (teachers, police, fire dept, roads, etc).
companies don't move to high cost of living areas because they want to. They do that because all the talented college grads want to live there.
My Kid is finishing up college and wants to move to one of the pricey cities in Colorado. As an old dude that doesn't make sense to me since I don't want to pay $2k/mo for a decent apartment but if I was young I'd want to live in a big, fun city.
For lower tier jobs workers go where the work is. But for the higher tier stuff it's the other way around. See here
until we stopped doing it. It started with a bit of Carter and Reagan, who began dialing back regulations on what banks could do and making stock buy backs legal (funny thing, those used to be illegal market manipulation). Clinton continued it by breaking down the wall between "Main Street" and "Wall Street" banks so that investors could mix doggy stock investments with safe mortgage investments.
Undoing all that would be a start. Talk to any economist who isn't paid by right wing think tanks and they'll tell you the rest.
Following the Great Depression economists at Universities spent decades studying all this and figuring out solutions. The only problem is nobody listens to them. Get rich quick schemes are too popular.
The powers that be have long since noticed that. They've been working for a decade or two to commoditize tech skills. There's been quite a bit of success, and if you haven't seen it you're just lucky.
It's not that hard to do really. You take a tech task and break it down into smaller and smaller chunks, assigning a person to each chunk, so that no one person is critical to the entire task. You then document the hell out of everything while using as much standard equipment as possible to avoid "institutional" knowledge.
If you think the billionaire class hasn't noticed that some of their employees are "irreplaceable" you're sorely mistaken. They're working on it, they just haven't gotten around to your job yet. It's a big economy after all. Some of us will slip through the cracks even, but that's just survival bias...
the only way to combat "common sense" is with education & hard science. For centuries the excuse for abandoning the poor has been "they're just of low moral character". Science is gradually eliminating that excuse and education means folks can't pretend not to know it.
The 770 are folks need to support new product launches. Activision is letting them go because they're not releasing anything next year (except maybe a COD).
that everyone knows is coming. It's so frustrating because we know a recession is coming and we're doing jack squat to stop it. Just more layoffs to keep the stock prices high and maybe another round of tax cuts.
It's not even like we don't know what to do: Regulate Wall Street so they can't gamble with our money (and make no mistake, it's out money since they're "too big to fail"), pump some money into the supply side (Tax Cuts for people who actually spend money, e.g. the working class, and the "Green New Deal"), increase the minimum wage and lift those stupid bloody tariffs. It doesn't do good to put tariffs on China when they can just build their stuff in Mexico and ship it here duty free (lord I shouldn't have to explain that).
And where the hell is the media in all this? Why the hell aren't they calling the current Admin out for doing nothing to stop the recession?
the solution isn't necessarily to stop immigration. The solution is to make sure that the wealth immigrants generate makes it to everyone.
Right now the money made from immigration goes to the top. At least in America. We don't have Single Payer healthcare, we have very few social services and we pay taxes that, if you count your company's healthcare as a tax (and you should, what else would you call it) we pay as much or more as anyone on Europe.
A huge part of the tension from immigration isn't just the occasional racist, it's that immigrants lower wages by increasing supply while improving a sector of the economy (the stock market) that doesn't affect the people who's wages are going down. Remember, only about 20% of Americans own stock, even if you include 401ks as "owning stock"....
but they can and will lower pay in many industries. That's just supply and demand. It's a double edge sword.
Automation does _not_ create jobs. Instead new jobs are created to replace the jobs that were destroyed. This is not the same thing. And it's a slower process than folks realize.
Outsourcing doesn't send work where it's efficient, it sends it where it's _cheapest_. This is why you have tariffs. You need to level the playing field when another country is willing to abuse it's workforce or you end up in a race to the bottom.
Unemployment figures have been cooked by counting gig economy and temp workers as fully employed. This trend was massively accelerated post 2008 when the economy crashed and the recovery went to the top 1%.
There were decades of unemployment, wars and social strife during and following the industrial revolution. Wars cut down on the excess population and the instability prevented factories from outsourcing. That lead to a golden age of high wages in some countries when the Unions gained enough leverage to demand good pay. Outsourcing and legal changes killed the Unions and with it wages.
GP is trolling (that Canada point is nonsense) but it's mostly out of frustration. We need a New New Deal in this country. The ruling class has reneged on the old one.
and get the President you want. We don't _have_ to have crap candidates. But if we want good ones it means showing up to the election before the election. That's where your vote has the most power.
it came from the Heritage Foundation, one of their think tanks. It wasn't at all what Obama or the Democrats wanted, it's what they could get past the right wing Congress. Go look up "Blue Dog Democrats". Nancy Pelosi's men are busy telling insurance companies that she's got their back when it comes to their profits.
It's almost as if corporatism is the problem, and not the party. Show up to your bloody primary election and vote the bastards out and we can easily fix this. As it stands the ACA was the best we can do with guys like you putting right wingers into power.
and it breaks all the God damn time. I average about $116/mo keeping it running. It's still a cash savings and I happen to have a job that lets me get away with it (got a kid in college so I can't afford to replace it).
If you're buying something as new as 2010 that doesn't have crazy miles on it expect to pay $8-$10k unless a relative gives it to you cheap. No, I'm not exaggerating, that's from a quick check of my local area. The used car market has gone nuts. Doesn't help that an entry level 4 door sedan is $16k after taxes and fees.
You don't get to pick where you born. And moving is _expensive_. And where the fuck do you get somebody to pay your mortgage? Listen to yourself man, You sound like Mitt "Why don't the poor just buy more money" Rhomney.
You're either trolling (likely, you insulted me) or trying to do something about the guilt you feel for abandoning people to their fate. Either way what goes around comes around. In 20 years after a few layoffs you'll come around to my way of thinking... when it's too late and you're stuck working 3 jobs to get by, maybe dying of a heart attack in the process. You know, you could stop all that right now.
on par with a sports stadium but without the benefit of getting to riot if you win/lose a championship. It's going to cost more in infrastructure and direct subsidies then those 25,000 jobs will every pay out (and that assumes they really bring 25k jobs).
Let 'em go. Jeff Bezos has enough of my tax money already.
it wasn't hard, they just asked a bunch of the newer, middle class addicts. Turns out it's blue collar guys who can't afford to miss work. They're popping pills to make it through days at work because they can't take time off to heal. In the old days they'd find less physically demanding jobs but the economy's a lot worse than anyone's willing to admit, especially for blue collar guys, so they're stuck in a rock and a hard place.
Not sure how it's gonna turn out though. The jobs they can do physically are few, far between and/or pay like crap. But we're gonna cut them off from the opioids either way since the optics are bad. I guess we could do extended workman's comp, but a lot of times these guys aren't hurt on the job so nobody wants to pay for it. Plus like most social programs workman's comp got a bad rap because a few bad apples were trumpeted to the high hills by companies who want to gut the program.
I think we're sitting on a powder keg there. It's one of the reasons we're about to go head long into a recession. Wish I could get people to get behind doing something about it. It's all just pointless suffering and a pointless waste.
Slashdot Mirror
we're talking the ability to target neighborhoods. Individuals even. Crazy shit becomes possible when you've got a large state with nigh unlimited resources and a monstrous amount of data on their enemy.
to go with that, so they'd know where, based on financial data, people were in bad or good financial shape and therefore where they could foment anger, frustration and discontent leading to poor decision making.
People in bad shape do not make good choices. Pressure does not make diamonds, it makes garbage more compact. Take somebody who's financially desperate and push the right buttons and they'll do stupid things. Do it to a large number of people in a country where political decisions are made by margins of less than half a percent and you can wreck shit.
to disrupt our political system. A DB like that would be a goldmine for that purpose, and we know just about every hostile nation is meddling in our politics.
We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.
once said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that he wanted to take all the fun out of making video games and make it just another business because that's what would be the most profitable. I'm fairly certain that he was deeply resentful of the fact that he was running a video game company and not something more grandiose like an arms manufacturer.
Point is, these are not gamers. They don't think like gamers. They think like businessmen. Innovation isn't their thing. Let other's innovate and they'll be there to crank out a copy. Look at PUBG. They're doing alright, but the bigger companies are moving in (Epic with Fortnight and now EA with Apex Legends). Activision just fell behind on that curve, but the curve still works.
Let somebody else take the risk while you reap the rewards. This works because you can beat them to market on the consoles and release a better product because you can throw more money at optimizations. Again, PUBG needs a beast of a machine to hit a stable 60, but Fortnight does it on a Toaster.
you still got to see the game and you did it for $90 bucks off the ticket price.
If you're really clever (well, not that clever) you by the ticket, scalp it, try to guess which player is going to get injured and use that to try to make a killing on the scalped ticket.
It's absolutely gambling in that it can and will be used for exactly that purpose. Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck.
because you're not expecting to "win". Nobody buys insurance with the intention of using it (except scammers). You buy insurance hoping to never need it.
In fact when insurance companies get to the point when they can be sure people _are_ going to use it they pull out of the market. This happened in Florida where it's impossible in large swaths of the state to get hurricane insurance due to the frequency of claims.
Oh, there's one more time when you'll buy insurance: when you're forced to. Like car insurance or health insurance. Me? I'd like to see Single Payer kill both of those. Car Insurance was made mandatory mostly because of rising medical bills. This is another one of those cases where it's not really gambling anymore since it's pretty much inevitable. You're just letting a company skim 10-20% off you.
I can't imagine that sits well with them.
60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Where would they get the capital to live without a paycheck for the 3-5 years it takes to establish a business?
Also the job market's pretty bad across the board. They can find people to replace them pretty easily. Workers lack solidarity so it'd be easy to get "scabs" (google the term if you haven't heard it).
This is gonna sound harsh, but we shouldn't indulge in fantasy. And "Walking off the Job to compete with your Boss" is by far the most famous business themed fantasy. In practice your Boss has capital and market share and he either buries you in price cuts or buys you outright.
At the same time we shouldn't despair. There _is_ a solution, but you're not gonna find it in the current, heavily distorted, markets. We need to man up and start regulating again. Stop buying into Ayn Rand (you're post is pretty much John Galt). There's a reason nobody paid her much mind in her day. Her ideas don't work. Just ask Eddie Lampert and Kansas.
e.g. proof that certain ideas are just plain wrong.
When somebody throws nonsense like supply side economics or anti-vaxxer crap or anti-GMO crap in your face you need to be able to say "You're wrong" with no doubt. Faith doesn't work when you're trying to make it in the real world. Faith is too easily exploited. You need the certainty that comes from being factually correct.
the problem with these tech companies (and also the reason they're so popular with investors) is they "scale" too well. You can have a company with 10,000 employees bringing in $5+ billion a year with a $100 billion market cap. This means very little of the money they generate is making it into the community at large.
In the "old" days you'd just tax the income of the investors but they're hiding their money, so we have to get creative if we want to have a civilization around these folks. Otherwise they'll take everything for themselves while making you and me pay for the services they want (teachers, police, fire dept, roads, etc).
companies don't move to high cost of living areas because they want to. They do that because all the talented college grads want to live there.
My Kid is finishing up college and wants to move to one of the pricey cities in Colorado. As an old dude that doesn't make sense to me since I don't want to pay $2k/mo for a decent apartment but if I was young I'd want to live in a big, fun city.
For lower tier jobs workers go where the work is. But for the higher tier stuff it's the other way around. See here
until we stopped doing it. It started with a bit of Carter and Reagan, who began dialing back regulations on what banks could do and making stock buy backs legal (funny thing, those used to be illegal market manipulation). Clinton continued it by breaking down the wall between "Main Street" and "Wall Street" banks so that investors could mix doggy stock investments with safe mortgage investments.
Undoing all that would be a start. Talk to any economist who isn't paid by right wing think tanks and they'll tell you the rest.
Following the Great Depression economists at Universities spent decades studying all this and figuring out solutions. The only problem is nobody listens to them. Get rich quick schemes are too popular.
The powers that be have long since noticed that. They've been working for a decade or two to commoditize tech skills. There's been quite a bit of success, and if you haven't seen it you're just lucky.
It's not that hard to do really. You take a tech task and break it down into smaller and smaller chunks, assigning a person to each chunk, so that no one person is critical to the entire task. You then document the hell out of everything while using as much standard equipment as possible to avoid "institutional" knowledge.
If you think the billionaire class hasn't noticed that some of their employees are "irreplaceable" you're sorely mistaken. They're working on it, they just haven't gotten around to your job yet. It's a big economy after all. Some of us will slip through the cracks even, but that's just survival bias...
the only way to combat "common sense" is with education & hard science. For centuries the excuse for abandoning the poor has been "they're just of low moral character". Science is gradually eliminating that excuse and education means folks can't pretend not to know it.
if these numbers are to be believed.
The 770 are folks need to support new product launches. Activision is letting them go because they're not releasing anything next year (except maybe a COD).
that everyone knows is coming. It's so frustrating because we know a recession is coming and we're doing jack squat to stop it. Just more layoffs to keep the stock prices high and maybe another round of tax cuts.
It's not even like we don't know what to do: Regulate Wall Street so they can't gamble with our money (and make no mistake, it's out money since they're "too big to fail"), pump some money into the supply side (Tax Cuts for people who actually spend money, e.g. the working class, and the "Green New Deal"), increase the minimum wage and lift those stupid bloody tariffs. It doesn't do good to put tariffs on China when they can just build their stuff in Mexico and ship it here duty free (lord I shouldn't have to explain that).
And where the hell is the media in all this? Why the hell aren't they calling the current Admin out for doing nothing to stop the recession?
not to work, or proven to work. Do you know what they call Natural Medicine that has been proven to work? Medicine
the solution isn't necessarily to stop immigration. The solution is to make sure that the wealth immigrants generate makes it to everyone.
Right now the money made from immigration goes to the top. At least in America. We don't have Single Payer healthcare, we have very few social services and we pay taxes that, if you count your company's healthcare as a tax (and you should, what else would you call it) we pay as much or more as anyone on Europe.
A huge part of the tension from immigration isn't just the occasional racist, it's that immigrants lower wages by increasing supply while improving a sector of the economy (the stock market) that doesn't affect the people who's wages are going down. Remember, only about 20% of Americans own stock, even if you include 401ks as "owning stock"....
This is why we need a New New Deal.
but they can and will lower pay in many industries. That's just supply and demand. It's a double edge sword.
Automation does _not_ create jobs. Instead new jobs are created to replace the jobs that were destroyed. This is not the same thing. And it's a slower process than folks realize.
Outsourcing doesn't send work where it's efficient, it sends it where it's _cheapest_. This is why you have tariffs. You need to level the playing field when another country is willing to abuse it's workforce or you end up in a race to the bottom.
Unemployment figures have been cooked by counting gig economy and temp workers as fully employed. This trend was massively accelerated post 2008 when the economy crashed and the recovery went to the top 1%.
There were decades of unemployment, wars and social strife during and following the industrial revolution. Wars cut down on the excess population and the instability prevented factories from outsourcing. That lead to a golden age of high wages in some countries when the Unions gained enough leverage to demand good pay. Outsourcing and legal changes killed the Unions and with it wages.
GP is trolling (that Canada point is nonsense) but it's mostly out of frustration. We need a New New Deal in this country. The ruling class has reneged on the old one.
and get the President you want. We don't _have_ to have crap candidates. But if we want good ones it means showing up to the election before the election. That's where your vote has the most power.
it came from the Heritage Foundation, one of their think tanks. It wasn't at all what Obama or the Democrats wanted, it's what they could get past the right wing Congress. Go look up "Blue Dog Democrats". Nancy Pelosi's men are busy telling insurance companies that she's got their back when it comes to their profits.
It's almost as if corporatism is the problem, and not the party. Show up to your bloody primary election and vote the bastards out and we can easily fix this. As it stands the ACA was the best we can do with guys like you putting right wingers into power.
and it breaks all the God damn time. I average about $116/mo keeping it running. It's still a cash savings and I happen to have a job that lets me get away with it (got a kid in college so I can't afford to replace it).
If you're buying something as new as 2010 that doesn't have crazy miles on it expect to pay $8-$10k unless a relative gives it to you cheap. No, I'm not exaggerating, that's from a quick check of my local area. The used car market has gone nuts. Doesn't help that an entry level 4 door sedan is $16k after taxes and fees.
You don't get to pick where you born. And moving is _expensive_. And where the fuck do you get somebody to pay your mortgage? Listen to yourself man, You sound like Mitt "Why don't the poor just buy more money" Rhomney.
You're either trolling (likely, you insulted me) or trying to do something about the guilt you feel for abandoning people to their fate. Either way what goes around comes around. In 20 years after a few layoffs you'll come around to my way of thinking... when it's too late and you're stuck working 3 jobs to get by, maybe dying of a heart attack in the process. You know, you could stop all that right now.
on par with a sports stadium but without the benefit of getting to riot if you win/lose a championship. It's going to cost more in infrastructure and direct subsidies then those 25,000 jobs will every pay out (and that assumes they really bring 25k jobs).
Let 'em go. Jeff Bezos has enough of my tax money already.
it wasn't hard, they just asked a bunch of the newer, middle class addicts. Turns out it's blue collar guys who can't afford to miss work. They're popping pills to make it through days at work because they can't take time off to heal. In the old days they'd find less physically demanding jobs but the economy's a lot worse than anyone's willing to admit, especially for blue collar guys, so they're stuck in a rock and a hard place.
Not sure how it's gonna turn out though. The jobs they can do physically are few, far between and/or pay like crap. But we're gonna cut them off from the opioids either way since the optics are bad. I guess we could do extended workman's comp, but a lot of times these guys aren't hurt on the job so nobody wants to pay for it. Plus like most social programs workman's comp got a bad rap because a few bad apples were trumpeted to the high hills by companies who want to gut the program.
I think we're sitting on a powder keg there. It's one of the reasons we're about to go head long into a recession. Wish I could get people to get behind doing something about it. It's all just pointless suffering and a pointless waste.