But it's Drones. Common, do you even read/.? If the Drones aren't ready yet, well... CNN just had a really scary article on the next frontier: remote workers. $.50/hr employees in Guatemala can do what AI can't.
Here's the thing: whatever else the future economy has in store for us, it's not employment. Not unless you're a member of the ruling class of investors, one of their (very few) slaves/lackies or one of the (even fewer) engineers who runs their machines. Remember, they don't need you to buy their crap when they already own everything.
This is how the modern economy works. Buyouts, Mergers & Acquisitions, patent litigation and just plain old skullduggery mean that at the end of the day there's always only 1 man left standing. Maybe if you could convince people that all those "Burdensome Regulations" exist for a reason that wouldn't happen, but if the last election proved anything that's not happening.
Uber's planning on being that last man standing in the world of transportation. So is Google. And Amazon. And hell maybe even Facebook. The billionaires who run our lives have plenty of money to throw around, and they'll get it all back when the Mergers & Acquisitions finish up anyway.
So, given the reality of our modern economy and unchecked capitalism Uber is doing exactly what they should do. So are the billionaire investors. Pity nobody else is.
it would take capital. And where are a bunch of guys who just lost their jobs going to get that. 3 decades of bad tech economy don't lend themselves to wealth building...
It's because companies are allowed to buy back their own stock. It sounds weird, but that used to be against the law. Something about manipulating their own stock prices. Well, after that little rule change CEOs started being paid in stock and most of their pay was made by cashing out that stock. This is why raising the stock prices is job # 1 for a CEO. The easiest way to do that is buy backs, and the easiest way to do that is to score some quick cash in the form of outsourcing and layoffs.
As a funny little aside it was the Regan administration who was responsible for that little rule change.
there's plenty to be patented. There just isn't a lot of money to be made in vaccine invention. It takes billions. The money is in manufacturing them _after_ all the work is done. This is painfully obvious.
That's the trouble with libertarians. They're not anti-government, they're anti-"The Kind of government I don't like". They're cheerfully in favor of government as long as it does what they want it to do. And they'll cheerfully crap all over freedom when it's in their interests. There's basically two types: The ones that don't like being told what to do and the ones that want to tell everyone else what to do but can't get away with it on a national stage (State's rights).
Ok, I know that quote's being inflammatory, but it's also true. For those of you wondering, this particular AC is using a classic technique pioneered by Stalin's men and perfected by Karl Rove: Whatever negative traits your party has you accuse the other party of. Then you force the other side to into an argument about how/why they don't have those negative traits instead of hammering down on them for being generally awful in the first place.
Nothing this AC does or says will change the fact that _his_ party committed a willful act of Terror. Full Stop.
it's just how these sorts of things work. Corporations give to charity for three reasons: Tax write offs, Marketing/Publicity and to advance their long term agendas. This is why we shouldn't rely on charity to maintain the public good.
because they're still in a position where their grotesque wealth might be taken away if anyone took the time to notice. In the UAE they just brutally repress their populations. I suspect sooner or later the Larry Page's and Gates of the world will get around to doing the same to us if we let them, and judging from the results of the last election we're going to...:(.
so much this. People don't realize that just about every major health initiative is funded by the gov't. The basic science in particular all gets done by the gov't because it's not profitable enough quick enough to attract investors. Then a corp moves in, do cheap the finishing touches to turn it into a product and sell back the public works to us.
I'll say this: The Republican Party are terrorists. I mean that. Literally, and here me out here.
Multiple members of their party were caught saying that they were opposing Obama because they wanted him to fail and the country to be hurt so that the Democrats would be damaged politically when the American people blamed the Dems. This happened repeatedly during his presidency. Meanwhile there were no repercussions or even denouncements from the Republican party leadership.
The goal was to spread fear among the American people to hurt the Democrats politically. What _else_ do you call somebody who uses fear to achieve political ends besides a Terrorist? Seriously, you don't have to be blowing up school buses to commit acts of terror. There are far more insidious (and better) ways.
is why I'm a socialist. Let capitalism run wild and we'll spend our resources on crap like this instead of Ebola vaccines. And don't say it's a false dichotomy. We are nowhere near ready as a civilization to support this level of veblen goods and a decent standard of living for the remaining 99%. Hell, in my country we'll still arguing over who's gonna pay for type-I diabetics to have insulin...
The cost of food, rent, health care and education are going up at a much higher rate (I'm seeing about 5% in my neck of the woods, down from around 7% because food is gone down).
Now, if you mix electronics and light consumer goods into that it drops. Even more if you include luxury & higher end goods into that the picture gets much rosier. But I don't buy a lot of that stuff.
And that's the trouble. Inflation impacts the lower class much more, but we lump it all into one big number.
we're talking about the economy as a whole, and the entire point of the GP's post was that inflation is good because the bulk of people are in debt up to their ears and it helps them get out of debt.
I don't know a nice way to say this: You're just spouting more bootstrappy nonsense to evade the argument. You're building the classic right wing straw man of personal responsibility that ignores market realities. Everything is always the individuals fault. Eventually it boils down to what I like to call Crowley Conservationism: Do what though wilt Shall be the Whole of the Law. Basically the worst elements of Satanism. All the lack of morality and none of the freedom. This isn't hyperbole. What else would you call the massive, systemic abuse of fellow humans that results the from this political ideology?
then it's probably not a slashvertisement. Social Isolationism is a problem nerds face most or all of their lives. In this case this really is News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters.
that keep screwing my bro over. He's worked for multiple companies with stable customer bases. Big ones. They keep getting bought out or buying out somebody and merging and then it's layoff city.
to make my debt affordable then something is very, very wrong with the economy.
You're right about the monetary system being used to balance things, but it's just a temporary patch on a broken system. People have come to expect (reasonable I'd say) improved quality of life. This generation is on track to the be first one American history to be worse off overall.
what's isolating me is money. Every year my income is more or less static but my bills go up. I've had promotions, a few projects that brought in some extra cash; but they've mostly served to keep my head above water and clean up the mess from the 2008 economy crash.
Plus it's hard to stay in one place for any length of time. You gotta move to where the work is. And to be blunt, I live in the cheap tech worker apartments, and that means lots and lots of folks here on work visas. They're nice people, but they're not my people.
I'd be a hell of a lot less isolated if the economy would stabilize, but I don't see a snowball's chance in hell of that...
I still watch a lot of youtube, but I'm not watching every single Daily Show, Sam Bee and Colbert video, and I've plum forgot about John Oliver until this post (which is a pity, he's the funniest of the bunch). Now, I have to admit that my side losing the election is a downer (though I do like what Keith Olbermann has been doing) but still, I'm definitely not watching as much as peak election.
there's shitloads of amazing commentary and criticism on youtube. Plus tons of great original animation. Go to the ExtraCreditz channel and watch the recent "Dan Recommends" series. Search for pony.mov and Brain Dump. Ever want to see anime picked apart by a film critic? Digibro. And Kim Justice's retrospectives on British computing are amazing.
This story caught me by surprise because I'm watching more youtube than regular TV these days.
since damn near every armchair politico questions the need for a strong federal government. But as for indoctrination, the only one I got in Public School was non-stop love for capitalism, to the point where if competing economic systems were even discussed it was only in regards to the horrors they caused. Noone ever questioned if National Socialists and Democratic Socialist were different things, ya know. I bet you haven't either.
Second, this is just so they can get your Credit Card # on file. Study after study shows that getting the first purchase is always the hardest for anything online.
The ones that don't give up their credentials will get more scrutiny.
Also you're vastly over estimating people's intelligence and sanity. Lots of "terrorists" are just the heavily manipulated mentally ill. For every Bin Laden there's a thousand of these guys. They're not likely to think they're at risk by giving up credentials, but they're also not all there in the head. Agents would be looking for patterns and again who they should be spending time investigating further.
I suppose we could also solve this problem with mental health services and equitable wealth distribution, but fat chance of that.
Slashdot Mirror
But it's Drones. Common, do you even read /.? If the Drones aren't ready yet, well... CNN just had a really scary article on the next frontier: remote workers. $.50/hr employees in Guatemala can do what AI can't.
Here's the thing: whatever else the future economy has in store for us, it's not employment. Not unless you're a member of the ruling class of investors, one of their (very few) slaves/lackies or one of the (even fewer) engineers who runs their machines. Remember, they don't need you to buy their crap when they already own everything.
This is how the modern economy works. Buyouts, Mergers & Acquisitions, patent litigation and just plain old skullduggery mean that at the end of the day there's always only 1 man left standing. Maybe if you could convince people that all those "Burdensome Regulations" exist for a reason that wouldn't happen, but if the last election proved anything that's not happening.
Uber's planning on being that last man standing in the world of transportation. So is Google. And Amazon. And hell maybe even Facebook. The billionaires who run our lives have plenty of money to throw around, and they'll get it all back when the Mergers & Acquisitions finish up anyway.
So, given the reality of our modern economy and unchecked capitalism Uber is doing exactly what they should do. So are the billionaire investors. Pity nobody else is.
How many jobs? I keep hearing big numbers like this thrown around but never any job figures. It's starting to make me nervous...
it would take capital. And where are a bunch of guys who just lost their jobs going to get that. 3 decades of bad tech economy don't lend themselves to wealth building...
It's because companies are allowed to buy back their own stock. It sounds weird, but that used to be against the law. Something about manipulating their own stock prices. Well, after that little rule change CEOs started being paid in stock and most of their pay was made by cashing out that stock. This is why raising the stock prices is job # 1 for a CEO. The easiest way to do that is buy backs, and the easiest way to do that is to score some quick cash in the form of outsourcing and layoffs.
As a funny little aside it was the Regan administration who was responsible for that little rule change.
there's plenty to be patented. There just isn't a lot of money to be made in vaccine invention. It takes billions. The money is in manufacturing them _after_ all the work is done. This is painfully obvious.
That's the trouble with libertarians. They're not anti-government, they're anti-"The Kind of government I don't like". They're cheerfully in favor of government as long as it does what they want it to do. And they'll cheerfully crap all over freedom when it's in their interests. There's basically two types: The ones that don't like being told what to do and the ones that want to tell everyone else what to do but can't get away with it on a national stage (State's rights).
Ok, I know that quote's being inflammatory, but it's also true. For those of you wondering, this particular AC is using a classic technique pioneered by Stalin's men and perfected by Karl Rove: Whatever negative traits your party has you accuse the other party of. Then you force the other side to into an argument about how/why they don't have those negative traits instead of hammering down on them for being generally awful in the first place.
Nothing this AC does or says will change the fact that _his_ party committed a willful act of Terror. Full Stop.
it's just how these sorts of things work. Corporations give to charity for three reasons: Tax write offs, Marketing/Publicity and to advance their long term agendas. This is why we shouldn't rely on charity to maintain the public good.
because they're still in a position where their grotesque wealth might be taken away if anyone took the time to notice. In the UAE they just brutally repress their populations. I suspect sooner or later the Larry Page's and Gates of the world will get around to doing the same to us if we let them, and judging from the results of the last election we're going to... :(.
so much this. People don't realize that just about every major health initiative is funded by the gov't. The basic science in particular all gets done by the gov't because it's not profitable enough quick enough to attract investors. Then a corp moves in, do cheap the finishing touches to turn it into a product and sell back the public works to us.
I'll say this: The Republican Party are terrorists. I mean that. Literally, and here me out here.
Multiple members of their party were caught saying that they were opposing Obama because they wanted him to fail and the country to be hurt so that the Democrats would be damaged politically when the American people blamed the Dems. This happened repeatedly during his presidency. Meanwhile there were no repercussions or even denouncements from the Republican party leadership.
The goal was to spread fear among the American people to hurt the Democrats politically. What _else_ do you call somebody who uses fear to achieve political ends besides a Terrorist? Seriously, you don't have to be blowing up school buses to commit acts of terror. There are far more insidious (and better) ways.
is why I'm a socialist. Let capitalism run wild and we'll spend our resources on crap like this instead of Ebola vaccines. And don't say it's a false dichotomy. We are nowhere near ready as a civilization to support this level of veblen goods and a decent standard of living for the remaining 99%. Hell, in my country we'll still arguing over who's gonna pay for type-I diabetics to have insulin...
The cost of food, rent, health care and education are going up at a much higher rate (I'm seeing about 5% in my neck of the woods, down from around 7% because food is gone down).
Now, if you mix electronics and light consumer goods into that it drops. Even more if you include luxury & higher end goods into that the picture gets much rosier. But I don't buy a lot of that stuff.
And that's the trouble. Inflation impacts the lower class much more, but we lump it all into one big number.
Oblig XKCD
we're talking about the economy as a whole, and the entire point of the GP's post was that inflation is good because the bulk of people are in debt up to their ears and it helps them get out of debt.
I don't know a nice way to say this: You're just spouting more bootstrappy nonsense to evade the argument. You're building the classic right wing straw man of personal responsibility that ignores market realities. Everything is always the individuals fault. Eventually it boils down to what I like to call Crowley Conservationism: Do what though wilt Shall be the Whole of the Law. Basically the worst elements of Satanism. All the lack of morality and none of the freedom. This isn't hyperbole. What else would you call the massive, systemic abuse of fellow humans that results the from this political ideology?
then it's probably not a slashvertisement. Social Isolationism is a problem nerds face most or all of their lives. In this case this really is News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters.
that keep screwing my bro over. He's worked for multiple companies with stable customer bases. Big ones. They keep getting bought out or buying out somebody and merging and then it's layoff city.
to make my debt affordable then something is very, very wrong with the economy.
You're right about the monetary system being used to balance things, but it's just a temporary patch on a broken system. People have come to expect (reasonable I'd say) improved quality of life. This generation is on track to the be first one American history to be worse off overall.
what's isolating me is money. Every year my income is more or less static but my bills go up. I've had promotions, a few projects that brought in some extra cash; but they've mostly served to keep my head above water and clean up the mess from the 2008 economy crash.
Plus it's hard to stay in one place for any length of time. You gotta move to where the work is. And to be blunt, I live in the cheap tech worker apartments, and that means lots and lots of folks here on work visas. They're nice people, but they're not my people.
I'd be a hell of a lot less isolated if the economy would stabilize, but I don't see a snowball's chance in hell of that...
and the expansion of data caps that will probably follow I don't think this is going to matter much...
I still watch a lot of youtube, but I'm not watching every single Daily Show, Sam Bee and Colbert video, and I've plum forgot about John Oliver until this post (which is a pity, he's the funniest of the bunch). Now, I have to admit that my side losing the election is a downer (though I do like what Keith Olbermann has been doing) but still, I'm definitely not watching as much as peak election.
there's shitloads of amazing commentary and criticism on youtube. Plus tons of great original animation. Go to the ExtraCreditz channel and watch the recent "Dan Recommends" series. Search for pony.mov and Brain Dump. Ever want to see anime picked apart by a film critic? Digibro. And Kim Justice's retrospectives on British computing are amazing.
This story caught me by surprise because I'm watching more youtube than regular TV these days.
since damn near every armchair politico questions the need for a strong federal government. But as for indoctrination, the only one I got in Public School was non-stop love for capitalism, to the point where if competing economic systems were even discussed it was only in regards to the horrors they caused. Noone ever questioned if National Socialists and Democratic Socialist were different things, ya know. I bet you haven't either.
Second, this is just so they can get your Credit Card # on file. Study after study shows that getting the first purchase is always the hardest for anything online.
The ones that don't give up their credentials will get more scrutiny.
Also you're vastly over estimating people's intelligence and sanity. Lots of "terrorists" are just the heavily manipulated mentally ill. For every Bin Laden there's a thousand of these guys. They're not likely to think they're at risk by giving up credentials, but they're also not all there in the head. Agents would be looking for patterns and again who they should be spending time investigating further.
I suppose we could also solve this problem with mental health services and equitable wealth distribution, but fat chance of that.