so I hardly see this as news. At worst It's moderately annoying for the people involved. Also the leakers are probably going to die soon (poor bastards).
Remember all those reforms that happened after Snowden's leaks? No? That's because there weren't any. So long as social issues exist to divide the working class into easily manageable groups you're not gonna see squat. Let me know when you figure out how to get people to stop caring about Abortion, Gays and guns long enough to care about economics..
the pirated content doesn't last 5 minutes unless it's so heavily modified as to be junk. And the most popular videos on youtube are all legit ones. Still, I suppose it doesn't hurt for them to ask for more and more. If you keep giving it to them why would they stop taking it?
that people will question the insane profits (mostly built off of Basic Research done with taxpayer dollars) and make them stop. Pharma bro almost blew the whole thing by openly admitting their business model without the dog whistle. They censored him like a ton of bricks (but I suspect he'll be back after he learns his lesson; they don't spill each other's blood).
Consoles are almost always loss leaders. Even Nintendo gave in this Gen and lost money on the Wii U (something I don't think they've ever done). The last thing you want is a bunch of folks buying your razor blade hilt and no blades...
they're very, very good at the specific task they're brought in for. That's the point. You don't have to train people. You don't have to worry about their long term well being. The come in ready to go for that one specific thing you need done, do it, and leave. No training costs. No retraining costs. No muss, no fuss. That's what makes them so desirable. You get specialty labor of the sort contractors used to charge $500/hr for at less than 1/20th the price. Lowering American tech Wages overall is just icing on the cake...
but I've got a solution for both. We could (and I'm just floating ideas here) not screw over either demographic. I know it's crazy to think like that. Perhaps I've already said too much.
Vacations. Travel. Nice homes. Nice schools. Clean drinking water ( if you live in Flint, Mi). Retirement. Economic security. Savings.
Healthcare. Moderately priced hobbies (model rail roads, scrap booking, golf, cycling). An evening out with the missus once a week. Should I go on?
I think I'll leave everyone with. One of the aspects of our food supply nobody every talks about is that we use oil byproducts to replenish soil. That's how we're able to grow so much food. Anyone want to guess what's going to happen when our oil supply dwindles...?
nutritious food is too expensive. Also companies are modifiying our food supply to make it addicting and encourage overeating (it's not an accident that eating chips goes well with soda pop). Plus people are turning to junk food to cope with the misery in life and to get a quick boost to get them through a long day.
When you look at wealthy folk they're rarely overweight. It's poor people getting shafted by a bad system. That's where the hate is coming from...
I gave up soda pop and believe me, it helped, but only about 5lbs worth. The trouble with Americans is that junk food is a cheap pleasure in a world that doesn't give out many pleasures to the poor. At the end of a long, miserable day it's hard to say no to a cheeseburger, fries and a chocolate shake. The fact that I can get all that for $6 bucks (no tip, it's fast food) is just icing on the cake (there's a pun in that somewhere). It doesn't help that vegetables are expensive and unsubsidized and that just about everything has added sugar...
short for "Women Infants and Children". It was created to prevent the sort of childhood diseases that exists when women don't get enough food while pregnant and children go hungry when they're gowing up.
Our Republican party defunded the program. It was one of the concessions our president gave them last election in exchange for not driving our economy over a cliff by not paying our national debt. Our voters allowed it because they don't understand that national debt and household debt are different things and that our national debt is in many ways a strength. That's a complex, nuanced view that a lot of our voters can't grasp, and so they've been duped into crap like this.
the vegetables on special don't keep. When you're working poor you usually have two jobs and pull 60/hr a week. Getting to the store every day isn't happening.
Bananas are just sugar. That's why they're cheap. Whole Chickens aren't cheap when you count the calories in them. They seem cheap because the weight of the skin and bones is part of the cost. Cheap cuts of beef aren't. They don't really exist anymore. Even 80/20 pink slime is $3/lb in a lot of places. Onions aren't food. They're a garnish. Like lettuce they're cheap because their complete lack of nutritional value means they're cheap to grow.
Eggs are up to $3/dozen for the off brand. They also don't keep long if you're not buying the fancy ones. Those are $4.39/dozen. Flour and butter are basically junk food. Flour especially. Why do you think they make donuts and cheap bread with it?
That leaves bulk rice and beans. For beans you better know what to buy and how to cook them or you're going to get sick. I forget why. I suppose I'll give you rice though.
All that said there's two other things your forgetting.
a. After a 60 hour work week plus dealing with the kids you didn't want to have (but couldn't stop yourself from having because a substantial portion of our electorate is trying to keep you from affordable birth control options because little hussies like you should have to have kids in exchange for sex) you're in no shape to clean. You live in a cheap, shitty apartment. That means bugs, and lots of them. I'm not the first one to make this observation. It was made in a rather famous essay kicking around google from a single mom with bad teeth who lived homeless for sometime because the bad teeth kept her from getting a job.
b. Cheap junk food and TV are the only pleasures the 1% let the working poor have. They don't get vacations or even time off. They're kids are miserable because so are they. They're poor education means enjoying literature is beyond them and the lack of birth control and a social safety net means they have to be careful with sex.
We here in America like punishing people. We just do. Well, not all of us, but the ones that do vote. And the ones that vote make the rules. So there you go.
Credit Cards are really, really tightly regulated in how they approach you cancelling. Gym memberships got that way after Bally Fitness got the *bleep* sued out of them by the NY Attorney General (sad we rely so heavily on NYAG's trying to kickstart their political careers to fix consumer law, but I digress). AOL had class action suits up the wazoo that they lost and had to cut the crap out (although if another company picks up the torch a recent law passed by our Republican Congress means they can just force Arbitrage so they nipped that in the bud, oh well. And yes I'm blaming the Republicans. DINOs have some of the blame too but this is still what we get for kickin guys like Grayson out.).
I don't recall having much trouble cancelling a cell phone plan simply because they're constantly raising rates and doing away with the best plans, so they're usually happy to see someone go and get off one of the unlimited or cheap high bandwidth data plans.
Inflation is currently about 6.5% for the working poor (real inflation, e.g. the increased cost of food, shelter, transportation, etc, low gas prices don't count because they're not gonna last). Basically it's not that big an increase given the timeframe. Sounds good though. But it's not going to spur Automation. What's spurring automation is that it's cheaper than slave labor in China now. I don't care how shitty we make the lives of the working poor, you're not gonna make a dent in that...
We enshrined them (and all arbitration agreements) into the Rule of Law. Our highest court just rule the law was valid too.
Our schools are churning out lawyers like crazy because it's cheap for the University but expensive for the Student and our ruling class took note of a potential glut of people with the means to fire off Class Action Lawsuits. So they bought themselves a nice law. I suspect they're planning to do the same in the rest of the world if they haven't already (or don't just plain own the courts like they do in Brazil...).
Just as soon as you do something about the schmucks running your state legislature. Oh, and get Citizens United over turned while you're at it. Our nation's political decisions have consequences, and this is one of them.
is two fold. First, the Indians know Java, and most of the mainframe code is Cobol. if you want cheap programmers you have to start moving it to Java. Plus the old Cobol programmers are dying/retiring and companies in America are loath to train. Half the reason they want the Indians is their trained overseas for peanuts on their own dime.
The other problem is they were built and their software written when space was at an absolute premium. Some of the systems can't handle the really large transactions banks and B2B customers want to do. They'll max out at 9,999,999 or so when $100 million transactions are standard and billion dollar ones not far off. Plus they're terrible at sending through complex invoice data. They can do it, but it's usually EDI which is a mess. If you've ever seen an EDI spec doc (or beaten a Zombie to death with one) you know what I mean.
Why is that such a problem? Because accounting automation is the next big thing. Businesses do a thing called 'reconciliation' where they track everything they sold, for how much and then compare it to the bank statements. This way they don't wake up one day to find they've been giving stuff away for free for a year and lost millions. In a big company it happens all the time because your rank and file peon doesn't care of the mega corp gets paid. If the checks stop coming from Company A they'll go work for Company B. Same shit, different master. But you better believe Company A cares:P.
Believe it or not right now that reconciliation is largely manual because banks suck at handling data. Updating their systems will fix that.
is use one of the 5 other Credit Cards I have that have lines of credit available that route through a different network. Worst case scenario I pay an extra 2% to borrow the cash for a few days. I'm also going to plan my purchases and bill payments around bank systems crashing and occasionally argue with customer service to get a late fee waived when they couldn't automatically bill my bank account and I didn't notice until I got a text message & and email telling me I'm over due. And because I'm a good (profitable) customer they'll waive the fee.
See, this is only a problem for poor people living paycheck to paycheck without any lines of credit. While it's true 66% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck most of them have a few lines of credit to patch this up (though at high interest). But for guys like me that are doing so-so (enough money in bank for a few months bills and lots and lots of credit) it's at worst a minor inconvenience.
Now, for the bottom 20% who have shit credit, no savings and shit jobs they are screwed. But we've never cared about them before, why start now?
Protectionism. Tariffs. The end of Work Visa programs and if need be all but a few immigration programs. We take care of our own first. Let them leave. America is a resource rich country. They can leave, but they don't get to take the ball home. Taxes. Massive taxes to take back internal capital from the ones that leave.
Or we could just roll over and die. Pretend like the market can somehow be free and do nothing as workers to protect our quality of life as we hang desperately onto the principles of Laissez-faire and trickle down economics that were droned into our heads when we were children too defenseless to know any better. I've already made my decision. I'll vote for the left candidates. The Democratic Socialists. Can't get any worse for me but it might get better.
My question is: What are the rest of you going to do? Give up or join guys like me and Bernie?
with a few clever legal tricks and the value of the company plundered. I'm surprised nobody is doing this. I've heard Intel keeps them around for 'competition' so they don't get a real lawsuit. Microsoft might prop them up too. But right now they look primed to be 'Bained'. I guess it depends on who they owe money too though.
do AMD and nVidia have a bunch of overlapping patents that would let Intel slot one in for the other or something? At any rate the one thing AMD does right is integrate graphics, it's just that integrated can never really compete with Discrete. My GPU is mid-range and still has it's own power supply, fans, and cranks heat out back the case...
Oh, and WTF is up with AMD's stock? It's under $3. Is there something I don't understand here? Their patent portfolio alone makes them worth more than that.
America has a ruling class, we just don't like to talk about it. Trump is part of that ruling class. Looking back in American history you'll see the only time the working class makes gains is when one of the ruling class breaks ranks and fights for the working class. FDR's the most famous example. JFK might have been but didn't get a chance. Trump May out may not be the next one. We'll only find out if he's elected.
If they can. It's not cheap to employ an h1-b. There's a reason they want the worker in the country. Underemployment is a huge (yuge?) problem here with lots of Americans stuck in dead end temp work. If you want the benefits of doing business in America then you hire Americans. Seems reasonable to me.
just not as much. And they're only worth less than their assets because of Alibaba, which unexpectedly exploded. And there's the rub. Take any company that's got assets worth a lot and somewhere out there is someone looking to gut the company and siphon off those assets for themselves. I looked up an old store called Yellow Front that I used to love when I was a kid and found they had that happen to them too. Profitable company that owned a lot of land so someone bought 'em, sold the land and shut down the company. Happened to Mervyn's too. Like Science Fiction? You can thank this business method for killing off all the great sci-fi monthlies. Their distributor owned a bunch of land too. After they lost their distributor they all went under before they could find a new one (this was the 50s, getting a new distribution network in place wasn't easy). It's so common we have a name for it: Bained.
Best quote I ever read was this: The stock market is no longer a method for getting capital into successful businesses, but for getting it out.
Slashdot Mirror
so I hardly see this as news. At worst It's moderately annoying for the people involved. Also the leakers are probably going to die soon (poor bastards).
Remember all those reforms that happened after Snowden's leaks? No? That's because there weren't any. So long as social issues exist to divide the working class into easily manageable groups you're not gonna see squat. Let me know when you figure out how to get people to stop caring about Abortion, Gays and guns long enough to care about economics..
the pirated content doesn't last 5 minutes unless it's so heavily modified as to be junk. And the most popular videos on youtube are all legit ones. Still, I suppose it doesn't hurt for them to ask for more and more. If you keep giving it to them why would they stop taking it?
that people will question the insane profits (mostly built off of Basic Research done with taxpayer dollars) and make them stop. Pharma bro almost blew the whole thing by openly admitting their business model without the dog whistle. They censored him like a ton of bricks (but I suspect he'll be back after he learns his lesson; they don't spill each other's blood).
Consoles are almost always loss leaders. Even Nintendo gave in this Gen and lost money on the Wii U (something I don't think they've ever done). The last thing you want is a bunch of folks buying your razor blade hilt and no blades...
they're very, very good at the specific task they're brought in for. That's the point. You don't have to train people. You don't have to worry about their long term well being. The come in ready to go for that one specific thing you need done, do it, and leave. No training costs. No retraining costs. No muss, no fuss. That's what makes them so desirable. You get specialty labor of the sort contractors used to charge $500/hr for at less than 1/20th the price. Lowering American tech Wages overall is just icing on the cake...
but I've got a solution for both. We could (and I'm just floating ideas here) not screw over either demographic. I know it's crazy to think like that. Perhaps I've already said too much.
Vacations. Travel. Nice homes. Nice schools. Clean drinking water ( if you live in Flint, Mi). Retirement. Economic security. Savings. Healthcare. Moderately priced hobbies (model rail roads, scrap booking, golf, cycling). An evening out with the missus once a week. Should I go on?
I think I'll leave everyone with. One of the aspects of our food supply nobody every talks about is that we use oil byproducts to replenish soil. That's how we're able to grow so much food. Anyone want to guess what's going to happen when our oil supply dwindles...?
nutritious food is too expensive. Also companies are modifiying our food supply to make it addicting and encourage overeating (it's not an accident that eating chips goes well with soda pop). Plus people are turning to junk food to cope with the misery in life and to get a quick boost to get them through a long day.
When you look at wealthy folk they're rarely overweight. It's poor people getting shafted by a bad system. That's where the hate is coming from...
I gave up soda pop and believe me, it helped, but only about 5lbs worth. The trouble with Americans is that junk food is a cheap pleasure in a world that doesn't give out many pleasures to the poor. At the end of a long, miserable day it's hard to say no to a cheeseburger, fries and a chocolate shake. The fact that I can get all that for $6 bucks (no tip, it's fast food) is just icing on the cake (there's a pun in that somewhere). It doesn't help that vegetables are expensive and unsubsidized and that just about everything has added sugar...
short for "Women Infants and Children". It was created to prevent the sort of childhood diseases that exists when women don't get enough food while pregnant and children go hungry when they're gowing up.
Our Republican party defunded the program. It was one of the concessions our president gave them last election in exchange for not driving our economy over a cliff by not paying our national debt. Our voters allowed it because they don't understand that national debt and household debt are different things and that our national debt is in many ways a strength. That's a complex, nuanced view that a lot of our voters can't grasp, and so they've been duped into crap like this.
Belgium sounds nice. I wish I lived there...
the vegetables on special don't keep. When you're working poor you usually have two jobs and pull 60/hr a week. Getting to the store every day isn't happening.
Bananas are just sugar. That's why they're cheap. Whole Chickens aren't cheap when you count the calories in them. They seem cheap because the weight of the skin and bones is part of the cost. Cheap cuts of beef aren't. They don't really exist anymore. Even 80/20 pink slime is $3/lb in a lot of places. Onions aren't food. They're a garnish. Like lettuce they're cheap because their complete lack of nutritional value means they're cheap to grow.
Eggs are up to $3/dozen for the off brand. They also don't keep long if you're not buying the fancy ones. Those are $4.39/dozen. Flour and butter are basically junk food. Flour especially. Why do you think they make donuts and cheap bread with it?
That leaves bulk rice and beans. For beans you better know what to buy and how to cook them or you're going to get sick. I forget why. I suppose I'll give you rice though.
All that said there's two other things your forgetting.
a. After a 60 hour work week plus dealing with the kids you didn't want to have (but couldn't stop yourself from having because a substantial portion of our electorate is trying to keep you from affordable birth control options because little hussies like you should have to have kids in exchange for sex) you're in no shape to clean. You live in a cheap, shitty apartment. That means bugs, and lots of them. I'm not the first one to make this observation. It was made in a rather famous essay kicking around google from a single mom with bad teeth who lived homeless for sometime because the bad teeth kept her from getting a job.
b. Cheap junk food and TV are the only pleasures the 1% let the working poor have. They don't get vacations or even time off. They're kids are miserable because so are they. They're poor education means enjoying literature is beyond them and the lack of birth control and a social safety net means they have to be careful with sex.
We here in America like punishing people. We just do. Well, not all of us, but the ones that do vote. And the ones that vote make the rules. So there you go.
Credit Cards are really, really tightly regulated in how they approach you cancelling. Gym memberships got that way after Bally Fitness got the *bleep* sued out of them by the NY Attorney General (sad we rely so heavily on NYAG's trying to kickstart their political careers to fix consumer law, but I digress). AOL had class action suits up the wazoo that they lost and had to cut the crap out (although if another company picks up the torch a recent law passed by our Republican Congress means they can just force Arbitrage so they nipped that in the bud, oh well. And yes I'm blaming the Republicans. DINOs have some of the blame too but this is still what we get for kickin guys like Grayson out.).
I don't recall having much trouble cancelling a cell phone plan simply because they're constantly raising rates and doing away with the best plans, so they're usually happy to see someone go and get off one of the unlimited or cheap high bandwidth data plans.
Inflation is currently about 6.5% for the working poor (real inflation, e.g. the increased cost of food, shelter, transportation, etc, low gas prices don't count because they're not gonna last). Basically it's not that big an increase given the timeframe. Sounds good though. But it's not going to spur Automation. What's spurring automation is that it's cheaper than slave labor in China now. I don't care how shitty we make the lives of the working poor, you're not gonna make a dent in that...
We enshrined them (and all arbitration agreements) into the Rule of Law. Our highest court just rule the law was valid too.
Our schools are churning out lawyers like crazy because it's cheap for the University but expensive for the Student and our ruling class took note of a potential glut of people with the means to fire off Class Action Lawsuits. So they bought themselves a nice law. I suspect they're planning to do the same in the rest of the world if they haven't already (or don't just plain own the courts like they do in Brazil...).
Just as soon as you do something about the schmucks running your state legislature. Oh, and get Citizens United over turned while you're at it. Our nation's political decisions have consequences, and this is one of them.
why not try something? Anything? Like I said, for 90% of us it can't get worse but it _could_ get better. It's happened before. It could happen again.
is two fold. First, the Indians know Java, and most of the mainframe code is Cobol. if you want cheap programmers you have to start moving it to Java. Plus the old Cobol programmers are dying/retiring and companies in America are loath to train. Half the reason they want the Indians is their trained overseas for peanuts on their own dime.
:P.
The other problem is they were built and their software written when space was at an absolute premium. Some of the systems can't handle the really large transactions banks and B2B customers want to do. They'll max out at 9,999,999 or so when $100 million transactions are standard and billion dollar ones not far off. Plus they're terrible at sending through complex invoice data. They can do it, but it's usually EDI which is a mess. If you've ever seen an EDI spec doc (or beaten a Zombie to death with one) you know what I mean.
Why is that such a problem? Because accounting automation is the next big thing. Businesses do a thing called 'reconciliation' where they track everything they sold, for how much and then compare it to the bank statements. This way they don't wake up one day to find they've been giving stuff away for free for a year and lost millions. In a big company it happens all the time because your rank and file peon doesn't care of the mega corp gets paid. If the checks stop coming from Company A they'll go work for Company B. Same shit, different master. But you better believe Company A cares
Believe it or not right now that reconciliation is largely manual because banks suck at handling data. Updating their systems will fix that.
is use one of the 5 other Credit Cards I have that have lines of credit available that route through a different network. Worst case scenario I pay an extra 2% to borrow the cash for a few days. I'm also going to plan my purchases and bill payments around bank systems crashing and occasionally argue with customer service to get a late fee waived when they couldn't automatically bill my bank account and I didn't notice until I got a text message & and email telling me I'm over due. And because I'm a good (profitable) customer they'll waive the fee.
See, this is only a problem for poor people living paycheck to paycheck without any lines of credit. While it's true 66% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck most of them have a few lines of credit to patch this up (though at high interest). But for guys like me that are doing so-so (enough money in bank for a few months bills and lots and lots of credit) it's at worst a minor inconvenience.
Now, for the bottom 20% who have shit credit, no savings and shit jobs they are screwed. But we've never cared about them before, why start now?
Protectionism. Tariffs. The end of Work Visa programs and if need be all but a few immigration programs. We take care of our own first. Let them leave. America is a resource rich country. They can leave, but they don't get to take the ball home. Taxes. Massive taxes to take back internal capital from the ones that leave.
Or we could just roll over and die. Pretend like the market can somehow be free and do nothing as workers to protect our quality of life as we hang desperately onto the principles of Laissez-faire and trickle down economics that were droned into our heads when we were children too defenseless to know any better. I've already made my decision. I'll vote for the left candidates. The Democratic Socialists. Can't get any worse for me but it might get better.
My question is: What are the rest of you going to do? Give up or join guys like me and Bernie?
with a few clever legal tricks and the value of the company plundered. I'm surprised nobody is doing this. I've heard Intel keeps them around for 'competition' so they don't get a real lawsuit. Microsoft might prop them up too. But right now they look primed to be 'Bained'. I guess it depends on who they owe money too though.
do AMD and nVidia have a bunch of overlapping patents that would let Intel slot one in for the other or something? At any rate the one thing AMD does right is integrate graphics, it's just that integrated can never really compete with Discrete. My GPU is mid-range and still has it's own power supply, fans, and cranks heat out back the case...
Oh, and WTF is up with AMD's stock? It's under $3. Is there something I don't understand here? Their patent portfolio alone makes them worth more than that.
America has a ruling class, we just don't like to talk about it. Trump is part of that ruling class. Looking back in American history you'll see the only time the working class makes gains is when one of the ruling class breaks ranks and fights for the working class. FDR's the most famous example. JFK might have been but didn't get a chance. Trump May out may not be the next one. We'll only find out if he's elected.
If they can. It's not cheap to employ an h1-b. There's a reason they want the worker in the country. Underemployment is a huge (yuge?) problem here with lots of Americans stuck in dead end temp work. If you want the benefits of doing business in America then you hire Americans. Seems reasonable to me.
just not as much. And they're only worth less than their assets because of Alibaba, which unexpectedly exploded. And there's the rub. Take any company that's got assets worth a lot and somewhere out there is someone looking to gut the company and siphon off those assets for themselves. I looked up an old store called Yellow Front that I used to love when I was a kid and found they had that happen to them too. Profitable company that owned a lot of land so someone bought 'em, sold the land and shut down the company. Happened to Mervyn's too. Like Science Fiction? You can thank this business method for killing off all the great sci-fi monthlies. Their distributor owned a bunch of land too. After they lost their distributor they all went under before they could find a new one (this was the 50s, getting a new distribution network in place wasn't easy). It's so common we have a name for it: Bained.
Best quote I ever read was this: The stock market is no longer a method for getting capital into successful businesses, but for getting it out.