There, I said it. You can pay for the roads you use and the thousands of miles of roads you benefit from indirectly. You can pay for clean drinking water in Flint, Mi even if you don't live there so those people don't become violent and spill over. You can pay for the college tuition of the next Albert Eisenstein or the doctor who cures your prostrate cancer. You can pay for the Civilization you benefit from every day even if you don't realizing it.
We liberals haven't figured out a nice way to say you didn't build it, but you know what? You didn't.
at least until you reach a complexity of programming where the two are indistinguishable, and the "Teach everyone to code" movement recognizes that at that level you're not going to be able to depress wages (which is the real goal) because you're basically dealing with genetic freaks that we don't yet know how to create.
It's got nothing to do with SJWs and everything to do with a longstanding economic pattern, namely that when capital notices labor prices going up it takes measures to increase supply. You remember Supply and Demand, right? That's what this is. Pay is good and programmers have middle class lives because supply is low. Middle Class lives don't come cheap, and somebody is actively looking to make it cheaper. This is how things work.
and more to do with maintaining a decent standard of living for 99% of the population.
Yes, any large organization can be abused. The Army Core of Engineers does great things. They prevent floods, bring water into disaster areas. Build bridges. They also gave smallpox blankets to Native Americans.
The solution is not to throw up your hands and declare defeat. It's to keep an eye on them. If you think you and your little lonesome stand a snowballs chance in hell of maintaining a middle class lifestyle without some sort of unified front to protect your interests then again, you're not paying attention. Go read the summary again for a good reason why you want/need this.
Put another way, there's a Grover Norquist Quote about a gov't small enough to down in a bathtub that sums up why you need large, powerful organizations to protect your interests. Sooner or later anything that's on your side and doesn't have some weight behind it is going to get the bathtub treatment from 'ole Grover.
What the US needs is a 20-30 hour work week, mandatory voting (ala Jury Duty), parliaments and the end of Electoral Colleges and in general we need to drag everybody into managing their long term well being. This is the sorta thing the Investor Class does with their time, and we need everybody to do it.
Yes, we say "AI" when we really mean "Expert System" but you're massively underestimating the power of a modern expert system. Self driving cars alone show you want works. Yes, they have problems, but there's so much money to be made with them that even if the problems aren't solved they'll be lived with. The squishy humans will have to learn to live with the self driving cars, not the other way around. If all else fails the folks driving (pun) the change will buy laws that shift liability so they can have them. You will note that here in the USA we just passed laws making Arbitration Agreements legally binding in all cases. While you and me are posting to/. the 1% are getting shit done...
As for war, not gonna happen. The best example of this I've seen is when a bunch of Pakistani Terrorists showed up with guns at a major skyscraper in India and blew a bunch of folks away. It came out that the Pakistani gov't knew it was gonna happen and didn't bother telling India. That's the kinda thing that should have started a war. Remember Arch Duke Ferdinand? Back in the 20s minor crap like that could set things off. Today a large scale terrorist attack just gets brushed off.
Basically our corporate overlords are now global. They no longer have anything to be gained from large scale wars. Small scale ones like Iraq are fine. They keep the pleebs in line, breed a few terrorists to keep everyone too scared to ask for better working conditions and let them run a Military Industrial Complex for profit. But the real big ones that bite into profits are a thing of the past.
The only way out of this is Socialism and redistribution of wealth. I knew it feels bad. You don't like the idea of someone with a good life not stressing out at work because, well, you do, so why shouldn't they. That's why the 1% always talk about how hard they work (lies) and why they make it sound like they're risking capital when investing (also lies). They don't want you to notice they're living the life they deny everybody else...
and start submitting stories to/.? No kidding. That's the _point_. If you haven't figured that out by now you haven't been paying attention.
The more interesting question is will people ever notice that the 1% does stuff like this? Every time the rich target an industry for lower wages I'm baffled that folks pretend like it's not happening. They tell me I'm a conspiracy loon because the idea that somebody might think 10 or 20 years down the line is nuts because well, they don't think that far down the line so why should anybody else?
This is kinda why workers formed Unions folks. The 1% are _always_ looking for ways to stop paying you. You know how you look for ways to save money on your day-to-day expenses? You clip coupons, they depress wages. Basically the same thing.
that's what the Dark Ages were. 1200 years of zero progress until a plague came along and killed off enough of the ruling class to cause some social disruption and let things get moving again.
Think of it this way. Let's say you're actually a member of the 1%. You have the best civilization has to offer. Do you want things to change? Do you want new tech to disrupt your power? No, of course not. You get really conservative, really fast when you're the king. Nothing changes, nothing improves because you won't let it. Because any change risks everything you have, and you have everything. That's the Dark Ages in a nut shell. And there's not a damned reason why we couldn't just go right back into that.
Seriously. It's already happening. It's well documented that Foxconn is only keeping their employees under pressure from the Chinese gov't to avoid causing social unrest. The 1% don't need us to buy their stuff when they've got robots to make it, Robots to defend it and then a very, very, very small class of servant to attend to their health needs and entertain them. The other 95% (98?) of the population is utterly superfluous. You can do just fine selling 100 computers for $2000 each instead of 1000 for $200. Apple's doing it, and they're the most profitable company in human history.
Oh, and before everybody starts going on about "There'll be all these new jobs in the Server Sector" no, there won't. If nobody has any money nobody will be able to hire people. That doesn't phase the 1%. Henry Ford only thought about this crap because there were limits to his global reach and ability to automate and obtain the wealth he wanted. That's not true anymore.
And as for the Industrial Revolution let's not forget there was 70 years of mass unemployment and misery. The Luddites who lost jobs never say employment again. Their Children didn't either. It wasn't until their grandchildren that we started seeing the new economy and by then the Luddites were dead and buried. Plus a lot of that was solved by shipping people overseas, but there really isn't an 'overseas' anymore. We've already colonized the new world.
Basically we're either going to redistribute the wealth of the machines or enter a new Dark Ages. Everybody sorta forgets the human race spent 1200 years with everyone but the 1% and their servants living like shit.
you should be asking: Do I deserve food, shelter and healthcare? The Answer is yes. You can't solve all the world's problems in one go, but you can work towards it. But before you can even do _that_ then you need to make sure your basic needs are taken care of.
For the record, our civilization already produces enough food to feed the world if you're just counting calories. The problem isn't production it's delivery. We can solve the worlds problems. What we _can't_ do is solve the world's problems while satisfying the opulent whims of the 1% of the 1%. Don't be fools. You're worth it. Everybody is.
Salemen, Managers, Accountants etc, etc. You don't really see the smart ones because they're not constantly breaking their computers or getting confused by simple things. It's hard not to develop a Superiority Complex with that going on.
For all his faults (and they are legion) Trump is at least starting up a conversation on left wing politics again. Tariffs, protectionism, etc, etc. He's also done something nobody has given credit for, namely removing the dog whistle from the GOP. Yes, he's saying a lot of Racists and Xenophobic things, but it's nothing we haven't been hearing on Fox News for years but just with a wink & a nod. Bringing that stuff out in the open is important. As long was he hide it behind implied racism we can pretend it's not there. Trump gets us talking about the root cause of all that racism: Fear of losing out in the economy. He's speaking to the millions of Middle Class Americans who are terrified of slipping into a lifetime of $11/hr jobs.
Basically, he's got the Social Conservatives thinking about the economy and how it effects them for the first time since the 70s. That's no mean feet, and we here on the left are hoping to bring them back into the fold. There was a time when Social Conservatives put aside their beliefs to focus on what was right for everyone. When Abortion, Gay Marriage and Gun control weren't the powerful wedge issues used by the Donor class to drive a wedge between workers. Trump might bring that back, and if he does then he's actually what he says he is: A Unifier.
Microsoft's UWP's got everybody spooked. I could see nVidia firing a shoot or two here. Microsoft makes hardware after all. Sure, they'd probably just let Intel do it, or maybe buy somebody like Power VR, but hey, it'd be childs play to kill nVidia. They're pretty much completely dependent on Widows right now outside of a few high end workstations for engineers/mathematicians.
I love the program. I couldn't care less about 1080 out 720p video on my crappy smart phone and this way YouTube doesn't eat up all my bandwidth for pixels I can't see anyway, but there are some real nasty questions around net neutrality. Still if you think this'll hurt new players in the streaming video market you're nuts. The barrier to entry there is already so high this isn't even a bump in the road for them
but I stick with google's ad program. It doesn't pay much (more than enough to cover the hosting costs and buy a little hardware now and then for testing/development. What can I say, having kids means I don't get to spend paycheck money on hobbies anymore:( ) but in all that time I haven't had my site taken down when users report I've been serving them malware for week...
Advisors in this context are really just salesmen. Most folks involved in the Stock trade are either salesmen trying to get you to buy stocks they get a kickback on or "Vulture Capitalists" who do what are called "leveraged" buyout where you borrow money to buy a company's assets, sell the assets to pay the loan, pocket the difference and shut down the company.
The best quote I've ever heard is this: "Stocks are no longer a means of getting capital into a successful business but of getting it out".
Anyway the real news is there's so little profit in these investors that RBS isn't even going to bother with salesmen anymore.
it's too easy for the corporations to go from State to State buying each legislature one at a time. I find when most people say they're in favor of small government they mean "Small enough that I can boss everybody around"...
they're trying to take everything (money, power) for themselves. They're greedy bastards hiding behind a veneer of decency. "They" here aren't the rubes voting for Ted Cruz's theocracy to be or Rubio's Trickle Down Economics. They are the 1% who power Cruz's and Rubio's existence.
They don't want what's best for everyone. They want to take everything for themselves. Trump supporters figured this out. They just don't know what to do with that information...
Trump is not the enemy. He's just a reflection of the hate and desperation white working class Voters feel in the face of an eroding standing of living. Rubio, Cruz, Kasich. Their your enemies. They're the ones who openly attack the working class and drive down wages while raising taxes on the poor and working class. Take care of them, protect the Workers and bring back the middle class and the fear and hate Trump is reflecting back will dissipate in the wind.
it will even out? What makes you think our overlords won't just take it all leaving a very, very small servant class for themselves? Post WWII America and Europe had unheard of levels of income equality. That's all being rolled back. Screw that noise. I'm not going to march to the slaughter house quietly like a fool. I want Tariffs, an end to Work Visas for all but PHD level researchers (researchers, not rank and file workers, we've got plenty of those) and protectionism. It benefits me. I want things that benefit _me_. That's not being selfish. That's common god damned sense.
there's nothing illegal about what these companies are doing. See here. The key part is that companies just have to say they are not adversely affecting American workers. That's a loophole you can drive a mac truck full of H1-B visas through. America is technically at full employment. You and I know those stats are bullshit, but judges rule on the side of property. They're part of that class. How do you think they're going to rule? You think they'll just down the program? You think our Supreme court will? Good luck with that.
or a conservative state. It's kinda like that old Dilbert cartoon about complaining to the Bureau of Dogs. There's really noone to help in that case. These were lower end tech support jobs. Nobody really cared. It predated smart phones or even most folks (especially in that income bracket) having cell phones. The ACLU was (and is) hopelessly over worked too. Paychecks and severance weren't withheld. That was never the point. The point was to avoid paying for unemployment insurance.
One of the dirty secrets of Unemployment Insurance is that companies pay premiums. That's why it's called insurance. But they don't _have_ to pay the premiums in all states. It most Republican led states it's optional, but if anyone files a claim and gets benefits the company pays every red cent of them. So the companies come up with dirty tricks like this.
Sure, maybe it's not technically legal, but good luck proving it.
what's really fun is when the Sheriff is used to intimidate the employees into signing their rights away. I saw a lot of that when the outsourcing started and companies didn't want to pay unemployment. You'd be put in a room with two mean looking guys with guns and not allowed to leave until you signed a paper saying you voluntarily quit.
Said it before, say it again: Vote Left. Vote for the most left leaning candidate you can get your hands on. Bernie. Trump. Hilary if you have to ( not that she's Left, but she's not Cruz/Rubio/Jeb). Join a Union. Start a Union. Vote in your State elections.
they no longer need to show there are no qualified Americans. The law was very quietly changed to allow them to replace American workers. Vote Left. Bernie Sanders, hell Trump if you have to (better than Cruz/Rubio, at least he talks about the issue). Join a Union if you can find one. If you think they're not coming for you your wrong. Only a matter of time.
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There, I said it. You can pay for the roads you use and the thousands of miles of roads you benefit from indirectly. You can pay for clean drinking water in Flint, Mi even if you don't live there so those people don't become violent and spill over. You can pay for the college tuition of the next Albert Eisenstein or the doctor who cures your prostrate cancer. You can pay for the Civilization you benefit from every day even if you don't realizing it.
We liberals haven't figured out a nice way to say you didn't build it, but you know what? You didn't.
is that they're doing it with robots now. It used to be only humans could do this kind of pretty fine grain work. At least the initial disassembly.
at least until you reach a complexity of programming where the two are indistinguishable, and the "Teach everyone to code" movement recognizes that at that level you're not going to be able to depress wages (which is the real goal) because you're basically dealing with genetic freaks that we don't yet know how to create.
It's got nothing to do with SJWs and everything to do with a longstanding economic pattern, namely that when capital notices labor prices going up it takes measures to increase supply. You remember Supply and Demand, right? That's what this is. Pay is good and programmers have middle class lives because supply is low. Middle Class lives don't come cheap, and somebody is actively looking to make it cheaper. This is how things work.
and more to do with maintaining a decent standard of living for 99% of the population.
Yes, any large organization can be abused. The Army Core of Engineers does great things. They prevent floods, bring water into disaster areas. Build bridges. They also gave smallpox blankets to Native Americans.
The solution is not to throw up your hands and declare defeat. It's to keep an eye on them. If you think you and your little lonesome stand a snowballs chance in hell of maintaining a middle class lifestyle without some sort of unified front to protect your interests then again, you're not paying attention. Go read the summary again for a good reason why you want/need this.
Put another way, there's a Grover Norquist Quote about a gov't small enough to down in a bathtub that sums up why you need large, powerful organizations to protect your interests. Sooner or later anything that's on your side and doesn't have some weight behind it is going to get the bathtub treatment from 'ole Grover.
What the US needs is a 20-30 hour work week, mandatory voting (ala Jury Duty), parliaments and the end of Electoral Colleges and in general we need to drag everybody into managing their long term well being. This is the sorta thing the Investor Class does with their time, and we need everybody to do it.
past 3. The bad news is you're wrong...
/. the 1% are getting shit done...
Yes, we say "AI" when we really mean "Expert System" but you're massively underestimating the power of a modern expert system. Self driving cars alone show you want works. Yes, they have problems, but there's so much money to be made with them that even if the problems aren't solved they'll be lived with. The squishy humans will have to learn to live with the self driving cars, not the other way around. If all else fails the folks driving (pun) the change will buy laws that shift liability so they can have them. You will note that here in the USA we just passed laws making Arbitration Agreements legally binding in all cases. While you and me are posting to
As for war, not gonna happen. The best example of this I've seen is when a bunch of Pakistani Terrorists showed up with guns at a major skyscraper in India and blew a bunch of folks away. It came out that the Pakistani gov't knew it was gonna happen and didn't bother telling India. That's the kinda thing that should have started a war. Remember Arch Duke Ferdinand? Back in the 20s minor crap like that could set things off. Today a large scale terrorist attack just gets brushed off.
Basically our corporate overlords are now global. They no longer have anything to be gained from large scale wars. Small scale ones like Iraq are fine. They keep the pleebs in line, breed a few terrorists to keep everyone too scared to ask for better working conditions and let them run a Military Industrial Complex for profit. But the real big ones that bite into profits are a thing of the past.
The only way out of this is Socialism and redistribution of wealth. I knew it feels bad. You don't like the idea of someone with a good life not stressing out at work because, well, you do, so why shouldn't they. That's why the 1% always talk about how hard they work (lies) and why they make it sound like they're risking capital when investing (also lies). They don't want you to notice they're living the life they deny everybody else...
and start submitting stories to /.? No kidding. That's the _point_. If you haven't figured that out by now you haven't been paying attention.
The more interesting question is will people ever notice that the 1% does stuff like this? Every time the rich target an industry for lower wages I'm baffled that folks pretend like it's not happening. They tell me I'm a conspiracy loon because the idea that somebody might think 10 or 20 years down the line is nuts because well, they don't think that far down the line so why should anybody else?
This is kinda why workers formed Unions folks. The 1% are _always_ looking for ways to stop paying you. You know how you look for ways to save money on your day-to-day expenses? You clip coupons, they depress wages. Basically the same thing.
that's what the Dark Ages were. 1200 years of zero progress until a plague came along and killed off enough of the ruling class to cause some social disruption and let things get moving again.
Think of it this way. Let's say you're actually a member of the 1%. You have the best civilization has to offer. Do you want things to change? Do you want new tech to disrupt your power? No, of course not. You get really conservative, really fast when you're the king. Nothing changes, nothing improves because you won't let it. Because any change risks everything you have, and you have everything. That's the Dark Ages in a nut shell. And there's not a damned reason why we couldn't just go right back into that.
Seriously. It's already happening. It's well documented that Foxconn is only keeping their employees under pressure from the Chinese gov't to avoid causing social unrest. The 1% don't need us to buy their stuff when they've got robots to make it, Robots to defend it and then a very, very, very small class of servant to attend to their health needs and entertain them. The other 95% (98?) of the population is utterly superfluous. You can do just fine selling 100 computers for $2000 each instead of 1000 for $200. Apple's doing it, and they're the most profitable company in human history.
Oh, and before everybody starts going on about "There'll be all these new jobs in the Server Sector" no, there won't. If nobody has any money nobody will be able to hire people. That doesn't phase the 1%. Henry Ford only thought about this crap because there were limits to his global reach and ability to automate and obtain the wealth he wanted. That's not true anymore.
And as for the Industrial Revolution let's not forget there was 70 years of mass unemployment and misery. The Luddites who lost jobs never say employment again. Their Children didn't either. It wasn't until their grandchildren that we started seeing the new economy and by then the Luddites were dead and buried. Plus a lot of that was solved by shipping people overseas, but there really isn't an 'overseas' anymore. We've already colonized the new world.
Basically we're either going to redistribute the wealth of the machines or enter a new Dark Ages. Everybody sorta forgets the human race spent 1200 years with everyone but the 1% and their servants living like shit.
you should be asking: Do I deserve food, shelter and healthcare? The Answer is yes. You can't solve all the world's problems in one go, but you can work towards it. But before you can even do _that_ then you need to make sure your basic needs are taken care of.
For the record, our civilization already produces enough food to feed the world if you're just counting calories. The problem isn't production it's delivery. We can solve the worlds problems. What we _can't_ do is solve the world's problems while satisfying the opulent whims of the 1% of the 1%. Don't be fools. You're worth it. Everybody is.
Salemen, Managers, Accountants etc, etc. You don't really see the smart ones because they're not constantly breaking their computers or getting confused by simple things. It's hard not to develop a Superiority Complex with that going on.
For all his faults (and they are legion) Trump is at least starting up a conversation on left wing politics again. Tariffs, protectionism, etc, etc. He's also done something nobody has given credit for, namely removing the dog whistle from the GOP. Yes, he's saying a lot of Racists and Xenophobic things, but it's nothing we haven't been hearing on Fox News for years but just with a wink & a nod. Bringing that stuff out in the open is important. As long was he hide it behind implied racism we can pretend it's not there. Trump gets us talking about the root cause of all that racism: Fear of losing out in the economy. He's speaking to the millions of Middle Class Americans who are terrified of slipping into a lifetime of $11/hr jobs.
Basically, he's got the Social Conservatives thinking about the economy and how it effects them for the first time since the 70s. That's no mean feet, and we here on the left are hoping to bring them back into the fold. There was a time when Social Conservatives put aside their beliefs to focus on what was right for everyone. When Abortion, Gay Marriage and Gun control weren't the powerful wedge issues used by the Donor class to drive a wedge between workers. Trump might bring that back, and if he does then he's actually what he says he is: A Unifier.
Microsoft's UWP's got everybody spooked. I could see nVidia firing a shoot or two here. Microsoft makes hardware after all. Sure, they'd probably just let Intel do it, or maybe buy somebody like Power VR, but hey, it'd be childs play to kill nVidia. They're pretty much completely dependent on Widows right now outside of a few high end workstations for engineers/mathematicians.
I love the program. I couldn't care less about 1080 out 720p video on my crappy smart phone and this way YouTube doesn't eat up all my bandwidth for pixels I can't see anyway, but there are some real nasty questions around net neutrality. Still if you think this'll hurt new players in the streaming video market you're nuts. The barrier to entry there is already so high this isn't even a bump in the road for them
but I stick with google's ad program. It doesn't pay much (more than enough to cover the hosting costs and buy a little hardware now and then for testing/development. What can I say, having kids means I don't get to spend paycheck money on hobbies anymore :( ) but in all that time I haven't had my site taken down when users report I've been serving them malware for week...
it's why here in the states we just passed a law (which our highest court OK'd) to allow companies to force you into private Arbitrage w/o lawyers.
Advisors in this context are really just salesmen. Most folks involved in the Stock trade are either salesmen trying to get you to buy stocks they get a kickback on or "Vulture Capitalists" who do what are called "leveraged" buyout where you borrow money to buy a company's assets, sell the assets to pay the loan, pocket the difference and shut down the company.
The best quote I've ever heard is this: "Stocks are no longer a means of getting capital into a successful business but of getting it out".
Anyway the real news is there's so little profit in these investors that RBS isn't even going to bother with salesmen anymore.
it's too easy for the corporations to go from State to State buying each legislature one at a time. I find when most people say they're in favor of small government they mean "Small enough that I can boss everybody around"...
cut up into 13 pieces? Crap like this is why we need a Federal gov't. It's too easy for the Mega corps to buy off individual states one at a time....
they're trying to take everything (money, power) for themselves. They're greedy bastards hiding behind a veneer of decency. "They" here aren't the rubes voting for Ted Cruz's theocracy to be or Rubio's Trickle Down Economics. They are the 1% who power Cruz's and Rubio's existence.
They don't want what's best for everyone. They want to take everything for themselves. Trump supporters figured this out. They just don't know what to do with that information...
Trump is not the enemy. He's just a reflection of the hate and desperation white working class Voters feel in the face of an eroding standing of living. Rubio, Cruz, Kasich. Their your enemies. They're the ones who openly attack the working class and drive down wages while raising taxes on the poor and working class. Take care of them, protect the Workers and bring back the middle class and the fear and hate Trump is reflecting back will dissipate in the wind.
it will even out? What makes you think our overlords won't just take it all leaving a very, very small servant class for themselves? Post WWII America and Europe had unheard of levels of income equality. That's all being rolled back. Screw that noise. I'm not going to march to the slaughter house quietly like a fool. I want Tariffs, an end to Work Visas for all but PHD level researchers (researchers, not rank and file workers, we've got plenty of those) and protectionism. It benefits me. I want things that benefit _me_. That's not being selfish. That's common god damned sense.
there's nothing illegal about what these companies are doing. See here. The key part is that companies just have to say they are not adversely affecting American workers. That's a loophole you can drive a mac truck full of H1-B visas through. America is technically at full employment. You and I know those stats are bullshit, but judges rule on the side of property. They're part of that class. How do you think they're going to rule? You think they'll just down the program? You think our Supreme court will? Good luck with that.
or a conservative state. It's kinda like that old Dilbert cartoon about complaining to the Bureau of Dogs. There's really noone to help in that case. These were lower end tech support jobs. Nobody really cared. It predated smart phones or even most folks (especially in that income bracket) having cell phones. The ACLU was (and is) hopelessly over worked too. Paychecks and severance weren't withheld. That was never the point. The point was to avoid paying for unemployment insurance.
One of the dirty secrets of Unemployment Insurance is that companies pay premiums. That's why it's called insurance. But they don't _have_ to pay the premiums in all states. It most Republican led states it's optional, but if anyone files a claim and gets benefits the company pays every red cent of them. So the companies come up with dirty tricks like this.
Sure, maybe it's not technically legal, but good luck proving it.
what's really fun is when the Sheriff is used to intimidate the employees into signing their rights away. I saw a lot of that when the outsourcing started and companies didn't want to pay unemployment. You'd be put in a room with two mean looking guys with guns and not allowed to leave until you signed a paper saying you voluntarily quit.
Said it before, say it again: Vote Left. Vote for the most left leaning candidate you can get your hands on. Bernie. Trump. Hilary if you have to ( not that she's Left, but she's not Cruz/Rubio/Jeb). Join a Union. Start a Union. Vote in your State elections.
they no longer need to show there are no qualified Americans. The law was very quietly changed to allow them to replace American workers. Vote Left. Bernie Sanders, hell Trump if you have to (better than Cruz/Rubio, at least he talks about the issue). Join a Union if you can find one. If you think they're not coming for you your wrong. Only a matter of time.