Why not force the banks to bear this cost. They got billions of my tax dollars (I'm a single high income earner with minimal capital investment, I pay the maximum tax of anyone in the US) for free. When I borrow money they make money off me. When they borrow money they get money from me. And it was largely their irresponsible lending practices coupled with large scale outsourcing supported by them that put all these Americans in the poor house. So I'll ask again, why the hell not make them pay to clean up their mess?
Oh, and the only reason they paid any of that back was because we have a Democrat in the Whitehouse and he threatened to regulate the bank owner's bonuses if they didn't. Funny how as soon as conditions were attached to the free money they suddenly had it all to payback. Well, not all of it, billions and billions still went missing; not even counting the trillions that went awol in Iraq.
Christ, the things that get modded up on/. these days...
you have a _lot_ more social welfare programs than Americans do. Moving is expensive, and rent is going up in America. These are people living paycheck to paycheck. The ones left behind were most likely trying to scrap together the money for a deposit on a new Apartment. There's no gov't programs to help them. They've been largely defunded. They're still there on paper so that folks like yourself can look and see and then blame the people for not being bootstrappy enough though.
I had a rough patch in life (3 family illnesses at once) and I kid you not people told me to go apply for Section 8 so the gov't would pay my mortgage. Section 8 is a program for larger property owners to get subsidies to rent apartment blocks and large groups of houses. Even for the wealthy and well connected it has a multi-year waiting list. But the people telling me that certainly felt better about themselves. They were helping! Plus they didn't need to lift a real finger the help me. You're doing the same thing, more or less. I'll give you props for taking care of your own though. You're right, in Germany I don't think this would happen.
you must live a very, very sheltered existence. Laws don't exist when they're not enforced. These laws are not enforced. It's like all the IT Contractor scams going on right now where you're hired as a Contractor for a full time job critical to the companies day to day ops. They just don't want to pay your health and unemployment benefits. That's illegal, right? I'm here in Arizona and good luck complaining to the labor board: They don't exists. Our right wing legislature just didn't fund them. They're not there. And thanks to a federal law that enforces Arbitration you can't even sue.
All of the protections that you think are there are gone. You're like a guy walking into a mine field with a magic amulet. It's not real, and you better hope you don't step on a mine.
There's plenty of pro-rent control economists. Rent-Seeking is a dirty word to most economists who aren't that asshat Laffer. Supply and demand breaks down faster than you think. A small group of people are buying up all the houses in America and they're in no hurry to build cheap housing that drives down the rents they're charging.
You're making a fundamental mistake about public housing in America. "Section 8" as it's callled is a subsidy for land lords to rent out property that nobody else will rent (most commonly because of Asbestos in the building materials, which is still legal as long as it's "intact"). If you can figure out how to get American voters to support FDR style public works programs to build housing let me know. When I suggest it to just about anyone I know who votes they blather something about communism, socialism and Nazis and end the conversation there:(...
in America? Corps benefit handsomely from our infrastructure, school systems and workforce subsidies. I'd like to see them paying for some of those benefits, and so far Federally levied taxes are the only thing that works. The States & Cities just drop their pants and give 'em free money because their fighting amongst themselves (or their bought off, it's dirt cheap to buy off State Legislatures here).
they've got the wrong kind of bandwidth, so you get crummy service outside of major cities or inside buildings/garages. That's why they've been pushing wifi calling and it's enabled on their devices. That's what makes AT&T & Sprint so big. Tmobile bought up some spectrum recently so we might see some improvements, hard to say (I don't know enough about spectrum and what else they could use it for).
They'll give you $650 for a brand new iPhone you bought yesterday. Everything else nets you $200 or less. What you really need to watch out for are those lovely "Regulatory Compliance" fees they pretend are taxes. They don't disclose them when you ask them the monthly service fee, and it's usually $5-$10 bucks per line. The best part is people look at them and get made at the gov't for charging a tax when it's the company pocketing the money. Then those folks turn around and demand taxes get cut and their fee goes up while Verizons taxes go down.
and it wasn't so future Internet forum goers could complain about them. There were decades of unemployment following the industrial revolution, and it was a large part of what triggered the first and second World Wars. Post WWII some of the ruling class broke ranks and decided to give the working class a decent living in a few places (parts of Europe and the United States if you weren't black). Those reforms are gradually being rolled back with new systems of oppression put in place to stop the working class from getting out of hand (google "Sesame Credit and Extra Creditz" sometime).
So we're going to have all the unemployment without the Chaos of a World War to pull us out of it and make the ruling class think twice about it. Can you say Dark Ages?
making most jobs obsolete. That's something that could happen in the near term. Since almost every country bases it's quality of life on the jobs it hands out that doesn't bode well for me, a member of the working class.
This is just how we do socialism in America. Our ruling class got really scared of communism so they spent most of the 50s, 60s and 70s pounding it into our skulls that socialism == bad (especially while we were children). But there were quite a few that broke ranks (FDR, Eisenhower, etc) and wanted to keep the economy from sinking back into the Pre-WWII world of winner take all and insane inequality. The Military Industrial Complex with all it's waste was the solution. This way wealth gets moved around without the icky after taste of socialism...
at least in the United States. We have a Republic as a means of preventing the lower classes from voting themselves land. There's lots and lots of writing about this dating back to when our constitution was drafted.
Our Gov't mostly exists to keep the 1% in power. They realized they needed a strong central gov't to raise an army and protect their interests, and they needed a strong civilian gov't to go with the Military one so that they wouldn't just get disposed in a coup d'etat. It's really just that simple. This is why mandatory voting never gets any traction.
Here you go. Oh, you wanted to be able to use a modern internet? Well try this then.
Modern browsers are staggeringly complex beasts. Video, Audio, Applications, storage. You name it. Don't ask how well the bear dances, it's impressive that it dances at all.
it's the poor and disadvantaged... We're taking advantage of people who are really vulnerable already. Hell, some of them might know the odds but can't help themselves. Gambling is addictive...
Every state that has one uses it to cut taxes on the rich instead of adding to Education budgets (seriously, there's a John Oliver video over on youtube that explains it). It's addictive gambling that often drains the last few dollars from the poor and worse it gives the lower class a false feeling of hope that discourages them from demanding better living conditions. It encourages the downtrodden to think of luck as a skill you work at and view their failure to win as a personal failure. Lotteries are one of the most vile tools for controlling the working class ever devised. How is it nobody but one guy on youtube ever points this out?
I've ever seen. Private schools do well for two reasons:
1. They're mostly filled with upper class or rich kids who can afford tuition. These kids have private tutors, stay at home moms that drive them to school and make breakfast, clean, violence free living spaces, etc, etc. This is what people are referring to when they use the word "privileged".
2. The few low income kids that are there have behave like angles and keep their grades up or get booted out. Imagine how much better the public school's scores would be if ever time a kid acted up or his GPA dropped below a 3.0 they got permanently expelled. Imagine how much worse the the scores would be at the schools those kids ended up.
Studies show scores have been dropping in American Schools for 50+ years. These are often sited by Regressives (I refuse to call them "Conservatives", they're not, they're policies are Radical Regressions) as a reason to turn back the clock to the 1950s. Those folks conveniently ignore the other half of the study that shows the reason for the drops are that we don't kick lower income kids to the curb anymore. We've cut down on the dog eat dog sink or swim ideals because folks were sinking, and we got tired of watching them gasp their last painful breath while drowning. The Regressives didn't get tired of that, they seem to enjoy it...
a public defender that is. They're not accused of a crime. At any rate the public defenders are so underfunded they're barely useful. By the time a pro-bono charity gets involved a lot of them will have finished their sentence...
It's his corrupt buddies that run the private prison systems. This bug cost those bastards millions. Private prisons are an obviously bad idea that we all look the other way on since we don't wanna pay taxes to house inmates humanly:(...
when you do what the summary suggests: Hire some local folks to feed the requirements to the offshore guys. The rank and file coder that used to make a decent wage is what's going to drop 8%. Those are a lot of middle class jobs going *poof*...
You need 1 software developer to manage a team of programmers and feed them requirements. This is a genuine drop in middle class American jobs due to outsourcing. There will be a small increase in the folks who manage the Indians and give them their marching orders...
they'll train up for that too if the prices get too high. There are already laws in place to bring cheap blue collar labor in from overseas; mostly in corrupt right wing states in the South but their spread.
Go into medicine. It's the last field that still has a Union (the AMA, who's smart enough to not call themselves a Union).
the end of work visas. Public Education to train local talent. Requirements to hire local talent. You use Unions to lobby gov't and organize voting blocks that can stand up to the corps dollars. You also use Unions to get information out there to voting blocks so people know how to vote. Look at the AARP for a good example of a political organization that protects it's members interests. Their the reason the Right Wing hasn't been able to defund Medicare.
It's a "you can go home, but you can't take the ball" approach to politics. If the corps want to leave they can. The fact is they _don't_ want to leave. The want the best of everything. Hell, they just plain want _everything_ for themselves. That's why it's called Winner Take All. America has more than enough wealth. We've been giving it away to the 1% out of some misplaced notion that if e don't give it up the other guy will take it. Stop that.
If there's going to be any hope for the American working class we're gonna need to get over our childish "I can make it on my own" attitudes and bring back organized labor and the power and protection it offers. It's ridiculous to think we as individuals can effectively bargain with mega corps. John Galt is a child's daydream...
this looks more like a mistake than anything else. It's nice to see the FTC calling them on it (nobody else had) but punishing companies for a mistake before giving them the chance to correct it wouldn't exactly be fair.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not force the banks to bear this cost. They got billions of my tax dollars (I'm a single high income earner with minimal capital investment, I pay the maximum tax of anyone in the US) for free. When I borrow money they make money off me. When they borrow money they get money from me. And it was largely their irresponsible lending practices coupled with large scale outsourcing supported by them that put all these Americans in the poor house. So I'll ask again, why the hell not make them pay to clean up their mess?
/. these days...
Oh, and the only reason they paid any of that back was because we have a Democrat in the Whitehouse and he threatened to regulate the bank owner's bonuses if they didn't. Funny how as soon as conditions were attached to the free money they suddenly had it all to payback. Well, not all of it, billions and billions still went missing; not even counting the trillions that went awol in Iraq.
Christ, the things that get modded up on
you have a _lot_ more social welfare programs than Americans do. Moving is expensive, and rent is going up in America. These are people living paycheck to paycheck. The ones left behind were most likely trying to scrap together the money for a deposit on a new Apartment. There's no gov't programs to help them. They've been largely defunded. They're still there on paper so that folks like yourself can look and see and then blame the people for not being bootstrappy enough though.
I had a rough patch in life (3 family illnesses at once) and I kid you not people told me to go apply for Section 8 so the gov't would pay my mortgage. Section 8 is a program for larger property owners to get subsidies to rent apartment blocks and large groups of houses. Even for the wealthy and well connected it has a multi-year waiting list. But the people telling me that certainly felt better about themselves. They were helping! Plus they didn't need to lift a real finger the help me. You're doing the same thing, more or less. I'll give you props for taking care of your own though. You're right, in Germany I don't think this would happen.
you must live a very, very sheltered existence. Laws don't exist when they're not enforced. These laws are not enforced. It's like all the IT Contractor scams going on right now where you're hired as a Contractor for a full time job critical to the companies day to day ops. They just don't want to pay your health and unemployment benefits. That's illegal, right? I'm here in Arizona and good luck complaining to the labor board: They don't exists. Our right wing legislature just didn't fund them. They're not there. And thanks to a federal law that enforces Arbitration you can't even sue.
All of the protections that you think are there are gone. You're like a guy walking into a mine field with a magic amulet. It's not real, and you better hope you don't step on a mine.
There's plenty of pro-rent control economists. Rent-Seeking is a dirty word to most economists who aren't that asshat Laffer. Supply and demand breaks down faster than you think. A small group of people are buying up all the houses in America and they're in no hurry to build cheap housing that drives down the rents they're charging.
:(...
You're making a fundamental mistake about public housing in America. "Section 8" as it's callled is a subsidy for land lords to rent out property that nobody else will rent (most commonly because of Asbestos in the building materials, which is still legal as long as it's "intact"). If you can figure out how to get American voters to support FDR style public works programs to build housing let me know. When I suggest it to just about anyone I know who votes they blather something about communism, socialism and Nazis and end the conversation there
in America? Corps benefit handsomely from our infrastructure, school systems and workforce subsidies. I'd like to see them paying for some of those benefits, and so far Federally levied taxes are the only thing that works. The States & Cities just drop their pants and give 'em free money because their fighting amongst themselves (or their bought off, it's dirt cheap to buy off State Legislatures here).
they've got the wrong kind of bandwidth, so you get crummy service outside of major cities or inside buildings/garages. That's why they've been pushing wifi calling and it's enabled on their devices. That's what makes AT&T & Sprint so big. Tmobile bought up some spectrum recently so we might see some improvements, hard to say (I don't know enough about spectrum and what else they could use it for).
They'll give you $650 for a brand new iPhone you bought yesterday. Everything else nets you $200 or less. What you really need to watch out for are those lovely "Regulatory Compliance" fees they pretend are taxes. They don't disclose them when you ask them the monthly service fee, and it's usually $5-$10 bucks per line. The best part is people look at them and get made at the gov't for charging a tax when it's the company pocketing the money. Then those folks turn around and demand taxes get cut and their fee goes up while Verizons taxes go down.
and it wasn't so future Internet forum goers could complain about them. There were decades of unemployment following the industrial revolution, and it was a large part of what triggered the first and second World Wars. Post WWII some of the ruling class broke ranks and decided to give the working class a decent living in a few places (parts of Europe and the United States if you weren't black). Those reforms are gradually being rolled back with new systems of oppression put in place to stop the working class from getting out of hand (google "Sesame Credit and Extra Creditz" sometime). So we're going to have all the unemployment without the Chaos of a World War to pull us out of it and make the ruling class think twice about it. Can you say Dark Ages?
making most jobs obsolete. That's something that could happen in the near term. Since almost every country bases it's quality of life on the jobs it hands out that doesn't bode well for me, a member of the working class.
This is just how we do socialism in America. Our ruling class got really scared of communism so they spent most of the 50s, 60s and 70s pounding it into our skulls that socialism == bad (especially while we were children). But there were quite a few that broke ranks (FDR, Eisenhower, etc) and wanted to keep the economy from sinking back into the Pre-WWII world of winner take all and insane inequality. The Military Industrial Complex with all it's waste was the solution. This way wealth gets moved around without the icky after taste of socialism...
at least in the United States. We have a Republic as a means of preventing the lower classes from voting themselves land. There's lots and lots of writing about this dating back to when our constitution was drafted.
Our Gov't mostly exists to keep the 1% in power. They realized they needed a strong central gov't to raise an army and protect their interests, and they needed a strong civilian gov't to go with the Military one so that they wouldn't just get disposed in a coup d'etat. It's really just that simple. This is why mandatory voting never gets any traction.
Here you go. Oh, you wanted to be able to use a modern internet? Well try this then.
Modern browsers are staggeringly complex beasts. Video, Audio, Applications, storage. You name it. Don't ask how well the bear dances, it's impressive that it dances at all.
it's the poor and disadvantaged... We're taking advantage of people who are really vulnerable already. Hell, some of them might know the odds but can't help themselves. Gambling is addictive...
Every state that has one uses it to cut taxes on the rich instead of adding to Education budgets (seriously, there's a John Oliver video over on youtube that explains it). It's addictive gambling that often drains the last few dollars from the poor and worse it gives the lower class a false feeling of hope that discourages them from demanding better living conditions. It encourages the downtrodden to think of luck as a skill you work at and view their failure to win as a personal failure. Lotteries are one of the most vile tools for controlling the working class ever devised. How is it nobody but one guy on youtube ever points this out?
I've ever seen. Private schools do well for two reasons:
1. They're mostly filled with upper class or rich kids who can afford tuition. These kids have private tutors, stay at home moms that drive them to school and make breakfast, clean, violence free living spaces, etc, etc. This is what people are referring to when they use the word "privileged".
2. The few low income kids that are there have behave like angles and keep their grades up or get booted out. Imagine how much better the public school's scores would be if ever time a kid acted up or his GPA dropped below a 3.0 they got permanently expelled. Imagine how much worse the the scores would be at the schools those kids ended up.
Studies show scores have been dropping in American Schools for 50+ years. These are often sited by Regressives (I refuse to call them "Conservatives", they're not, they're policies are Radical Regressions) as a reason to turn back the clock to the 1950s. Those folks conveniently ignore the other half of the study that shows the reason for the drops are that we don't kick lower income kids to the curb anymore. We've cut down on the dog eat dog sink or swim ideals because folks were sinking, and we got tired of watching them gasp their last painful breath while drowning. The Regressives didn't get tired of that, they seem to enjoy it...
a public defender that is. They're not accused of a crime. At any rate the public defenders are so underfunded they're barely useful. By the time a pro-bono charity gets involved a lot of them will have finished their sentence...
It's his corrupt buddies that run the private prison systems. This bug cost those bastards millions. Private prisons are an obviously bad idea that we all look the other way on since we don't wanna pay taxes to house inmates humanly :(...
when you do what the summary suggests: Hire some local folks to feed the requirements to the offshore guys. The rank and file coder that used to make a decent wage is what's going to drop 8%. Those are a lot of middle class jobs going *poof*...
You need 1 software developer to manage a team of programmers and feed them requirements. This is a genuine drop in middle class American jobs due to outsourcing. There will be a small increase in the folks who manage the Indians and give them their marching orders...
they'll train up for that too if the prices get too high. There are already laws in place to bring cheap blue collar labor in from overseas; mostly in corrupt right wing states in the South but their spread.
Go into medicine. It's the last field that still has a Union (the AMA, who's smart enough to not call themselves a Union).
the end of work visas. Public Education to train local talent. Requirements to hire local talent. You use Unions to lobby gov't and organize voting blocks that can stand up to the corps dollars. You also use Unions to get information out there to voting blocks so people know how to vote. Look at the AARP for a good example of a political organization that protects it's members interests. Their the reason the Right Wing hasn't been able to defund Medicare.
It's a "you can go home, but you can't take the ball" approach to politics. If the corps want to leave they can. The fact is they _don't_ want to leave. The want the best of everything. Hell, they just plain want _everything_ for themselves. That's why it's called Winner Take All. America has more than enough wealth. We've been giving it away to the 1% out of some misplaced notion that if e don't give it up the other guy will take it. Stop that.
If there's going to be any hope for the American working class we're gonna need to get over our childish "I can make it on my own" attitudes and bring back organized labor and the power and protection it offers. It's ridiculous to think we as individuals can effectively bargain with mega corps. John Galt is a child's daydream...
this looks more like a mistake than anything else. It's nice to see the FTC calling them on it (nobody else had) but punishing companies for a mistake before giving them the chance to correct it wouldn't exactly be fair.
In the States we don't spend until after the collapse. And even then it's only because we need to put the bridge back up.
be to trigger the DMCA. No matter how trivial it is you just violated the law by bypassing it...
/.? Seriously, it's not even a blog post. There's no content.
Also how slow a news day does it have to be for this to make the front page of