God I'm sick of folks trying to fit the supply/demand crap they learned in High School into the real world. The problem is _real_ simple:
1. Real Wages have been falling for 40 years, to the point where wages for many jobs are what they were 20 years ago after 20 years of inflation. Outsourcing + lack of protectionism and free trade nonsense did this.
2. Capital has concentrated into the hands of a lucky few (the "1%" as they're called) and they have no incentive to build more houses when they're making obscene profits off the existing supply.
Said it before, say it again: Globalism _breaks_ capitalism. All your left with is oligarchy and kleptocracy.
there's other ways this can play out. We've been putting all our eggs in one basket and letting the top 1% have almost all the capital. There's very few people with the money to build a sizable number of homes. Those people are part of the investor class, and they're going to put their money where it will make money.
So if you figured out that flooding the market with houses will devalue the existing properties (which they own, since they own damn near everything) what makes you think they haven't? And if that's the case what's to say they won't just skip the whole "Supply" part of "Supply and Demand"? What do we do when 1% of the population has all the capital and they decide to limit supply to increase the value of that capital? In the past it was violent revolution, but with today's military and police that's not really an option.
Now would be a good time to start doing something about income inequality and wealth concentration. Either that or get used to the idea of a new "Dark Ages"...
And did you read the grandparent? The supply is being constricted by billionaire fuckholes buying up all the existing properties instead of building new ones because it's _way_ more profitable to own a limited supply than to make more. Supply & Demand breaks down when you get the kinds of crazy rich we have here in America because they start actively molding the markets.
but the H1-Bs have a pretty big impact here. They're guaranteed renters. There's no way to move into a house when you can't claim residency in the country.
it's all well and good to say don't buy a cell phone but a) it puts you at a social disadvantage and b) it only really saves about $1200 year for a family of 3, but rent on a crummy 3 bedroom apartment is damn near that. So after 10 years I can't even pay a years worth of rent...
Millennials have already cut the cord. They have Internet, but they needed that to get their jobs. In America where these abuses happen most you have to own a car or again, no job. Sure, you might get by for a year or two without one, but pretty soon you're gonna have to leave your job for a better one. That's how you move up now.
See, wages in this country have been declining for everyone but the top 1% for 40 years. It's gotten to the point where a job pays the same now as it did in 1995 after 20 years of inflation. Unless you won the lottery in life (rich parent, good genetics that make math a cinch, etc) you're not gonna save shit. It's all the rank and file can do to keep their heads above water.
Still, it does feel good to keep telling ourselves that if we just save a little money it'll all work out. It beats the hell out of facing how fuck we really, really are...
with the added benefit that claims work can be done completely overseas where ever labor's the cheapest. Can we _please_ have some protectionist policies back?
1. He drunk the bottle, not her, to show her it was nonsense.
2. (More importantly) She thought she was buying real medicine. Not sure what country the parent's in, but in America $250 isn't out of the ordinary for a drug not covered by your insurance, so the high price wouldn't necessarily be a tip off. Assuming I'm not just putting words in the parent's mouth than that's the scary part for me: that Homeopathy is indistinguishable from clinically tested medicine to an intelligent woman.
The last time Microsoft had a major Xbox Live outage due to high demand they just spun up a bunch of VMs and everything was fine 4 hours later. You keep them idling so that when you need 'em they're ready on a moments notice. Also if you're not Microsoft or Oracle this means you're not paying the licensing costs associated with the software being in production non stop.
I don't know, a cup of tea _and_ a biscuit when they wake their Chinese employees up at 3 in the morning for an 18 hour shift to accommodate another one of Steve Job's last minute whims? Seems pretty generous by today's standards.
of crap they were going to do anyway that they're blaming on the evil govmint and their nasty nasty net neutrality. I've long since noticed businesses doing this; blaming every evil thing they do on gov't regulations because if only they'd just leave us alone to innovate we'd play nice. Didn't happen in the robber baron era and it's not gonna happen in my life.
video on my phone can be 240p and it looks fine. 480p looks like high def to me (I'm old, sue me). Compressed 480p video with 128kbps audio is generally 5 megabytes a minute. What I"m getting at is that these networks are looking like they'll have the capacity to do away with caps. Now if we can just get enough people to believe that and demand their government do something about that. Not sure about Europe but here in America there's so much anti-gov't sentiment that might never happen:(.
It won't be discredited anymore than any of the other miracles of religion are. For this kind of stuff to be discredited you need journalists with cameras and travel options.
is the thought that a large organization (public schools) could potentially have finger prints for every single person in the country with the exception of a few rich kids who go to private schools where room and board are included in the crazy, crazy fees.
Couldn't we just stop being petty bastards and just give out free food to kids at school? Food is not expensive in America. All this bitching about budgetary constraints is just another example of the middle class and poor at each other's throats...
Square finally gave into the fanboys for the FF7 remake? They've resisted it for years because they didn't think they could make money at it, and with how pricy modern graphics are I tend to agree. Maybe Sony backed it as a marketing stunt...
If a person on minimum wage gets fined it's almost always a speeding ticket, which is usually $300 minimum ( and $500 if it's excessive, like what AT&T was fined for).
I think the grandparents numbers are a bit off. Min wage is $7.25 hr. About 15% of that goes to taxes that no poor person can get out of (even accounting for earned income credits which is really meant to offset other taxes the poor pay). It's about $6.16/hr take home (profit) or about $37 bucks.
So if we were to fine AT&T the way we fine the poor it would be about $1.3 billion, give or take.
But OTOH the poor person didn't make any profit from speeding (unless you want to count getting to their shitty job as "profit", but that's just being a vindictive jerk if you're gonna do that). The reason us libtardos want to find Corps way, way more than the pleabs is so that it _hurts_. You have to fine them more money than they made doing the illegal activity or they're going to do it again. They have to, since it's profitable and corporations have a legal requirement to do whatever's most profitable for the shareholders (they really do, look it up).
See, that $500 bucks _hurts_ the guy at McDonalds. It might even be what turns him into a hobo when he can't pay his rent. At the very least he's not going to do _anything_ except work and eat (and not much of that) for the next 6 months to a year. He'll remember the pain of losing that money and think twice about speeding. Let's give AT&T that feeling. Then maybe we'll stop seeing crap like this happen.
The real world is complex, often too complex to define without introducing tonnes of loopholes. So instead of making an unenforceable law that mega corps run roughshod over you set broad standards defined by legal presidence. If your goal is a just society with a high quality of life it's great. If your after slaves in everything but name? Not so much.
there's a world of difference between the very, very violent crime you just described and the relatively non-violent muggings and pickpocketings that go on. Crooks know this. They know if they ever do anything really out there to someone with money that the cops come down on them like a ton of bricks. Sure, they might get away, but all their friends and family will suffer during the police beat down.
It's probably not the best way to control crime and prevent social unrest, but it's how we do things here in America. In the rest of the world I don't know if they do the same, but I'm pretty sure they do in the UK at least.
I see I touched a nerve though, didn't I? Feel free to go on ignoring the advantages of wealth and the disadvantages of poverty. The rest of us living in the real world will read this comic and keep trying to do something about poverty besides make ourselves feel better about ignoring it.
She got way more than she paid in. Everybody except the rich does. That's because one of the dirty little secrets of social security and Medicare is that they're socialist programs. The whole thing about her "paying" for it b was cooked up to get libertarian types like her to accept the v help the desperately needed. If you'd had a decent history prof in college you'd know this
Obesity is most common with the working poor. It's not too surprising. Cheap junk food and TV is about the only pleasure they have left what with smoking being a no-no
From what I've read it's dead simply because we're hitting the limits of physics. You just can't make things smaller, so there's a practical limit to how small a transistor can be (Moore's Law says that you get twice as many transistors per square inch every year).
That said our processors have been so focused on smaller and smaller transistors and getting so much performance out of it that we've ignored tons of other optimizations. Right now the big thing is more power per watt so that datacenters can run cheaper and our phones and watches can run longer.
I'm in the payment industry and it pretty well works. There's more to it (metrics and whatnot that score up or down your transactions) but location is incredibly useful. Give it 10, 15 years and these sorts of metrics + big data parsing will pretty much eliminate point of sale fraud. Right now the only thing holding it back is processor cycles are still kinda pricy per watt in a data center, but that's changing more and more. Sure, Moore's law is done but we're nowhere's near done with reducing the energy footprint. Plus before long cell phones will replace your credit card, and when your "credit card" is a no longer a dumb piece of plastic but basically a super computer with tons advanced sensors in your pocket it opens up a whole new world.
I know it's popular to say the hackers and crackers will always come out ahead, but really they won't. In 10-15 years the only fraud left will be the large scale investor kind and the "legal" kind where you buy up a company Bain Capital style and suck the life out of it. Small scale credit card fraud is a dying breed.
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God I'm sick of folks trying to fit the supply/demand crap they learned in High School into the real world. The problem is _real_ simple:
1. Real Wages have been falling for 40 years, to the point where wages for many jobs are what they were 20 years ago after 20 years of inflation. Outsourcing + lack of protectionism and free trade nonsense did this.
2. Capital has concentrated into the hands of a lucky few (the "1%" as they're called) and they have no incentive to build more houses when they're making obscene profits off the existing supply.
Said it before, say it again: Globalism _breaks_ capitalism. All your left with is oligarchy and kleptocracy.
there's other ways this can play out. We've been putting all our eggs in one basket and letting the top 1% have almost all the capital. There's very few people with the money to build a sizable number of homes. Those people are part of the investor class, and they're going to put their money where it will make money.
So if you figured out that flooding the market with houses will devalue the existing properties (which they own, since they own damn near everything) what makes you think they haven't? And if that's the case what's to say they won't just skip the whole "Supply" part of "Supply and Demand"? What do we do when 1% of the population has all the capital and they decide to limit supply to increase the value of that capital? In the past it was violent revolution, but with today's military and police that's not really an option.
Now would be a good time to start doing something about income inequality and wealth concentration. Either that or get used to the idea of a new "Dark Ages"...
Can't wait to go see 'em.
And did you read the grandparent? The supply is being constricted by billionaire fuckholes buying up all the existing properties instead of building new ones because it's _way_ more profitable to own a limited supply than to make more. Supply & Demand breaks down when you get the kinds of crazy rich we have here in America because they start actively molding the markets.
but the H1-Bs have a pretty big impact here. They're guaranteed renters. There's no way to move into a house when you can't claim residency in the country.
it's all well and good to say don't buy a cell phone but a) it puts you at a social disadvantage and b) it only really saves about $1200 year for a family of 3, but rent on a crummy 3 bedroom apartment is damn near that. So after 10 years I can't even pay a years worth of rent...
Millennials have already cut the cord. They have Internet, but they needed that to get their jobs. In America where these abuses happen most you have to own a car or again, no job. Sure, you might get by for a year or two without one, but pretty soon you're gonna have to leave your job for a better one. That's how you move up now.
See, wages in this country have been declining for everyone but the top 1% for 40 years. It's gotten to the point where a job pays the same now as it did in 1995 after 20 years of inflation. Unless you won the lottery in life (rich parent, good genetics that make math a cinch, etc) you're not gonna save shit. It's all the rank and file can do to keep their heads above water.
Still, it does feel good to keep telling ourselves that if we just save a little money it'll all work out. It beats the hell out of facing how fuck we really, really are...
with the added benefit that claims work can be done completely overseas where ever labor's the cheapest. Can we _please_ have some protectionist policies back?
was two things:
1. He drunk the bottle, not her, to show her it was nonsense.
2. (More importantly) She thought she was buying real medicine. Not sure what country the parent's in, but in America $250 isn't out of the ordinary for a drug not covered by your insurance, so the high price wouldn't necessarily be a tip off. Assuming I'm not just putting words in the parent's mouth than that's the scary part for me: that Homeopathy is indistinguishable from clinically tested medicine to an intelligent woman.
The last time Microsoft had a major Xbox Live outage due to high demand they just spun up a bunch of VMs and everything was fine 4 hours later. You keep them idling so that when you need 'em they're ready on a moments notice. Also if you're not Microsoft or Oracle this means you're not paying the licensing costs associated with the software being in production non stop.
I don't know, a cup of tea _and_ a biscuit when they wake their Chinese employees up at 3 in the morning for an 18 hour shift to accommodate another one of Steve Job's last minute whims? Seems pretty generous by today's standards.
The success of Net Neutrality certainly had a role in making the bureaucrats bold enough to fine AT&T.
of crap they were going to do anyway that they're blaming on the evil govmint and their nasty nasty net neutrality. I've long since noticed businesses doing this; blaming every evil thing they do on gov't regulations because if only they'd just leave us alone to innovate we'd play nice. Didn't happen in the robber baron era and it's not gonna happen in my life.
video on my phone can be 240p and it looks fine. 480p looks like high def to me (I'm old, sue me). Compressed 480p video with 128kbps audio is generally 5 megabytes a minute. What I"m getting at is that these networks are looking like they'll have the capacity to do away with caps. Now if we can just get enough people to believe that and demand their government do something about that. Not sure about Europe but here in America there's so much anti-gov't sentiment that might never happen :(.
It won't be discredited anymore than any of the other miracles of religion are. For this kind of stuff to be discredited you need journalists with cameras and travel options.
is the thought that a large organization (public schools) could potentially have finger prints for every single person in the country with the exception of a few rich kids who go to private schools where room and board are included in the crazy, crazy fees.
Couldn't we just stop being petty bastards and just give out free food to kids at school? Food is not expensive in America. All this bitching about budgetary constraints is just another example of the middle class and poor at each other's throats...
Square finally gave into the fanboys for the FF7 remake? They've resisted it for years because they didn't think they could make money at it, and with how pricy modern graphics are I tend to agree. Maybe Sony backed it as a marketing stunt...
If a person on minimum wage gets fined it's almost always a speeding ticket, which is usually $300 minimum ( and $500 if it's excessive, like what AT&T was fined for).
I think the grandparents numbers are a bit off. Min wage is $7.25 hr. About 15% of that goes to taxes that no poor person can get out of (even accounting for earned income credits which is really meant to offset other taxes the poor pay). It's about $6.16/hr take home (profit) or about $37 bucks.
So if we were to fine AT&T the way we fine the poor it would be about $1.3 billion, give or take.
But OTOH the poor person didn't make any profit from speeding (unless you want to count getting to their shitty job as "profit", but that's just being a vindictive jerk if you're gonna do that). The reason us libtardos want to find Corps way, way more than the pleabs is so that it _hurts_. You have to fine them more money than they made doing the illegal activity or they're going to do it again. They have to, since it's profitable and corporations have a legal requirement to do whatever's most profitable for the shareholders (they really do, look it up).
See, that $500 bucks _hurts_ the guy at McDonalds. It might even be what turns him into a hobo when he can't pay his rent. At the very least he's not going to do _anything_ except work and eat (and not much of that) for the next 6 months to a year. He'll remember the pain of losing that money and think twice about speeding. Let's give AT&T that feeling. Then maybe we'll stop seeing crap like this happen.
The real world is complex, often too complex to define without introducing tonnes of loopholes. So instead of making an unenforceable law that mega corps run roughshod over you set broad standards defined by legal presidence. If your goal is a just society with a high quality of life it's great. If your after slaves in everything but name? Not so much.
there's a world of difference between the very, very violent crime you just described and the relatively non-violent muggings and pickpocketings that go on. Crooks know this. They know if they ever do anything really out there to someone with money that the cops come down on them like a ton of bricks. Sure, they might get away, but all their friends and family will suffer during the police beat down.
It's probably not the best way to control crime and prevent social unrest, but it's how we do things here in America. In the rest of the world I don't know if they do the same, but I'm pretty sure they do in the UK at least.
I see I touched a nerve though, didn't I? Feel free to go on ignoring the advantages of wealth and the disadvantages of poverty. The rest of us living in the real world will read this comic and keep trying to do something about poverty besides make ourselves feel better about ignoring it.
She got way more than she paid in. Everybody except the rich does. That's because one of the dirty little secrets of social security and Medicare is that they're socialist programs. The whole thing about her "paying" for it b was cooked up to get libertarian types like her to accept the v help the desperately needed. If you'd had a decent history prof in college you'd know this
Obesity is most common with the working poor. It's not too surprising. Cheap junk food and TV is about the only pleasure they have left what with smoking being a no-no
not riot, but we're splitting hairs at that point.
From what I've read it's dead simply because we're hitting the limits of physics. You just can't make things smaller, so there's a practical limit to how small a transistor can be (Moore's Law says that you get twice as many transistors per square inch every year).
That said our processors have been so focused on smaller and smaller transistors and getting so much performance out of it that we've ignored tons of other optimizations. Right now the big thing is more power per watt so that datacenters can run cheaper and our phones and watches can run longer.
I'm in the payment industry and it pretty well works. There's more to it (metrics and whatnot that score up or down your transactions) but location is incredibly useful. Give it 10, 15 years and these sorts of metrics + big data parsing will pretty much eliminate point of sale fraud. Right now the only thing holding it back is processor cycles are still kinda pricy per watt in a data center, but that's changing more and more. Sure, Moore's law is done but we're nowhere's near done with reducing the energy footprint. Plus before long cell phones will replace your credit card, and when your "credit card" is a no longer a dumb piece of plastic but basically a super computer with tons advanced sensors in your pocket it opens up a whole new world.
I know it's popular to say the hackers and crackers will always come out ahead, but really they won't. In 10-15 years the only fraud left will be the large scale investor kind and the "legal" kind where you buy up a company Bain Capital style and suck the life out of it. Small scale credit card fraud is a dying breed.
it's just much easier to keep tabs on your supplier (and ship product back for repairs) when they're not across an ocean.