It's just socialism. This is how we do socialism in the United States. We don't have enough work for people to do any more. Too much outsourcing and too much automation. So we either start letting people die in the streets or we start redistributing wealth.
Thing is we spend most of the 50s-90s talking about how Socialism is Evil (tm) . It's heavily engrained in our populace. So we needed a form of Socialism that Americans could stomach. Enter the "Military Industrial Complex". Eisenhower built it up out of fear of another recession and regretted it. It pretty much warps our entire society...
but after 20+ years competing head on with cheaper Indian, Malaysian and Chinese tech workers it's more like BS + on the job + maybe a few years working for free at an internship and your dad knows a guy...
Don't like it? Form a Union and get organized or get another line of work.
Just ask Bandai. Scalpers bought up all the Action Figures for their Gundam Seed TV show in America. At one point a figure with an msrp of $15 was going for $150 on ebay and at the big action figure scalper sites.
Thing is, Gundam is a giant robot show, and the toys are a major part of what draws fandom in and gets buzz. Nobody could get the toys without paying 5x-10x msrp. Heck, I didn't even know Bandai had put the show out until I saw some of the toys at the old KB Toy Store for $3 a piece after it had finished bombing and Bandai dumped the remaining stock.
Oh, and if you're in a band and your show gets scalped you might sell 10000 tickets and only 1000 people show up. Thing is, you were planning to sell the other 9,000 ppl who showed up CDs and T-Shirts.
So yeah, scalping hurts. Lots. It's a much more complicated issue than "Just a secondary Market"
After 30 years of off shoring Unions are weak and ineffective in America. Laws can and will be changed. Paperwork can be automated and digitally stored and regulators can be captured.
The reason you're not seeing this in America is the top 1% won't pay the taxes for the infrastructure development, and they've got all the money. 1%ers don't use the subway...
I have absolutely no power of a large corporation. They're so big I can't boycott them without basically dropping off the grid, in which case I cease to matter anyway. I would need to be a billionaire to have any say in them as an individual.
At least with the Gov't I have a chance, however small. It's happened before. In the 50s, 60s and 70s we saw a massive decline in the power of the aristocracy (fyi, America has an aristocracy, they just don't like to talk about themselves). We saw huge decreases in wealth inequality. Most of this was fueled by Unions along with a bit of the aristocracy turning on itself (Frank Roosevelt). Still, it's _possible_, however unlikely.
And what's the worst that can happend? At the end of the day it doesn't make any difference to me if the jack boot in my neck is a public or private jack boot. Might as well take a chance with Gov't.
more than anything else. Same goes for Arcades. $0.25 cents had a lot more buying power 30 years ago, but then again so did everything else. Arcade operators needed to raise prices to $1 or more a play to be profitable, but very few people can throw that kind of money away for 5 minutes of entertainment. If you're going to hang out at a mall for hours on end you need enough disposable income to do stuff.
I've seen a lot of harebrained theories about what cause the 80's game crash, but fact is it was just a massive recession.
but for the opposite. I slow down when I see I can't make the light because I drive an old car with less than prefect brakes. But then I'm lucky enough to have a job where if I"m 5 minutes late twice a year I don't get fired...
That's only true if you live somewhere that it's easily accessible. There are People in the deep south who don't have running water much less access to the internet to buy those condoms. There are also places where people (usually religious) go out of their way to limit other people's access to birth control. You're probably someone who lives is a pretty liberal part of the country. Spend a few years in the bible belt or parts of the rust belt. They're scary, scary places...
At least if we mean Republican Politicians, which is implied by the context. There's several cases where Republican leadership got caught saying they want to crash the economy so that people will blame the democrats. There's several (mostly on the Tea Party fringes) who believe the democrats policies are so damaging to the country that it'd be better to wreak the economy than to risk those policies.
So yeah, Grandparent's kinda trolling, but compared to what the Repubs are doing it's small potatoes.
if there wasn't so much Automation and off shoring going on. More importantly, those studies look at _total_ # of jobs, not Job quality. The reason there's a shortage of non-immigrant farm labor is that they pay them less than minimum wage and rely on their illegal status to keep them quiet. Also nearly all of the job growth in America is in low paying service sector jobs like fast food and customer service while the middle class manufacturing, tech and office jobs have been going off shore and to H1-Bs
But hey, one of the best things about armchair economics is you can declare anything you don't agree with a fallacy.
Bloomberg is a billionaire. I don't believe for a second he's doing this out of the kindness of his heart. If the guy really gave a flying fark about the poor there's a thousand and one things he could be doing. Maybe this is punishment to the local soda manufacturers? It's just too silly a thing to push when it means going up against companies like Coke & Pepsi, who aren't exactly well known for taking things lying down.
Actually, the solution is better pay and less hours:(. The people I knew who were slamming down 44 oz of soda were doing it to keep going just 1 more hour in their 10 hour shift...
whoops, forgot to finish editing my post:). that was suppose to read "where as people that kill themselves working are idolized", but I'm pretty sure you get the idea:).
I think the difference is we either pity or look down on alcoholics, where as people that kill themselves
And nobody has the goal to be the worlds greatest middle manager. You're goal something else. Buy your kid braces, keep your car running just a little longer, pay for your Grandma's doctor's visits.
And again, I'll ask why we're racing to the bottom? There's a difference between fighting for something you want just trying to survive one more day. A man swimming the English Channel is fighting for something, a man drowning is just a man drowning. It's OK to pull him up for air you know?
And Toqueville was a rich entitled prick. Not the sort I want to base public policy on. But nice quote.
No? You're entire post is based on the idea that Unions are inherently bad. For a capitalist they are. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Marx predicted that capital would flow to where ever labor's cheapest in a constant race to the bottom, but all anyone can remember about him is that a few dictators borrowed one of his books for rhetoric.
Did it ever cross your mind that there is a _reason_ Unions formed? Have you ever heard the phrase "Nasty, brutish and short"? Have you seen pictures of the Mini-Guns used by "private" security employed by mines in the 70s to intimidate workers?
Whatever else you think, you _want_ Unions. You _need_ Unions. Unions are labor organized to seek better and safer working conditions. Nothing more or less. Hell, there's another story on/. here today talking about the death of the 40 hour work week in America. It's a statistical fact that wages have declined and productivity has increased. What in God's name are you planning to do by your little lonesome against multi-billion dollar corporations? Seriously, do you think Toyota is going to keep paying a living wage out of the kindness of their Hearts? It's the sacrifice of the Union man and the competition for those Union Jobs that's why Toyota is paying those wages in the first place. And before you bring it up, no, they don't need you to buy their cars. They have plenty of other buyers, and they really don't need that many. They can just raise the price and sell fewer.
I could go on, and on, and on, but seriously man. You don't know of what you speak. Go work in a meat packing plant for a decade and tell me you don't need Unions.
Calling it "Workaholism" implies we have a choice. Companies are demanding we do more with less. If you don't like it there's not much you can do. The job market sucks, and it's never going to get any better. Off-shoring and abundant work Visas guarantee that. You're given X amount of work to do and Y amount of time and if you don't do X you're fired, so you put in extra hours. Again and again and again. Heck, it's even worse for the Visa holders. They're practically indentured serfs. If they don't put the hours in it's back to where they came from with a black mark to boot. And those are the guys we're competing with for jobs....
Heck, is it just me or can nobody in the American Media do anything except blame the workers? Maybe it's because the capitalists own the media... Heck, I don't know.
Browsers are really, really, really hard to make, and Microsoft, Mozilla and Google all give theirs away for free, insuring anyone who tries to compete also has to do the same. Opera couldn't make any money. They're trying to survive.
And if you think these are bad times for browsers then you have no idea my friend. Not too long ago it was IE or nothing. And what Monoculture? We've got 3 major players all meeting the standards pretty well (4 if you count webkit/safari, which with iOS installs is nothing to sneeze at). Office is a Monoculture. Browsers? Not so much.:)
the real threat to your freedom is an ultra wealthy oligarchy that's been steadily chipping away at your wages for 40 years. More than anything else money is freedom, since if you're financially destitute you'll do what they say when they say. Dictator's don't oppress for the shear giddy joy of it, whatever the sci-fi books you read when in high school/college say. They oppress because they've taken a disproportionate amount of wealth for themselves and oppression and poverty is how you keep it.
I'd like to see us stop blaming a few well meaning bureaucrats and administrators for the horrors wrought by the ultra wealthy. Probably not gonna happen though, what with them controlling the media and all...
Ah, so what you're saying is all I need is about $100k is raw wealth and I'm set? Saying "If you own your house" doesn't really fly in this situation. A lot of these people have already sold their houses paying for medical disasters. Medicare doesn't kick in until you're destitute or 65, and even then there are copays for the Meds (hence the $100-$200 mo). Medicare is _insurance_, not Socialized Medicine:(...
Social Security: Another 24 percent of the budget, or $814 billion, paid for Social Security, which provided monthly retirement benefits averaging $1,294 to 37.9 million retired workers in December 2013. Social Security also provided benefits to 2.9 million spouses and children of retired workers, 6.2 million surviving children and spouses of deceased workers, and 11 million disabled workers and their eligible dependents in December 2013.
I know very few places where $1300/mo is enough to live on when you're over 65 and/or disabled. America doesn't have Nationalized Socialized medicine. Even if you manage to get on one of the State run programs you're laying out $100-$200/mo just for meds (God Bless the Big Pharma). Then there's Rent, food, transportation (to the doctor's appointments that are keeping you alive) etc, etc. I know a few ppl on SS Disability, and they live very, very shitty lives.
So can you tell me, why is it we can get a man on the moon but we can't take care of a few million old people and a few million disabled? Are we really that pathetic as a country that we can't just solve this problem?
because so far the only thing I see trickling down is piss. Seriously. At the risk of being marked troll, can I just ask why we don't lower _all_ regressive taxes and _raise_ progressive taxes? Income tax of 90% makes sense when it's on your income AFTER $1 million/year. It means that if you want to be really, really, sickeningly wealthy you really have to work at it. Or you have to actually _invest_ that money instead of sitting on it and grinding the entire economy to a halt with your greed. The 1% have something like 50% of their assests in CASH. That's cash that's doing nothing in our economy. They're basically ending all human progress in an effort to hang on to their wealth and status. Heck, that's more or less the end game of conservationism.:(
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It's just socialism. This is how we do socialism in the United States. We don't have enough work for people to do any more. Too much outsourcing and too much automation. So we either start letting people die in the streets or we start redistributing wealth.
Thing is we spend most of the 50s-90s talking about how Socialism is Evil (tm) . It's heavily engrained in our populace. So we needed a form of Socialism that Americans could stomach. Enter the "Military Industrial Complex". Eisenhower built it up out of fear of another recession and regretted it. It pretty much warps our entire society...
Because it hangs with any rig less than $400. Put a GTX 660 in this year so I could keep gaming in Win 7 after the forced upgrade from XP.
but after 20+ years competing head on with cheaper Indian, Malaysian and Chinese tech workers it's more like BS + on the job + maybe a few years working for free at an internship and your dad knows a guy...
Don't like it? Form a Union and get organized or get another line of work.
Just ask Bandai. Scalpers bought up all the Action Figures for their Gundam Seed TV show in America. At one point a figure with an msrp of $15 was going for $150 on ebay and at the big action figure scalper sites.
Thing is, Gundam is a giant robot show, and the toys are a major part of what draws fandom in and gets buzz. Nobody could get the toys without paying 5x-10x msrp. Heck, I didn't even know Bandai had put the show out until I saw some of the toys at the old KB Toy Store for $3 a piece after it had finished bombing and Bandai dumped the remaining stock.
Oh, and if you're in a band and your show gets scalped you might sell 10000 tickets and only 1000 people show up. Thing is, you were planning to sell the other 9,000 ppl who showed up CDs and T-Shirts.
So yeah, scalping hurts. Lots. It's a much more complicated issue than "Just a secondary Market"
After 30 years of off shoring Unions are weak and ineffective in America. Laws can and will be changed. Paperwork can be automated and digitally stored and regulators can be captured.
The reason you're not seeing this in America is the top 1% won't pay the taxes for the infrastructure development, and they've got all the money. 1%ers don't use the subway...
I have absolutely no power of a large corporation. They're so big I can't boycott them without basically dropping off the grid, in which case I cease to matter anyway. I would need to be a billionaire to have any say in them as an individual.
At least with the Gov't I have a chance, however small. It's happened before. In the 50s, 60s and 70s we saw a massive decline in the power of the aristocracy (fyi, America has an aristocracy, they just don't like to talk about themselves). We saw huge decreases in wealth inequality. Most of this was fueled by Unions along with a bit of the aristocracy turning on itself (Frank Roosevelt). Still, it's _possible_, however unlikely.
And what's the worst that can happend? At the end of the day it doesn't make any difference to me if the jack boot in my neck is a public or private jack boot. Might as well take a chance with Gov't.
more than anything else. Same goes for Arcades. $0.25 cents had a lot more buying power 30 years ago, but then again so did everything else. Arcade operators needed to raise prices to $1 or more a play to be profitable, but very few people can throw that kind of money away for 5 minutes of entertainment. If you're going to hang out at a mall for hours on end you need enough disposable income to do stuff.
I've seen a lot of harebrained theories about what cause the 80's game crash, but fact is it was just a massive recession.
Impressive, but can you fit a timecube into it?
but for the opposite. I slow down when I see I can't make the light because I drive an old car with less than prefect brakes. But then I'm lucky enough to have a job where if I"m 5 minutes late twice a year I don't get fired...
That's only true if you live somewhere that it's easily accessible. There are People in the deep south who don't have running water much less access to the internet to buy those condoms. There are also places where people (usually religious) go out of their way to limit other people's access to birth control. You're probably someone who lives is a pretty liberal part of the country. Spend a few years in the bible belt or parts of the rust belt. They're scary, scary places...
At least if we mean Republican Politicians, which is implied by the context. There's several cases where Republican leadership got caught saying they want to crash the economy so that people will blame the democrats. There's several (mostly on the Tea Party fringes) who believe the democrats policies are so damaging to the country that it'd be better to wreak the economy than to risk those policies.
So yeah, Grandparent's kinda trolling, but compared to what the Repubs are doing it's small potatoes.
if there wasn't so much Automation and off shoring going on. More importantly, those studies look at _total_ # of jobs, not Job quality. The reason there's a shortage of non-immigrant farm labor is that they pay them less than minimum wage and rely on their illegal status to keep them quiet. Also nearly all of the job growth in America is in low paying service sector jobs like fast food and customer service while the middle class manufacturing, tech and office jobs have been going off shore and to H1-Bs
But hey, one of the best things about armchair economics is you can declare anything you don't agree with a fallacy.
Bloomberg is a billionaire. I don't believe for a second he's doing this out of the kindness of his heart. If the guy really gave a flying fark about the poor there's a thousand and one things he could be doing. Maybe this is punishment to the local soda manufacturers? It's just too silly a thing to push when it means going up against companies like Coke & Pepsi, who aren't exactly well known for taking things lying down.
Actually, the solution is better pay and less hours :(. The people I knew who were slamming down 44 oz of soda were doing it to keep going just 1 more hour in their 10 hour shift...
When from the tone of the post it's pretty obvious I meant
whoops, forgot to finish editing my post :). that was suppose to read "where as people that kill themselves working are idolized", but I'm pretty sure you get the idea :).
I think the difference is we either pity or look down on alcoholics, where as people that kill themselves
And nobody has the goal to be the worlds greatest middle manager. You're goal something else. Buy your kid braces, keep your car running just a little longer, pay for your Grandma's doctor's visits.
And again, I'll ask why we're racing to the bottom? There's a difference between fighting for something you want just trying to survive one more day. A man swimming the English Channel is fighting for something, a man drowning is just a man drowning. It's OK to pull him up for air you know?
And Toqueville was a rich entitled prick. Not the sort I want to base public policy on. But nice quote.
No? You're entire post is based on the idea that Unions are inherently bad. For a capitalist they are. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Marx predicted that capital would flow to where ever labor's cheapest in a constant race to the bottom, but all anyone can remember about him is that a few dictators borrowed one of his books for rhetoric.
/. here today talking about the death of the 40 hour work week in America. It's a statistical fact that wages have declined and productivity has increased. What in God's name are you planning to do by your little lonesome against multi-billion dollar corporations? Seriously, do you think Toyota is going to keep paying a living wage out of the kindness of their Hearts? It's the sacrifice of the Union man and the competition for those Union Jobs that's why Toyota is paying those wages in the first place. And before you bring it up, no, they don't need you to buy their cars. They have plenty of other buyers, and they really don't need that many. They can just raise the price and sell fewer.
Did it ever cross your mind that there is a _reason_ Unions formed? Have you ever heard the phrase "Nasty, brutish and short"? Have you seen pictures of the Mini-Guns used by "private" security employed by mines in the 70s to intimidate workers?
Whatever else you think, you _want_ Unions. You _need_ Unions. Unions are labor organized to seek better and safer working conditions. Nothing more or less. Hell, there's another story on
I could go on, and on, and on, but seriously man. You don't know of what you speak. Go work in a meat packing plant for a decade and tell me you don't need Unions.
Calling it "Workaholism" implies we have a choice. Companies are demanding we do more with less. If you don't like it there's not much you can do. The job market sucks, and it's never going to get any better. Off-shoring and abundant work Visas guarantee that. You're given X amount of work to do and Y amount of time and if you don't do X you're fired, so you put in extra hours. Again and again and again. Heck, it's even worse for the Visa holders. They're practically indentured serfs. If they don't put the hours in it's back to where they came from with a black mark to boot. And those are the guys we're competing with for jobs....
Heck, is it just me or can nobody in the American Media do anything except blame the workers? Maybe it's because the capitalists own the media... Heck, I don't know.
Browsers are really, really, really hard to make, and Microsoft, Mozilla and Google all give theirs away for free, insuring anyone who tries to compete also has to do the same. Opera couldn't make any money. They're trying to survive.
:)
And if you think these are bad times for browsers then you have no idea my friend. Not too long ago it was IE or nothing. And what Monoculture? We've got 3 major players all meeting the standards pretty well (4 if you count webkit/safari, which with iOS installs is nothing to sneeze at). Office is a Monoculture. Browsers? Not so much.
the real threat to your freedom is an ultra wealthy oligarchy that's been steadily chipping away at your wages for 40 years. More than anything else money is freedom, since if you're financially destitute you'll do what they say when they say. Dictator's don't oppress for the shear giddy joy of it, whatever the sci-fi books you read when in high school/college say. They oppress because they've taken a disproportionate amount of wealth for themselves and oppression and poverty is how you keep it.
I'd like to see us stop blaming a few well meaning bureaucrats and administrators for the horrors wrought by the ultra wealthy. Probably not gonna happen though, what with them controlling the media and all...
Ah, so what you're saying is all I need is about $100k is raw wealth and I'm set? Saying "If you own your house" doesn't really fly in this situation. A lot of these people have already sold their houses paying for medical disasters. Medicare doesn't kick in until you're destitute or 65, and even then there are copays for the Meds (hence the $100-$200 mo). Medicare is _insurance_, not Socialized Medicine :(...
from http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=1258
Social Security: Another 24 percent of the budget, or $814 billion, paid for Social Security, which provided monthly retirement benefits averaging $1,294 to 37.9 million retired workers in December 2013. Social Security also provided benefits to 2.9 million spouses and children of retired workers, 6.2 million surviving children and spouses of deceased workers, and 11 million disabled workers and their eligible dependents in December 2013.
I know very few places where $1300/mo is enough to live on when you're over 65 and/or disabled. America doesn't have Nationalized Socialized medicine. Even if you manage to get on one of the State run programs you're laying out $100-$200/mo just for meds (God Bless the Big Pharma). Then there's Rent, food, transportation (to the doctor's appointments that are keeping you alive) etc, etc. I know a few ppl on SS Disability, and they live very, very shitty lives.
So can you tell me, why is it we can get a man on the moon but we can't take care of a few million old people and a few million disabled? Are we really that pathetic as a country that we can't just solve this problem?
because so far the only thing I see trickling down is piss. Seriously. At the risk of being marked troll, can I just ask why we don't lower _all_ regressive taxes and _raise_ progressive taxes? Income tax of 90% makes sense when it's on your income AFTER $1 million/year. It means that if you want to be really, really, sickeningly wealthy you really have to work at it. Or you have to actually _invest_ that money instead of sitting on it and grinding the entire economy to a halt with your greed. The 1% have something like 50% of their assests in CASH. That's cash that's doing nothing in our economy. They're basically ending all human progress in an effort to hang on to their wealth and status. Heck, that's more or less the end game of conservationism. :(
not the riders. The drivers are usually taking it as a second (or third) job to make ends meet.