And the Cable companies track on a per person / per neighborhood basis whether you do or not. I was paying $75/mo just for internet at one point because there was no DSL in my neighborhood. My buddy got the same service for $55/mo, but he could jump ship to DSL because his house was newer. When I called to "cancel" they just called my bluff ala South Park
I'm not sure what's going to happen when all that money exits the US Economy. It's kinda scary actually. There's an overpowering sentiment in America that if you didn't do something unpleasant to get money you didn't earn it. There's also a _lot_ of racism floating around (Welfare Queen == "Black Person", it's called Dog Whistling...).
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you'll never get enough votes behind it...
but I expect it to be turned into tax cuts for the top 1%... We're not spending on infrastructure now. Getting us to start would take a large scale expansion of the federal gov't, just the sort that's politically unpopular right now. There's not enough profit in it to bring private industry to the table. I think the term is "idle capacity". The US economy is sorta winding down. There's only so much money you can make, and if you're already rich it pays to sit on your wealth and use it to broker power deals:(.
hands down, they won. They got absolutely everything they wanted. There was absolutely no material action taken against them whatsoever. This is especially bad when there were so many smoking guns, like the old "It's not done until Lotus 123 won't run" emails or the stuff they did to Beos. It doesn't help that the "Punishment" for killing Sun Java was giving their software to schools, something they'd been trying to do for decades. What kind of company gets a cherished reward as punishment?
Plus If you're into computers then you're frustrated because Microsoft tech has always been just barely good enough. If you remember the early days stuff like Novel and Wordperfect, the aforementioned Beos and even some of the Win 3.1 competitors were far superior to Microsoft's offerings, but backdoor deals killed a lot of that tech. Their "good enough" approach has held back a lot of real enhancements to computing:(.
So yeah, there's a lot of ill will floating around...
there's a lot of studies that show that once people develop a negative self image that they tend to take actions that reinforce that self image, often without realizing their doing it. i.e. if a person thinks they're dumb they become unable to do anything smart. This is where the "Precious Little Snowflake" movement came from. You praise kids even if they're not doing very well because if you don't they don't just get discouraged, they quickly come to believe that success is impossible and subconsciously sabotage themselves.
American Puritanicalism runs counter to this. The idea there is that adversity breeds character. I'm inclined to disagree with this. What I mostly see is adversity wears people down. The problem is that people who've been crushed at best fade away quietly and at worst end up in prison. Either way they're marginalized. The few that survive and prosper are much more visible. The phenomenon's called survival bias.
Real Freedom is economic security. That's why the 1% have been relentlessly attacking your economic security for 30 years. Declining wages, relentless attacks on Unions, starve the beast politics and boom/busts where they buy up property on the cheap because they're the only ones with any money left after the bust. They're all tools to make you poor so you'll do what they say.
60 hours a week @ $9/hr + $3k/yr in gov't benefits (being very generous here) = ~$31k/yr.
Car/Gas/Insurance (required by most jobs): $200/mo
A (cheap) 2 bedroom apt: $900/mo
Utilities (no longer included, thanks 2008 housing collapse:( ) : $200/mo
Food / Toiletries (3 ppl): $600/mo (eating very poorly)
Health Care (with a kid): $400/mo
Communications (2x Cheap cell phones) $60/mo
It could work. I've left out two big thing though:
1. Low wage jobs have inconsistent hours.
2. Any emergency (car wreak, and the other guy drove off) and you're basically boned.
I think I heard some economist call it a "Fragile Existence"
Until Apple burst on the scene Carriers locked their platforms down, charged insane amounts of money for dev kits ($20k+) and were generally jerks to their customers. They had little or no desire to improve since they were making lots of money selling slightly better handsets and super high prices. Google does a good job reigning that in. The carriers aren't powerless in this equation either you know. I like that they're all at each other's throats:P.
What do we do with all the people though?
on
Star Trek Economics
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· Score: 1
I haven't heard a good answer for that. Our entire society is built around work. You work, you get paid. The more people value your work ( regardless of it's objective value) the more you get paid. It's easy to sell the Narrative that it's morally wrong to give someone something for nothing. It's popular, and drives a substantial amount of American Politics at least. Nobody likes the idea of paying somebody to sit around and do nothing. They want that for themselves.
Also, if everybody is rich than nobody is. "Rich" means having more wealth than everyone else. If you're wealthy your status and power are based on your ability to control people's access to food, shelter, transportation, etc. It feels good to have people waiting on you hand on foot. You can't get that unless you have something (money) to give them in return.
and it's become a valid question. Employees have fewer rights and less power than 20 years ago. A lot. Social mores are changing and questions like this are the inevitable conclusion when you take the narrative of "Personal Responsibility" to it's (il)logical conclusion:(.
Just about every major construction project I've ever seen has run over budget. All Contractors under bid on big projects because a) It's the only way to get in and b) you know that 9 months into a project nobody's gonna wanna switch horses in the middle of the thing.
The rich & powerful are going to use gov't whether you like it or not. If there is no gov't they'll use their wealth to create institutions that might as well be. I've yet to hear a convincing argument otherwise.
So if they're going to use the tool that is gov't, I don't see any reason why I shouldn't. The worst that'll happen is the jack boot in my neck is a public one instead of a private. And at least with a strong central gov't I can vote against Jack Boots...
Maybe you're from France or something, but in America we don't have anything that even remotely resembles a Left Wing party. There's a few pundits who're left wing on _social_ issues, but I can count the number of economic liberals that show up in public discourse on one hand (Robert Reich, Liz Warren, Rachel Maddow and that old guy who plays her second fiddle).
Heck, when Liz Warren suggested reinstating Glass-Seagal to prevent another crash like in 2008 the question wasn't if it was right or wrong, but why she was even bothering having a discussion on something when it's got zero chance of happening...
I thought the thing people were worried about was spills. Those pipelines are long and not always well monitored.
From an economic standpoint it's basically a pipe from Canada to China. If you're an Oilman that's great, because you can sell you're oil to a new market for big money. If you're anyone else in America or Canada... not so much, since you've just started competing with the Chinese to buy that oil...
unless the platform maker let you write in C/C++ . If the platform vendor wants to lock things down that much then you're pretty much done.
If you're libraries have ports then you're in a bit better shape. The library does all the heavy lifting, and you have a skeleton of function calls, if statements and for loops to control logic. Most of the big libraries like Poco/QT see ports to everything that can take 'em. But again, if a platform vendor wants to lock it down to the point where everything's JavaScript then you're only option is wheel reinventing or ignoring the platform...
I find the solution to that is lots of well organized libraries. I wrote an mp3 tagger and it compiles on Windows, OSX and Linux because I use Poco and QT for everything instead of writing it myself.
I do give up some of the whizz-bang features of the language for the sake of keeping it simple, but my code base is the same on all 3 platforms.
I've had to use a lot of different code/languages for my little Firefox Plugin and it's not that hard to keep up with. For the most part I can find libraries (I use Poco and QT) that do all the heavy lifting when I'm in C/C++. For my site a little jquery goes a long way.
For the most part there's only minor syntax differences in modern languages anyway. It's all arrays, hashs/dictionaries iterators and if statements with a bit of gui programming.
Heck, even the gui programming follows the same basic paradigm. Again, wrote a few toy Android apps and found I was using Java to do the same stuff I do with HTML/JavaScript. e.g. Get a reference to a gui element then call methods to get/set it's state and attach a callback to it.
What I'm finding is that until you're writing math heavy programs everything is more or less the same:P
Slashdot Mirror
And the Cable companies track on a per person / per neighborhood basis whether you do or not. I was paying $75/mo just for internet at one point because there was no DSL in my neighborhood. My buddy got the same service for $55/mo, but he could jump ship to DSL because his house was newer. When I called to "cancel" they just called my bluff ala South Park
Big Data is real and they use it to screw us.
This guy's got it running on a dead badger.
The credit card companies would have long since started flagging Internet game companies as such high risk that they'd be out of business.
IT companies are tired of paying $100k/yr for programmers. They're trying to flood the market. Getting women into Programmer is just one part of this.
I'm not sure what's going to happen when all that money exits the US Economy. It's kinda scary actually. There's an overpowering sentiment in America that if you didn't do something unpleasant to get money you didn't earn it. There's also a _lot_ of racism floating around (Welfare Queen == "Black Person", it's called Dog Whistling...).
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you'll never get enough votes behind it...
but I expect it to be turned into tax cuts for the top 1%... We're not spending on infrastructure now. Getting us to start would take a large scale expansion of the federal gov't, just the sort that's politically unpopular right now. There's not enough profit in it to bring private industry to the table. I think the term is "idle capacity". The US economy is sorta winding down. There's only so much money you can make, and if you're already rich it pays to sit on your wealth and use it to broker power deals :(.
hands down, they won. They got absolutely everything they wanted. There was absolutely no material action taken against them whatsoever. This is especially bad when there were so many smoking guns, like the old "It's not done until Lotus 123 won't run" emails or the stuff they did to Beos. It doesn't help that the "Punishment" for killing Sun Java was giving their software to schools, something they'd been trying to do for decades. What kind of company gets a cherished reward as punishment?
:(.
Plus If you're into computers then you're frustrated because Microsoft tech has always been just barely good enough. If you remember the early days stuff like Novel and Wordperfect, the aforementioned Beos and even some of the Win 3.1 competitors were far superior to Microsoft's offerings, but backdoor deals killed a lot of that tech. Their "good enough" approach has held back a lot of real enhancements to computing
So yeah, there's a lot of ill will floating around...
Yep, I do.
there's a lot of studies that show that once people develop a negative self image that they tend to take actions that reinforce that self image, often without realizing their doing it. i.e. if a person thinks they're dumb they become unable to do anything smart. This is where the "Precious Little Snowflake" movement came from. You praise kids even if they're not doing very well because if you don't they don't just get discouraged, they quickly come to believe that success is impossible and subconsciously sabotage themselves.
American Puritanicalism runs counter to this. The idea there is that adversity breeds character. I'm inclined to disagree with this. What I mostly see is adversity wears people down. The problem is that people who've been crushed at best fade away quietly and at worst end up in prison. Either way they're marginalized. The few that survive and prosper are much more visible. The phenomenon's called survival bias.
Real Freedom is economic security. That's why the 1% have been relentlessly attacking your economic security for 30 years. Declining wages, relentless attacks on Unions, starve the beast politics and boom/busts where they buy up property on the cheap because they're the only ones with any money left after the bust. They're all tools to make you poor so you'll do what they say.
Here, let This guy explain it. He's much better than I am.
just don't drink the water while you're doing it.
Is there anything Stackoverflow can't do?
60 hours a week @ $9/hr + $3k/yr in gov't benefits (being very generous here) = ~$31k/yr. Car/Gas/Insurance (required by most jobs): $200/mo A (cheap) 2 bedroom apt: $900/mo Utilities (no longer included, thanks 2008 housing collapse :( ) : $200/mo
Food / Toiletries (3 ppl): $600/mo (eating very poorly)
Health Care (with a kid): $400/mo
Communications (2x Cheap cell phones) $60/mo
It could work. I've left out two big thing though:
1. Low wage jobs have inconsistent hours.
2. Any emergency (car wreak, and the other guy drove off) and you're basically boned.
I think I heard some economist call it a "Fragile Existence"
Until Apple burst on the scene Carriers locked their platforms down, charged insane amounts of money for dev kits ($20k+) and were generally jerks to their customers. They had little or no desire to improve since they were making lots of money selling slightly better handsets and super high prices. Google does a good job reigning that in. The carriers aren't powerless in this equation either you know. I like that they're all at each other's throats :P.
I haven't heard a good answer for that. Our entire society is built around work. You work, you get paid. The more people value your work ( regardless of it's objective value) the more you get paid. It's easy to sell the Narrative that it's morally wrong to give someone something for nothing. It's popular, and drives a substantial amount of American Politics at least. Nobody likes the idea of paying somebody to sit around and do nothing. They want that for themselves.
Also, if everybody is rich than nobody is. "Rich" means having more wealth than everyone else. If you're wealthy your status and power are based on your ability to control people's access to food, shelter, transportation, etc. It feels good to have people waiting on you hand on foot. You can't get that unless you have something (money) to give them in return.
there's a cut down JavaScript spec designed to work around this very issue. Static typing and all that jazz :P.
and it's become a valid question. Employees have fewer rights and less power than 20 years ago. A lot. Social mores are changing and questions like this are the inevitable conclusion when you take the narrative of "Personal Responsibility" to it's (il)logical conclusion :(.
Just about every major construction project I've ever seen has run over budget. All Contractors under bid on big projects because a) It's the only way to get in and b) you know that 9 months into a project nobody's gonna wanna switch horses in the middle of the thing.
what is with all these bright white layouts nowadays? I can see it's all the rage, but why?
The rich & powerful are going to use gov't whether you like it or not. If there is no gov't they'll use their wealth to create institutions that might as well be. I've yet to hear a convincing argument otherwise.
So if they're going to use the tool that is gov't, I don't see any reason why I shouldn't. The worst that'll happen is the jack boot in my neck is a public one instead of a private. And at least with a strong central gov't I can vote against Jack Boots...
Maybe you're from France or something, but in America we don't have anything that even remotely resembles a Left Wing party. There's a few pundits who're left wing on _social_ issues, but I can count the number of economic liberals that show up in public discourse on one hand (Robert Reich, Liz Warren, Rachel Maddow and that old guy who plays her second fiddle).
...
Heck, when Liz Warren suggested reinstating Glass-Seagal to prevent another crash like in 2008 the question wasn't if it was right or wrong, but why she was even bothering having a discussion on something when it's got zero chance of happening
I thought the thing people were worried about was spills. Those pipelines are long and not always well monitored.
From an economic standpoint it's basically a pipe from Canada to China. If you're an Oilman that's great, because you can sell you're oil to a new market for big money. If you're anyone else in America or Canada... not so much, since you've just started competing with the Chinese to buy that oil...
unless the platform maker let you write in C/C++ . If the platform vendor wants to lock things down that much then you're pretty much done.
If you're libraries have ports then you're in a bit better shape. The library does all the heavy lifting, and you have a skeleton of function calls, if statements and for loops to control logic. Most of the big libraries like Poco/QT see ports to everything that can take 'em. But again, if a platform vendor wants to lock it down to the point where everything's JavaScript then you're only option is wheel reinventing or ignoring the platform...
I find the solution to that is lots of well organized libraries. I wrote an mp3 tagger and it compiles on Windows, OSX and Linux because I use Poco and QT for everything instead of writing it myself.
I do give up some of the whizz-bang features of the language for the sake of keeping it simple, but my code base is the same on all 3 platforms.
I've had to use a lot of different code/languages for my little Firefox Plugin and it's not that hard to keep up with. For the most part I can find libraries (I use Poco and QT) that do all the heavy lifting when I'm in C/C++. For my site a little jquery goes a long way.
:P
For the most part there's only minor syntax differences in modern languages anyway. It's all arrays, hashs/dictionaries iterators and if statements with a bit of gui programming.
Heck, even the gui programming follows the same basic paradigm. Again, wrote a few toy Android apps and found I was using Java to do the same stuff I do with HTML/JavaScript. e.g. Get a reference to a gui element then call methods to get/set it's state and attach a callback to it.
What I'm finding is that until you're writing math heavy programs everything is more or less the same