you've been enjoying the positive effects of what little socialism is left. Unless your daddy was rich you were educated in public schools. You drive on public roads and the reason you could afford a home is that cheap, gov't subsidized transportation drives down the cost of housing. You drink clean water and breath clean air because of socialism (unless you're in China. Once again, it's complicated. Just because a country says their socialist doesn't mean they are. Heck, they don't even say that, they're commies).
I'm actually really tired of people like you. People who have spent the last 50 years enjoying all Socialism has to offer and because you're doing alright now you're clamoring for a return to the good old days of 16 tons, company stores and child labor. I'm tired of hearing people say you don't need socialism because companies don't do evil things anymore. Did it ever occur to you there's a REASON why they don't do as much evil as they used to? Jesus, just look at China. Oh, sorry. You can't. They're not visible from orbit anymore...
you just have to pay (in cash money) for the infrastructure and support systems needed for a just society. That's socialism. And again, you're mixing up the very complex system that is socialism with the very simple system that is Communism.
Being a socialist is a pain the the ass. It means no nice little sound bites. No convenient ideology. It means acknowledging real problems and having the will to solve them. You might screw up, but you don't pretend some blanket political theory or ideology can fix things. Yes, you will defer to experts, but you will strive to be an expert yourself. It's hard. That's why it's not popular. Socialism, like Math, is hard.
I also don't eat babies. It's not magic. It's very complex and careful social policy. There is no philosophy. Only the Scientific Method. I don't have an ideology, I have a goal. If I want to build a house I don't let ideology get in the way of good architecture. Socialists will change depending on the needs. If we get it wrong, we'll ask ourselves why and try again. What we won't do is leave everything in the hands of Capitalists and hope for the best. We've seen too many cases where that didn't turn out so well.
And I was only half joking. During the last election/. was lousing with Astro turfers. With over $1 Billion in campaign money being tossed around every forum was.
To your last point, there is no minority. We are, in the end, all human. Once we start talking minorities and going down that route it's just divide and conquer time. That's the real goal of the people funding the Libertarians (you didn't think you got national attention for you're well reasoned arguments and your Ayn Rand bumper sticker, did you?). You're at my throat, I'm at yours, and they're laughing all the way to the bank.
with Communism. Again that's where complexity comes in. You're free to own the means of production, but you will pay to maintain a society that can use and enjoy that production.
You're also using a personal attach on Keynes to discredit his economic theories. That's is actually a very sophisticated rhetorical technique for a silly message board like/.. Are you an Astroturfer?
I don't see much grand standing going on. Nobody runs on gun control. It's a losing issue. Google Bill Clinton and gun control and you'll find him talking about how he lost congress over it. Pro-Gun people are single issue voters. Ironically you could take away every real freedom they have and so long as you left their guns alone they're OK (that's what it means to be a single issue voter, btw).
The anti-gun lobby is not gunning (pun) for power. They genuinely believe gun control will help. Socialized medicine and treatment for the mentally ill would help more, but they lost that battle when the health insurance lobby spent over a billion dollars to convince you the that health care was a limited resource because, hell, it's not like we couldn't train a 100,000 doctors a year for the price of America's private jets (you do the math, that's what I came up with using very, very conservative numbers).
So the people that want the shooting to stop gave up on treating the mentally ill and they're trying to just control things. I think they'll lose, but on the plus side it's put the corporate bastards on the defensive. I'll take what I can get.
it's people with mental illness and easy access to firearms. I've known a lot of people with real mental illness. It's a chemical thing. When they have episodes it all seems rational. With the right meds they know better, but getting those meds riight is very, very expensive. We cut funding to their care back in the Reagan era because it was "freedom". It was really because we wanted tax cuts for the rich, but oh well. The upshot is there's out there, and they're surrounded by guns. A lot of us would rather take your guns away than pay for their treatment. The alternative is to get shot to pieces by one of them every so often. Take your pick out of those 3, but you will choose one of them. If only by default. I guess I did leave one thing off, which is just identifying and killing these people, but I doubt you've got the stomach for that.
For the record, keep your damn guns but start making the to 10% pay for these people's care. Socialism. Your taxes go up, but so does your standard of living. Go figure.
I take offense. Genuine offense too, not silly slashdotter offense. I do not believe "the government knows better than you". I believe you by yourself are simply too weak and ineffective to stand up to corporate oligarchy. I believe power naturally accumulates into the hands of a lucky few as it's passed down generation to generation. I believe that the dark ages are a think to be feared, and that Keynesian economics, which have been proven time and again, are a better answer than the writings of a fellow from the 1800s who couldn't imagine a telephone much less global communications.
It's not that the government knows better, it's more complicated than that. That's the trouble with socialism. It's the complex answer to a complex problem. Libertarianism is the simple answer, the easy one. Simple answers always sound better, but I'll steal a fellow/.er's sig here to end: "For every complex problem there is a simple answer that is also wrong".
but why spend 4 years in school and walk out with a worthless piece of paper? At least get a business degree. A business degree lets you apply for any job out there. A CS degree gets you replaced by an H1B. And no, I don't suggest an English Major. Yes, there are worse majors for employment than CS, but you work damn hard for that CS degree...
who in their right mind would go into CS? Or are these foreign students? I did hear that we've got a lot of them encouraged to come here because they pay a lot more than their local counterparts.
this isn't true. The few jobs left pay $8 to $10/hr and you do the work of 3 or 4 guys. It also largely depends on how you classify IT. If you mean jobs at google yeah. No shortage there. If you mean entry level VB programmer for a competent guy that's not a mathematical genius, those jobs go to H1-Bs until they hit the quota.
Besides, what do you thing dropping 250,000 people into the workforce is going to do to even that bullshit 3.5%? I know I just accused one guy of this, so I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but are you an Astro Turfer?
I call bullshit. At most you pony up a few bucks for a business license. I've got tons of friends running "Businesses" to get their Warhammer stuff cheap. They've gone through the entire process. It's not even hard. There's a few zoning laws to prevent you from drawing a ton of traffic into small neighborhoods that don't have the infrastructure for it.
Forgive me for asking, but what are you? A tea bagger twit or an astro turfer?
in the 80s and 90s. Here we are in the 2010s and I see doctors that diagnose with computers and closet making companies that replaced carpenters with a CNC machine and a tape measure.
Big Data might be a buzz word, but it's real. Computers have been fast enough to crunch large amounts of data for a while now, but you needed either a lot of money or a brilliant programmer for both to do it. Cheap Linux clusters and Hadoop for free changes all that. Code monkeys have enough power at their disposal to do number crunching that woulda taken a genius 20 years ago.
What's the result? Huge increases in efficiency and expert systems that make 90% of Knowledge Workers obsolete. We see it with Wal-Mart where the shelves with next to no overstock. We see it with UPS eliminating left turns to save gas.
We're gonna start seeing it with Credit Card fraud going away pretty soon here too. The second you run an out of patter charge you're card gets flagged and you get a text message. It's not just that computer power is so cheap the companies can scrutinize every transaction, it's that it's gotten so cheap that the cost of doing that extra work is now lower than the cost of letting the fraud happen.
So yeah, Big Data might be a buzz word, but it's a real one. I'm not so sure it's a good thing either. The huge increases in efficiency are really starting to squeeze the lower half of our population at a time when everyone's talking about spending cuts and Austerity and Keynesian economics is a dirty word. We're piling on the money at the top and none of it is trickling down. Nobody is spending any money, and we're just sorta shutting down the whole world. We had 2000 years of dark ages where people basically did nothing, so if it's one thing history has shown it doesn't take much to halt all human progress...
it was more the support nightmare that always on DRM created plus the very real threat of a class action lawsuit when the servers went down that killed it. But sure, go on thinking that your hastily scrawled email to Ubisoft made a difference. It's darling really.
I know if at least one company that uses it to make closets. None of their people have the slightest idea how to do wood working. They measure your existing closet, put the numbers in, and take the wood out. From there it's basically Ikea. It might look like crap to you, an experienced woodworker, but to anyone else it's just fine.
it's wrong to feel entitled to food, housing and health care. Seriously. He said this. And the worst part was it wasn't news. The only news was 47% of Americans felt slighted when they should have felt horrified.
If you like big budget titles? Activision's just going to do the same thing you know. Heck, Blizzard already does. I remember watching the 40k players complain about the massive price increases from the last year, but they kept right on buying...
it's corporate oligarchy and the interests of the 1%. The Koch brothers have been implicated in tons of shady dealings, but you don't see anyone tapping their lines, do you?
because I certainly have no use whatsoever for networking. Nope. None. And getting pinged by 500 ppl per minute in IM because that's the only way to get ahold of me will never get old.
or a despot. If you discard the idea that society should make things better you get Anarchy. Welcome to the world of Ayn Rand and Libertarian Paradise (google it). OTOH, If you keep that idea then you're just choosing an arbitrary place to draw the line. In that case welcome to the world of despotism. Say hi to Rand Paul for me.
also the debt tends to be compounded by a) interest and b) the fact that the super rich use the debt as an excuse to lobby for smaller gov't, which in turn means lower taxes.
That's sort of the problem. The Narrative is simple: Big gov't has us all Tax to The Max (tm) so we need to cut spending NOW! Simple right? But the trouble is the actual effect is complex. Re-read the first sentence I wrote. It's a complex multi-step trick build on simple rhetoric that appeals to common sense. The trouble is the world isn't simple, and common sense doesn't work.
To put it another way I'll borrow a fellow/.er's sig: For every complex problem there is a simple solution that is also wrong.
but besides a strong federal government what do you suggest can stand it's ground against the uber-wealthy? Join or die you know.
I think we forget just how much power the wealthy had up until the end of WWII. What changed was that since everyone came back a war hero they finally felt some entitlement. The felt they'd earned something besides a nasty & brutish death. We've lost site of that. It's the opposite of an entitlement complex. Mitt Romney said that what's wrong with the 47% is they feel entitled to food, housing and healthcare, and nobody though to ask what the hell is wrong with that? Who ISN'T entitle to that?
We're not broke people. Really. We're not. This is what people in politics call a "Narrative". It's a story to get you to vote a certain way. Specifically to vote for massive tax cuts for the rich so they can pocket all the gains in productivity from the last 50 years.
Cut all the "Waste" you want. It'll never come close or be a drop in the bucket against what the ultra wealthy are taking from you on a daily basis. I tell ya man, dog eat dog capitalism for the poor, socialism for the wealthy...
Slashdot Mirror
you've been enjoying the positive effects of what little socialism is left. Unless your daddy was rich you were educated in public schools. You drive on public roads and the reason you could afford a home is that cheap, gov't subsidized transportation drives down the cost of housing. You drink clean water and breath clean air because of socialism (unless you're in China. Once again, it's complicated. Just because a country says their socialist doesn't mean they are. Heck, they don't even say that, they're commies).
I'm actually really tired of people like you. People who have spent the last 50 years enjoying all Socialism has to offer and because you're doing alright now you're clamoring for a return to the good old days of 16 tons, company stores and child labor. I'm tired of hearing people say you don't need socialism because companies don't do evil things anymore. Did it ever occur to you there's a REASON why they don't do as much evil as they used to? Jesus, just look at China. Oh, sorry. You can't. They're not visible from orbit anymore...
you just have to pay (in cash money) for the infrastructure and support systems needed for a just society. That's socialism. And again, you're mixing up the very complex system that is socialism with the very simple system that is Communism.
Being a socialist is a pain the the ass. It means no nice little sound bites. No convenient ideology. It means acknowledging real problems and having the will to solve them. You might screw up, but you don't pretend some blanket political theory or ideology can fix things. Yes, you will defer to experts, but you will strive to be an expert yourself. It's hard. That's why it's not popular. Socialism, like Math, is hard.
I also don't eat babies. It's not magic. It's very complex and careful social policy. There is no philosophy. Only the Scientific Method. I don't have an ideology, I have a goal. If I want to build a house I don't let ideology get in the way of good architecture. Socialists will change depending on the needs. If we get it wrong, we'll ask ourselves why and try again. What we won't do is leave everything in the hands of Capitalists and hope for the best. We've seen too many cases where that didn't turn out so well.
/. was lousing with Astro turfers. With over $1 Billion in campaign money being tossed around every forum was.
And I was only half joking. During the last election
To your last point, there is no minority. We are, in the end, all human. Once we start talking minorities and going down that route it's just divide and conquer time. That's the real goal of the people funding the Libertarians (you didn't think you got national attention for you're well reasoned arguments and your Ayn Rand bumper sticker, did you?). You're at my throat, I'm at yours, and they're laughing all the way to the bank.
with Communism. Again that's where complexity comes in. You're free to own the means of production, but you will pay to maintain a society that can use and enjoy that production.
/.. Are you an Astroturfer?
You're also using a personal attach on Keynes to discredit his economic theories. That's is actually a very sophisticated rhetorical technique for a silly message board like
I don't see much grand standing going on. Nobody runs on gun control. It's a losing issue. Google Bill Clinton and gun control and you'll find him talking about how he lost congress over it. Pro-Gun people are single issue voters. Ironically you could take away every real freedom they have and so long as you left their guns alone they're OK (that's what it means to be a single issue voter, btw).
The anti-gun lobby is not gunning (pun) for power. They genuinely believe gun control will help. Socialized medicine and treatment for the mentally ill would help more, but they lost that battle when the health insurance lobby spent over a billion dollars to convince you the that health care was a limited resource because, hell, it's not like we couldn't train a 100,000 doctors a year for the price of America's private jets (you do the math, that's what I came up with using very, very conservative numbers).
So the people that want the shooting to stop gave up on treating the mentally ill and they're trying to just control things. I think they'll lose, but on the plus side it's put the corporate bastards on the defensive. I'll take what I can get.
it's people with mental illness and easy access to firearms. I've known a lot of people with real mental illness. It's a chemical thing. When they have episodes it all seems rational. With the right meds they know better, but getting those meds riight is very, very expensive. We cut funding to their care back in the Reagan era because it was "freedom". It was really because we wanted tax cuts for the rich, but oh well. The upshot is there's out there, and they're surrounded by guns. A lot of us would rather take your guns away than pay for their treatment. The alternative is to get shot to pieces by one of them every so often. Take your pick out of those 3, but you will choose one of them. If only by default. I guess I did leave one thing off, which is just identifying and killing these people, but I doubt you've got the stomach for that.
For the record, keep your damn guns but start making the to 10% pay for these people's care. Socialism. Your taxes go up, but so does your standard of living. Go figure.
I take offense. Genuine offense too, not silly slashdotter offense. I do not believe "the government knows better than you". I believe you by yourself are simply too weak and ineffective to stand up to corporate oligarchy. I believe power naturally accumulates into the hands of a lucky few as it's passed down generation to generation. I believe that the dark ages are a think to be feared, and that Keynesian economics, which have been proven time and again, are a better answer than the writings of a fellow from the 1800s who couldn't imagine a telephone much less global communications.
/.er's sig here to end: "For every complex problem there is a simple answer that is also wrong".
It's not that the government knows better, it's more complicated than that. That's the trouble with socialism. It's the complex answer to a complex problem. Libertarianism is the simple answer, the easy one. Simple answers always sound better, but I'll steal a fellow
but why spend 4 years in school and walk out with a worthless piece of paper? At least get a business degree. A business degree lets you apply for any job out there. A CS degree gets you replaced by an H1B. And no, I don't suggest an English Major. Yes, there are worse majors for employment than CS, but you work damn hard for that CS degree...
who in their right mind would go into CS? Or are these foreign students? I did hear that we've got a lot of them encouraged to come here because they pay a lot more than their local counterparts.
this isn't true. The few jobs left pay $8 to $10 /hr and you do the work of 3 or 4 guys. It also largely depends on how you classify IT. If you mean jobs at google yeah. No shortage there. If you mean entry level VB programmer for a competent guy that's not a mathematical genius, those jobs go to H1-Bs until they hit the quota.
Besides, what do you thing dropping 250,000 people into the workforce is going to do to even that bullshit 3.5%? I know I just accused one guy of this, so I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but are you an Astro Turfer?
I call bullshit. At most you pony up a few bucks for a business license. I've got tons of friends running "Businesses" to get their Warhammer stuff cheap. They've gone through the entire process. It's not even hard. There's a few zoning laws to prevent you from drawing a ton of traffic into small neighborhoods that don't have the infrastructure for it.
Forgive me for asking, but what are you? A tea bagger twit or an astro turfer?
in the 80s and 90s. Here we are in the 2010s and I see doctors that diagnose with computers and closet making companies that replaced carpenters with a CNC machine and a tape measure.
Big Data might be a buzz word, but it's real. Computers have been fast enough to crunch large amounts of data for a while now, but you needed either a lot of money or a brilliant programmer for both to do it. Cheap Linux clusters and Hadoop for free changes all that. Code monkeys have enough power at their disposal to do number crunching that woulda taken a genius 20 years ago.
What's the result? Huge increases in efficiency and expert systems that make 90% of Knowledge Workers obsolete. We see it with Wal-Mart where the shelves with next to no overstock. We see it with UPS eliminating left turns to save gas.
We're gonna start seeing it with Credit Card fraud going away pretty soon here too. The second you run an out of patter charge you're card gets flagged and you get a text message. It's not just that computer power is so cheap the companies can scrutinize every transaction, it's that it's gotten so cheap that the cost of doing that extra work is now lower than the cost of letting the fraud happen.
So yeah, Big Data might be a buzz word, but it's a real one. I'm not so sure it's a good thing either. The huge increases in efficiency are really starting to squeeze the lower half of our population at a time when everyone's talking about spending cuts and Austerity and Keynesian economics is a dirty word. We're piling on the money at the top and none of it is trickling down. Nobody is spending any money, and we're just sorta shutting down the whole world. We had 2000 years of dark ages where people basically did nothing, so if it's one thing history has shown it doesn't take much to halt all human progress...
it was more the support nightmare that always on DRM created plus the very real threat of a class action lawsuit when the servers went down that killed it. But sure, go on thinking that your hastily scrawled email to Ubisoft made a difference. It's darling really.
"It has a lot of Graphics".
I know if at least one company that uses it to make closets. None of their people have the slightest idea how to do wood working. They measure your existing closet, put the numbers in, and take the wood out. From there it's basically Ikea. It might look like crap to you, an experienced woodworker, but to anyone else it's just fine.
it's wrong to feel entitled to food, housing and health care. Seriously. He said this. And the worst part was it wasn't news. The only news was 47% of Americans felt slighted when they should have felt horrified.
If you like big budget titles? Activision's just going to do the same thing you know. Heck, Blizzard already does. I remember watching the 40k players complain about the massive price increases from the last year, but they kept right on buying...
it's corporate oligarchy and the interests of the 1%. The Koch brothers have been implicated in tons of shady dealings, but you don't see anyone tapping their lines, do you?
because I certainly have no use whatsoever for networking. Nope. None. And getting pinged by 500 ppl per minute in IM because that's the only way to get ahold of me will never get old.
or a despot. If you discard the idea that society should make things better you get Anarchy. Welcome to the world of Ayn Rand and Libertarian Paradise (google it). OTOH, If you keep that idea then you're just choosing an arbitrary place to draw the line. In that case welcome to the world of despotism. Say hi to Rand Paul for me.
also the debt tends to be compounded by a) interest and b) the fact that the super rich use the debt as an excuse to lobby for smaller gov't, which in turn means lower taxes.
/.er's sig: For every complex problem there is a simple solution that is also wrong.
That's sort of the problem. The Narrative is simple: Big gov't has us all Tax to The Max (tm) so we need to cut spending NOW! Simple right? But the trouble is the actual effect is complex. Re-read the first sentence I wrote. It's a complex multi-step trick build on simple rhetoric that appeals to common sense. The trouble is the world isn't simple, and common sense doesn't work.
To put it another way I'll borrow a fellow
This one.
talked about "eviscerating" defense? Or are you talking about all those horses and bayonets?
Again, Narrative. But nice try there.
but besides a strong federal government what do you suggest can stand it's ground against the uber-wealthy? Join or die you know.
I think we forget just how much power the wealthy had up until the end of WWII. What changed was that since everyone came back a war hero they finally felt some entitlement. The felt they'd earned something besides a nasty & brutish death. We've lost site of that. It's the opposite of an entitlement complex. Mitt Romney said that what's wrong with the 47% is they feel entitled to food, housing and healthcare, and nobody though to ask what the hell is wrong with that? Who ISN'T entitle to that?
We're not broke people. Really. We're not. This is what people in politics call a "Narrative". It's a story to get you to vote a certain way. Specifically to vote for massive tax cuts for the rich so they can pocket all the gains in productivity from the last 50 years.
Cut all the "Waste" you want. It'll never come close or be a drop in the bucket against what the ultra wealthy are taking from you on a daily basis. I tell ya man, dog eat dog capitalism for the poor, socialism for the wealthy...