the trouble with democracy is that it's so easy to game. All you have to do is get one big voting block to agree on an issue no matter way (say Child Porn, Social Security, or hating Commies) and you can more or less own. The rest of us get divided up and end up counting for nothing...
...to make it more difficult and to compel students even more than they already are to buy textbooks"
Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Oh God... he was serious, wasn't he?
Uh, for the record, my bro's French text was a) useless and b) written by the department head. A copy was ordered for each and every student, and they sat in the bookstore all year until the teacher was advised that no one would receive their grades until they were gone because, hey, how could anyone have gotten through the coursework w/o the textbook? Right?
First off, desktop displays are 27" max, and most 24". It's pretty well documented that once you hit 1080p you need a 37"+ display to see the difference (insert 100+/.ers with 40/40 vision claiming otherwise). Second off, since 90% of games are xbox360 ports what diff does it make (x2)?
That said, ultra high res displays do have one good use for gaming. Phony vector games (think ports of Asteroids) look awesome:).
and I keep not getting a good answer. So, all you dog-eat-dog libertarians: what are we going to do with all these people we don't need? If you're ready for them to die in the street then I'd like to here you come out and say it. Other than that I don't know of any solution to the problem of massively increasing productivity than either a) ignoring progress Amish style or b) Socialism. And I know, but... but... Socialism?
Get yourself a programming project. I do a plugin and I did a few projects at work. Those helped a lot. It's hard work (maintaining that plugin can be tough), but worth it.
Also, keep an eye out for stuff at your job that adds value to the company but lets you learn. Let the rest of the guys around you do the easy rut stuff. Take on the challenging stuff so you can get paid to learn.
about what killed Best Buy. It's convergence. I can get any cable I need at Walmart. Why? Because There are only 3: USB, ethernet & HDMI. There are some off balls, but not enough to keep a man employed. For those there's Newegg. What's killing Best buy is there's less and less electronics stuff every year. Pretty soon you'll have a tablet and a TV screen and that's about it. Heck, if this gigabit wifi stuff works well enough then in 5 years the only cable will be power cords.
...because they have the resources to deal with such a catastrophe. I suppose private companies have the resources too though. How much does it cost to tie a case up in court until the other side runs out of money and/or dies from injuries? Probably cheaper to buy off a Senator anyway. At the risk of being modded troll I'll add 'Viva Libertarian Paradise!'. But I'll touch off by saying that at least with the gov't it's not somebody's 9 to 5 day job to make sure the victims don't get paid (Tobacco companies, I'm lookin' at you).
it works for Indians because their gov't is subsidizing them coming to America (and sometimes our gov't too:(... ) and because they're so desperate they'll work 70 hours a week for 2/3rds the pay of an American (effective cost about 1/5 that of an American).
If you're a native in your country and not being hired with the understanding that you're going to be abused, a $100 Master's degree is literally worse than worthless. The folks with dime store diploma's that applied at my old place were specifically weeded out because the assumption was if you're dumb enough to pay for one of those you're not worth hiring.
For the record, those mills serve one other purpose (besides taking advantage of the desperate). If you're already employed and your position suddenly requires a degree for no good reason you use them to keep your job. Oh well, that's what happens when you mix dog-eat-dog capitalism with altruistic education:(.
what was the catch? My best friend's mom just finished her Doctorate, and paid for it with loans because nobody would just give her money for it. What'd you have to agree to to get the stipend? I'm in America though, I understand the rest of the developed world is a bit better off.
I do realize I seem to be contradicting myself there, saying it's hard for a worker to move but easy to bring labor in. This isn't double think though. It's still very hard for a worker to move, but when you get to function globally (as corporations do), it becomes easy to find that one person who will uproot themselves and to devil with the consequences. Sure, they leave family and friends behind and take an enormous risk, but countries like China and India are so awful the risk and misery are worth it.
"Lets say a DBA. I good DBA is an excellent asset to a company. They can extract data and find information that you didn't even know you had,"
you want a highly skilled Business Analyst (aka a Statistician) who happens to be a crack DBA. What you're really asking for (whether you realize it or not) is two for the price of one....
And the employers CAN get it. They get to work at global scales (H1B Visa that is). Workers function at the local level. It's very expensive for a worker to move (I know, I just did). You buy houses, sign leases, etc. You don't just up and move. But it's easy and cheap to bring labor in, especially when it's paid for by tax dollars, tax incentives, or the desperate worker trying to escape the hell hole that is his homeland...
But you're an MBA, so you knew all this, right? Sorry, sorry, I know that last bit's trolling, but after 40 years of plummeting wages and rising food prices I'm a little bitter. So sue me.
and over complicating others. But the big one you're missing is that one of the main functions of any civilization is deciding who gets what, how, and why. How do we divvy up the spoils of civilization. When socialists talk about the 'safety net' they're taking this basic function of civilization for granted. Heck, most people do. It's the primary reason civilizations are formed. That and cooperation to achieve larger goals that benefit everyone.
That's what makes it hard for socialists to have a dialog with libertarians. I just finished (gave up) on a long thread with a libertarian over why it was our civilization allocated so much of it's output to 1% (Meg Whitman happen to be my straw man/gal, but I'm afraid it only served to confuse the issue further). Whether you like it or not a civilization will come up with some system to allocate it's resources. Libertarians maintain that natural order will optimize this. But then I watch CEOs wreak entire economies for their own short term gains and find it impossible to reconcile this. Combine that with the realities of out dog eat dog capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich and Libertarianism and the free market become hopeless ideals that inevitably descend into oppressive oligarchies or Somalian anarchy (depending on if there's enough money to maintain an army to oppress the civilians). I've yet to hear a convincing argument otherwise, but you're welcome to try.
Now for the over simplification: Doctors don't function in the free market under the rules you set out. Read here why. Long story short is you don't have the specialized knowledge to know a good heart surgeon and you don't buy enough heart transplants to be a good judge of the product.
Oh, and one last jab at the free market: How do you reconcile massively increasing productivity putting workers out of work? Do we let those people starve (after all, forget safety net, now I'm talking outright socialism)? There's not enough work for them any more. We don't need them to work. What's more, as we need less and less of them supply and demand make their labor increasingly worthless. I guess they can all go work in those Biotech jobs from 1990... but now I'm just being flippant:P. And if you haven't seen it yet watch this
What I mean is, after you're done playing a video game, you haven't really exercised your mental capacities (in most cases, games like Chess and Go are exceptions because of their insane capacity). I guess I was taking the context for granted, but to clarify I am referring to games like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Skyrim, etc. The games aren't meant to be complex and challenging. They're meant to give you a constant string of rewards for low effort to keep you hooked.
There's a much better (and funnier) discussion of the problem at the end of Egoraptor's video on Castlevania here.
Social security and medicare aren't ponzi schemes, they're socialist programs to keep old people from dying of starvation. Back in the 30s when it was envisioned it was considered morally reprehensible to accept help just because you were, you know, physically unfit to work. Ayn Rand for example had to be talked into it or she would have died homeless (true story, google it).
Anyway, they two programs were made into "insurance" programs to trick proud/dumb people into accepting the help they need to survive. We started doing stuff like that in the 30s because it was right around there that advancements in farming and manufacturing made it possible to feed the poor without cramping the rich's style too much. Guess that's changing. Never underestimate the number of people willing to make people poor to be rich. Put another way, if I take $100/mo from every man and woman in America, suddenly I'm rich. There's an unlimited supply of people trying to do that, but you can only take so many $100 bills before those Americans are back to poverty...
Xbox was mostly dumb luck. It's a distant 2nd this gen (Wii blows it away for profits and market share) and it mostly won because it was $100 cheaper than the PS3 for ages thanks to Blue Ray (otoh, Sony did kill HDDVD, so mission accomplished). Microsoft is end of life-ing.Net, they were already dominant for email (and any increase dominance is mostly Lotus notes sucking balls and refusing to leave the mid 1990s). The server gains are debatable (large performance gains in Linux servers at the software visualization level are resulting in fewer units sold). I'll give you databases though, but that's 99% lazy, lazy programmers using the built in MS-SQL (which will bite them hard in the ass in a few years when in high cost of maintaining SQL DBs running over TCP/IP vs el-cheapo access DBs on network shares becomes apparent).
Vista was a beta (alpha?) of Win7 that they got people to pay for, so that's kinda of win really. Yeah, the blew the phone harder than something that blows really hard (I decided to stop before this thread gets dirty...), but Microsoft is a lot of things, and 'cool' is never, will never, and can never be one of them (brown Zune anyone?).
That said, don't be shocked in Balmer's looking for a bailout soon. Most of Microsoft's revenue is Office and Windows running on PCs. People HATE pcs. I mean they really hate them. Not just hate, but resentment too. Tablets level the playing field a lot, and they're getting cheap. Really cheap. Plus you're about to start seeing fast, $sub $50 android PCs that plug into your HDTV. Unless MS does something bout those they're pretty boned. They'll collapse under their own weight.
and it cost me $200/mo in Arizona to eat. The only way I can cut that is to switch to a diet rich in R(amen) vitamins and Hydrogenated goodness. GM is the least of my worries.
after a fashion. Video games give you a feeling of reward without hard work. Porn gives your an outlet for your urges. What's that all mean? It means people have an alternative to spewing out 10 kids. If you're part of the ruling class, this scares you. Google 'Japanese Birth Rate' and see what I mean. The 1% rely on two things
1. An oversupply of labor.
2. Balkanization (aka race baiting, homophobia, or anti-unionism, it's all the same, pit one group against another so that you're the only one on top).
A massive decline in population does away with # 1 and leaves so many resources # 2 stops working. We saw this at the end of WWI/WWII when 50 million some odd young men of working age marched off to die in trenches and freed up a lot of space in our civilization. Declining birth rates are doing it now.
Property rights are a construct we invented to improve civilization. If they are no longer serving that purpose the can and should be adjusted and/or eliminated.
Ok, so I STILL don't get this. You don't believe Meg Whitman has earned the money that she has been granted, but you think it's wrong to take away? What the hell? The point I was making was, if I take your things I have them without EARNING them. How is that any different than Meg, who's been paid millions (Billions?) to run HP into the ground? She's a leader of our capitalist society.
And if you go back to the start of the thread you'll see I was pointing out that consensus on slashdot was Meg was an incompetent boob that doesn't deserve the huge amount of wealth she commands. I don't begrudge her a good life, I do begrudge her a private jet, especially when the resources that went to that jet could feed a family of four, well, forever.
Can you answer, yes or no, do you believe Meg deserves the wealth she has because she earned it?
Ok, you keep missing this, so I will put it in caps and use very simple words
I AM A MEMBER OF THIS CIVILIZATION. THAT IS WHAT CIVILIZATION IS FOR. THAT IS WHAT GIVES ME THE RIGHT.
If you don't like that, please enjoy your decent into Anarchy. Put another way, please provide me with your full name and address so that I may come to your home and take all of your possessions, and sell you and your family into slavery. Remember, you don't have any right to question anything I happen to be able to do.
I will change up my question, just for you (cause I like ya, kid). Now than, since you believe Meg's contribution to society is worth the enormous amount of resources we dedicate to satisfying her every whim, how do you justify that? Specifically, what does Meg do to rate a private jet, the food, shelter and medical care our civilization has, unlimited resources dedicated to her fancies and entertainment, and complete freedom from any daily toil (e.g. doing the wash, cleaning her own bathroom, etc).? Please don't say the HP / Compaq Merger....
Now, understand that I DO believe there are some people we should free from the drudgery of daily life. I don't think a main like Albert Eisenstein should waste his time doing laundry. But, do tell, what is it that Meg does that's more worthy of our society's resources than Mr Eisenstein?
Oh, and you started trolling right around the time you started using badly formatted HTML and Britney Spears references...
Slashdot Mirror
shoulda got a lawyer. Because if it's one thing a bunch of broke college kids have it's money to hire a lawyer. :P
Even if a rich kid had hired one out of spite, it's still 'required course work'. Buyer beware, and all that rot.
the trouble with democracy is that it's so easy to game. All you have to do is get one big voting block to agree on an issue no matter way (say Child Porn, Social Security, or hating Commies) and you can more or less own. The rest of us get divided up and end up counting for nothing...
...to make it more difficult and to compel students even more than they already are to buy textbooks"
Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Oh God... he was serious, wasn't he?
Uh, for the record, my bro's French text was a) useless and b) written by the department head. A copy was ordered for each and every student, and they sat in the bookstore all year until the teacher was advised that no one would receive their grades until they were gone because, hey, how could anyone have gotten through the coursework w/o the textbook? Right?
First off, desktop displays are 27" max, and most 24". It's pretty well documented that once you hit 1080p you need a 37"+ display to see the difference (insert 100+ /.ers with 40/40 vision claiming otherwise). Second off, since 90% of games are xbox360 ports what diff does it make (x2)?
:).
That said, ultra high res displays do have one good use for gaming. Phony vector games (think ports of Asteroids) look awesome
and I keep not getting a good answer. So, all you dog-eat-dog libertarians: what are we going to do with all these people we don't need? If you're ready for them to die in the street then I'd like to here you come out and say it. Other than that I don't know of any solution to the problem of massively increasing productivity than either a) ignoring progress Amish style or b) Socialism. And I know, but... but... Socialism?
Oh, one more suggestion, learn to spell 'advice'. :P
Get yourself a programming project. I do a plugin and I did a few projects at work. Those helped a lot. It's hard work (maintaining that plugin can be tough), but worth it.
Also, keep an eye out for stuff at your job that adds value to the company but lets you learn. Let the rest of the guys around you do the easy rut stuff. Take on the challenging stuff so you can get paid to learn.
because we're broke. Seriously. 40 years of no wage increases kinda does that to a guy.
about what killed Best Buy. It's convergence. I can get any cable I need at Walmart. Why? Because There are only 3: USB, ethernet & HDMI. There are some off balls, but not enough to keep a man employed. For those there's Newegg. What's killing Best buy is there's less and less electronics stuff every year. Pretty soon you'll have a tablet and a TV screen and that's about it. Heck, if this gigabit wifi stuff works well enough then in 5 years the only cable will be power cords.
...because they have the resources to deal with such a catastrophe. I suppose private companies have the resources too though. How much does it cost to tie a case up in court until the other side runs out of money and/or dies from injuries? Probably cheaper to buy off a Senator anyway. At the risk of being modded troll I'll add 'Viva Libertarian Paradise!'. But I'll touch off by saying that at least with the gov't it's not somebody's 9 to 5 day job to make sure the victims don't get paid (Tobacco companies, I'm lookin' at you).
it works for Indians because their gov't is subsidizing them coming to America (and sometimes our gov't too :(... ) and because they're so desperate they'll work 70 hours a week for 2/3rds the pay of an American (effective cost about 1/5 that of an American).
:(.
If you're a native in your country and not being hired with the understanding that you're going to be abused, a $100 Master's degree is literally worse than worthless. The folks with dime store diploma's that applied at my old place were specifically weeded out because the assumption was if you're dumb enough to pay for one of those you're not worth hiring.
For the record, those mills serve one other purpose (besides taking advantage of the desperate). If you're already employed and your position suddenly requires a degree for no good reason you use them to keep your job. Oh well, that's what happens when you mix dog-eat-dog capitalism with altruistic education
what was the catch? My best friend's mom just finished her Doctorate, and paid for it with loans because nobody would just give her money for it. What'd you have to agree to to get the stipend? I'm in America though, I understand the rest of the developed world is a bit better off.
and a cable subscription, not sure if they're really gonna go through with that though.
I do realize I seem to be contradicting myself there, saying it's hard for a worker to move but easy to bring labor in. This isn't double think though. It's still very hard for a worker to move, but when you get to function globally (as corporations do), it becomes easy to find that one person who will uproot themselves and to devil with the consequences. Sure, they leave family and friends behind and take an enormous risk, but countries like China and India are so awful the risk and misery are worth it.
"Lets say a DBA. I good DBA is an excellent asset to a company. They can extract data and find information that you didn't even know you had,"
you want a highly skilled Business Analyst (aka a Statistician) who happens to be a crack DBA. What you're really asking for (whether you realize it or not) is two for the price of one....
And the employers CAN get it. They get to work at global scales (H1B Visa that is). Workers function at the local level. It's very expensive for a worker to move (I know, I just did). You buy houses, sign leases, etc. You don't just up and move. But it's easy and cheap to bring labor in, especially when it's paid for by tax dollars, tax incentives, or the desperate worker trying to escape the hell hole that is his homeland...
But you're an MBA, so you knew all this, right? Sorry, sorry, I know that last bit's trolling, but after 40 years of plummeting wages and rising food prices I'm a little bitter. So sue me.
and over complicating others. But the big one you're missing is that one of the main functions of any civilization is deciding who gets what, how, and why. How do we divvy up the spoils of civilization. When socialists talk about the 'safety net' they're taking this basic function of civilization for granted. Heck, most people do. It's the primary reason civilizations are formed. That and cooperation to achieve larger goals that benefit everyone.
:P. And if you haven't seen it yet watch this
That's what makes it hard for socialists to have a dialog with libertarians. I just finished (gave up) on a long thread with a libertarian over why it was our civilization allocated so much of it's output to 1% (Meg Whitman happen to be my straw man/gal, but I'm afraid it only served to confuse the issue further). Whether you like it or not a civilization will come up with some system to allocate it's resources. Libertarians maintain that natural order will optimize this. But then I watch CEOs wreak entire economies for their own short term gains and find it impossible to reconcile this. Combine that with the realities of out dog eat dog capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich and Libertarianism and the free market become hopeless ideals that inevitably descend into oppressive oligarchies or Somalian anarchy (depending on if there's enough money to maintain an army to oppress the civilians). I've yet to hear a convincing argument otherwise, but you're welcome to try. Now for the over simplification: Doctors don't function in the free market under the rules you set out. Read here why. Long story short is you don't have the specialized knowledge to know a good heart surgeon and you don't buy enough heart transplants to be a good judge of the product.
Oh, and one last jab at the free market: How do you reconcile massively increasing productivity putting workers out of work? Do we let those people starve (after all, forget safety net, now I'm talking outright socialism)? There's not enough work for them any more. We don't need them to work. What's more, as we need less and less of them supply and demand make their labor increasingly worthless. I guess they can all go work in those Biotech jobs from 1990... but now I'm just being flippant
What I mean is, after you're done playing a video game, you haven't really exercised your mental capacities (in most cases, games like Chess and Go are exceptions because of their insane capacity). I guess I was taking the context for granted, but to clarify I am referring to games like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Skyrim, etc. The games aren't meant to be complex and challenging. They're meant to give you a constant string of rewards for low effort to keep you hooked.
There's a much better (and funnier) discussion of the problem at the end of Egoraptor's video on Castlevania here.
Social security and medicare aren't ponzi schemes, they're socialist programs to keep old people from dying of starvation. Back in the 30s when it was envisioned it was considered morally reprehensible to accept help just because you were, you know, physically unfit to work. Ayn Rand for example had to be talked into it or she would have died homeless (true story, google it).
Anyway, they two programs were made into "insurance" programs to trick proud/dumb people into accepting the help they need to survive. We started doing stuff like that in the 30s because it was right around there that advancements in farming and manufacturing made it possible to feed the poor without cramping the rich's style too much. Guess that's changing. Never underestimate the number of people willing to make people poor to be rich. Put another way, if I take $100/mo from every man and woman in America, suddenly I'm rich. There's an unlimited supply of people trying to do that, but you can only take so many $100 bills before those Americans are back to poverty...
Xbox was mostly dumb luck. It's a distant 2nd this gen (Wii blows it away for profits and market share) and it mostly won because it was $100 cheaper than the PS3 for ages thanks to Blue Ray (otoh, Sony did kill HDDVD, so mission accomplished). Microsoft is end of life-ing .Net, they were already dominant for email (and any increase dominance is mostly Lotus notes sucking balls and refusing to leave the mid 1990s). The server gains are debatable (large performance gains in Linux servers at the software visualization level are resulting in fewer units sold). I'll give you databases though, but that's 99% lazy, lazy programmers using the built in MS-SQL (which will bite them hard in the ass in a few years when in high cost of maintaining SQL DBs running over TCP/IP vs el-cheapo access DBs on network shares becomes apparent).
Vista was a beta (alpha?) of Win7 that they got people to pay for, so that's kinda of win really. Yeah, the blew the phone harder than something that blows really hard (I decided to stop before this thread gets dirty...), but Microsoft is a lot of things, and 'cool' is never, will never, and can never be one of them (brown Zune anyone?).
That said, don't be shocked in Balmer's looking for a bailout soon. Most of Microsoft's revenue is Office and Windows running on PCs. People HATE pcs. I mean they really hate them. Not just hate, but resentment too. Tablets level the playing field a lot, and they're getting cheap. Really cheap. Plus you're about to start seeing fast, $sub $50 android PCs that plug into your HDTV. Unless MS does something bout those they're pretty boned. They'll collapse under their own weight.
or build your apps on HTML5 and to hell with it all.
and it cost me $200/mo in Arizona to eat. The only way I can cut that is to switch to a diet rich in R(amen) vitamins and Hydrogenated goodness. GM is the least of my worries.
after a fashion. Video games give you a feeling of reward without hard work. Porn gives your an outlet for your urges. What's that all mean? It means people have an alternative to spewing out 10 kids. If you're part of the ruling class, this scares you. Google 'Japanese Birth Rate' and see what I mean. The 1% rely on two things
1. An oversupply of labor.
2. Balkanization (aka race baiting, homophobia, or anti-unionism, it's all the same, pit one group against another so that you're the only one on top).
A massive decline in population does away with # 1 and leaves so many resources # 2 stops working. We saw this at the end of WWI/WWII when 50 million some odd young men of working age marched off to die in trenches and freed up a lot of space in our civilization. Declining birth rates are doing it now.
Oh, and love your sig.
Getting $75 million in no strings attached loans rocks. Lesson 2: Corporate welfare rules.
Property rights are a construct we invented to improve civilization. If they are no longer serving that purpose the can and should be adjusted and/or eliminated.
Ok, so I STILL don't get this. You don't believe Meg Whitman has earned the money that she has been granted, but you think it's wrong to take away? What the hell? The point I was making was, if I take your things I have them without EARNING them. How is that any different than Meg, who's been paid millions (Billions?) to run HP into the ground? She's a leader of our capitalist society.
And if you go back to the start of the thread you'll see I was pointing out that consensus on slashdot was Meg was an incompetent boob that doesn't deserve the huge amount of wealth she commands. I don't begrudge her a good life, I do begrudge her a private jet, especially when the resources that went to that jet could feed a family of four, well, forever.
Can you answer, yes or no, do you believe Meg deserves the wealth she has because she earned it?
Ok, you keep missing this, so I will put it in caps and use very simple words
I AM A MEMBER OF THIS CIVILIZATION. THAT IS WHAT CIVILIZATION IS FOR. THAT IS WHAT GIVES ME THE RIGHT.
If you don't like that, please enjoy your decent into Anarchy. Put another way, please provide me with your full name and address so that I may come to your home and take all of your possessions, and sell you and your family into slavery. Remember, you don't have any right to question anything I happen to be able to do.
I will change up my question, just for you (cause I like ya, kid). Now than, since you believe Meg's contribution to society is worth the enormous amount of resources we dedicate to satisfying her every whim, how do you justify that? Specifically, what does Meg do to rate a private jet, the food, shelter and medical care our civilization has, unlimited resources dedicated to her fancies and entertainment, and complete freedom from any daily toil (e.g. doing the wash, cleaning her own bathroom, etc).? Please don't say the HP / Compaq Merger....
Now, understand that I DO believe there are some people we should free from the drudgery of daily life. I don't think a main like Albert Eisenstein should waste his time doing laundry. But, do tell, what is it that Meg does that's more worthy of our society's resources than Mr Eisenstein?
Oh, and you started trolling right around the time you started using badly formatted HTML and Britney Spears references...