"I'm sure the aristocracy of England thought the same thing of those pesky colonists circa the 1770's."
Because nothing at all has changed since the 1700s, right? Nope. No new guns that shoot 1000+ rounds a SECOND. No new satellites. Nothing. Jeez. Now you're just being silly.
"cap all corporate profits at 30%"
An now you're just being TOO silly. This could never work, and I hardly even know where to begin with why, but I'll start with the simple fact that company's only turn a "profit" when it's convenient. That said, you're close. The Japanese did a cap on income based on 10x your lowest paid employee. Globalize that and change 'income' to 'wealth' and we might have something.
"While all men are created equal, that doesn't mean we all have to march in lockstep when it comes to philosophy"
There's your problem. You're busy thinking about philosophy and what you feel is fair. The people in charge are busy with the practical work of making you work 80 hours a week for subsistence wages and living like Gods off the result.The world is too complex a place for 'philosophy'; e.g. for hard and fast rules. All you do is try forcing the real world to match your ideals and end up losing to the practical guy with the 1000 round/sec machine gun.
You're darling. Look at you thinking a bunch of weekend warriors with rifles are going to do anything against a modern military (except get shot).
If you don't like being oppressed, you need something more than "Freedom". You need economic security. The reason those people don't speak out is they're just barely hanging on (Seriously. Studies shows less than 50% of Americans could weather a $1000 critical expense). That's real oppression. You want security? You need health care a guaranteed right and basic income to weather tough times when the rich crash our economy. The trouble with Libertarians is all they get is paradise
it's what you'll get. Libertarianism is used by the powers that be to encourage you to pointless acts of self reliance; like voting against unemployment insurance or single payer healthcare. It's also used for Dog Whistling to being the racists out without a backlash. You might not like it, but that's the practical effect of your ideals. You're signing away on any sort of security.
Then again That's OK, because you're doing OK right now. There was an article recently about a right wing senator that forgot to cherry pick his audience for a town hall and was grilled pretty bad on healthcare (The highlight of the whole thing was when he tried to say the US has the lowest mortality rate in the world, which is patently false. He's a Doctor, and someone called him on it:) ). Anyway, the article ended with a good point, which was:
"Conservatives are the sort of people that don't believe anything unless they see and feel it first hand for themselves. He's alive and well and has great Government healthcare. Hey, what's the problem?"
I always find it amusing when the proles point out that the higher ups never get the axe. There's never any indignation, just the same blind faith that the invisible hand will mete out justice. Newsflash: these guys have tanked our economy every 5 to 10 years since 1970 and they seem to be doing just fine.
There's this myth that you can pay your sales staff like crap if you treat them nice enough. It stems from people comparing $100k/year salesmen to $30k/year salesmen. Yes, you can give a $100k/yr salesman a better work environment for very, very little money, and you'll get more out of him than if you gave him another $20k/year. The same is not true for the $30k/yr guy. It's because there's a world of difference between 100k and 30k. Scott Adams made a joke about it in one of the Dilbert books, the difference between owing a Ferrari and owing an Altima isn't as large as between shelter and being eaten by wolves. To put it another way, the $100k/yr guy can solve basic problems in his life with money (like buying his sick kid a new toy to make 'em feel better). The $30k/yr guy can't. Managers like to ignore facts like this because they don't play into their own personal narrative of boot straps and pulling. The fact that a large part of our economic philosophy is based around a physical impossibility worries me though...
Um... every single brick 'n mortor in the history of business operates that way unless they're selling ultra high margin items (read: Apple). Amazon is making it up on volume that's almost unimaginable. Reward knowlegable sales staff? If they're not good looking most people won't want to talk to 'em. For people that aren't tech savy ugly but knowledgeable is just as unpleasant an experience (again, see Apple). Want pretty people AND knowledgeable? Then you've got to do that 'Reward' thing in 'Reward sales staff'. That costs money you know? Despite what a bunch of dumb books on the subject have said, you can't reward a minimum wage monkey with intangibles (aka pats on the back) and get better performance. That doesn't work until about 1.5-2 times the medium income. If you pay them better you have to raise your prices, and then customers stop coming. If you develop them w/o the pay they just get training and leave.
Best Buy's problem has nothing to do with people grousing about bad service. It's two things a) people are done upgrading to LCDs and b) device convergence (e.g. you don't buy a phone, PDA, Camera & camcorder any more, you buy 1 phone that does all that). That, plus digital media services (dvd and CD sales are oh so profitable) and you've got a business model that's just plain going away.
At the risk of politicizing this discussion, I wonder what we're going to do with all these people we don't need any more? We're certainly not going to feed/cloth them for nothing, but there's nothing we need them to do...
Male Birth Control. It's not far off (although there's a joke in there). As we map the Genome we find why some men are sterile w/o having other problems/side effects. Using that data making shots and pills that are 100% effective and safe. Birth rates are already declining in every industrialized nation.
That's kinda our three most recognizable cultural exports. I recognize that Crocodile Dundee is kinda silly, but that Kangaroos and Fosters are about all most people see of Australia. Some of us have heard of Vegemite. Your culture (Pop or otherwise) hasn't made it that far. Sorry mate.
You're right that apple gets singled out due to it's extraordinary profitability. But the reason they're singled out is, you'd think a company with a profit margin like that could let the workers live like humans, wouldn't you?
of people with Masters in Engineering willing to work for $40k/yr. I guess that qualifies as a shortage. Still, doesn't matter. Engineers are primarily anti-union with libertarian leanings. You know, there's a reason the Lawyers have a Bar you know? Same for the doctor's Union, whoops, I mean AMA. The only way things will get better for US engineers is by banding together as single issue voters. No more giving a flying fsck if some welfare queen is getting by on tax dollars or having an abortion. You've got better things to worry about. If you tax me and extra 10k but my Union and single issue voting nets me another 30k, I'm still ahead you know.
Yeah, you can buy it for $60, but there's a chunk of pretty critical zero day DLC. Heck, Super Street Fighter II was $70 in 1995, and Phantasy Star was $80 in '84. But then again those were both commercial failures in the States...
so long as the only people that can afford to be on one are rich, retired or some combination thereof. I had a scary moment when I got called for a grand jury at my State Capital. I don't live in the State Capital. That, plus a 3 month trial and I'd be destitute. My job would fire me, I'd lose my house, etc, etc. So I sent a hardship letter and they excused me. In the end I can imagine the composition of that Jury, a bunch of rich, let's face it white, conservatives.
Unless you can figure out some way to elevate jury service to the level of Military service (e.g. with equivalent pay and protection), your wasting your time. But anyone who's ever read the history of this country can probably tell you that's sorta the point.
you need people that can afford to teach. Teachers love teaching. They'll give up a lot for it. But there are limits. In many places teachers are paid so little they can't survive as teachers. This has been the case since the 50s, but for a long time the bulk of teachers were woman and retires. The husbands brought home enough money that their wives could afford to earn less, and the retirees had pensions. As a result we had a pool of highly skilled teachers working for much less than a living wage. As real wages declined in the 70s this wasn't true anymore. People couldn't afford to retire. Woman needed more money to keep the family afloat. Teachers began to want a living wage, which raised the cost of education. We could do without the incentives if we just had an economic base that allowed people to teach.
'ability' in a child is mostly a function of the environment the mother lives in when the child is in the womb. So long as the woman has proper nutrition and avoids exposure to dangerous chemicals most children are quite capable. This is why the United States has WIC. From there it's a matter of them being raised properly.
Vouchers are a terrible idea. In practice they're used to send rich kids to good schools and poor kids to bad schools. You've no doubt seen the statistics that prove how effective they are. What you're ignoring is that the private schools that benefit from vouchers can and will expel any child whose performance falls below their desired metrics. Yes, they don't do this to the rich kids, but then the rich kids have professional tutors to give them the extra attention they need to succeed.
In the end, it's all about money. Money buys a healthy stress free life for the Mom, a safe healthy environment to learn in, the extra attention to grow and develop. The only question is, is there enough money? Well, money is just a representation of the wealth of a society, and I keep hearing about how automated factories are putting people out of work. Why can't these people teach the next generation?
The Neatherlands already fixed education. All you do is ban private schools and require all schools receive equal funding proportionate to their student body. When the rich kids have to go to the same quality of school as the poor kids, well what do you know? The schools get better. It's not rocket surgery.
very little is done for you. You'll be writing tonne of low level code you just don't need on Android. Read blogs from the guy who made Gratuitous Space Battles for more detail on this. Basically, since there's so few different iDevices you can get away with damn near writing to bare metal. If you've put the time in to do that, great. But if not Android is a nice platform.
Besides, it'll catch up on the next gen unless you're targeting the low end (like my Hauwei Ascend II from Cricket). Give it one more hardware gen and all this crap will go away.
Most mobile purchases are impusle. Like when you're stuck waiting a long time or trapped in a car on a long drive. The people that drive the market are not going to have any luck installing from untrusted sources. Yeah, for a/. poster it's easy as falling off a log, but joe & jane average just get lost in the menus. Now, what that says for the average mobile phone user I won't bother commenting on, but the model is sustainable.
either that or (god help me) Silverlight + C#/VB. Both do a really good job of separating GUI & program logic, and both have easy access to high performance display libraries (opengl for Droid, directx for Silverlight). I'm working on a combination Droid/Sliverlight app where the front end user data stuff runs off Android and the backend creations tools are in Silverlight. Oh, both have the added value of being free to develop on.
Nope, only the lawyers are entitled to millions. You get $15 bucks or a cheap plastic case. There's got to be a better way to keep companies honest than giving some schmuck lawyer millions of dollars and everyone else pittance. Christ, the last class action I qualified for I got a 10% off coupon for services from the company that screwed me. My settlement was participation in their marketing campaign for pete's sake.
but if this is all it takes to get those 'cut govmint waste!' tards off his back for the election year I'm all for it. Obama's doing this to shut them up, not because it's all that much money. But they're noisy and stupid and tend to convince other people to vote Republican. As bad a president as Obama was/is/will be, he's sunshine and sweetness next to Mitt (a man who, let's not forget, made his fortune buying companies up, borrowing billions on their good name, paying him said billions, and then bankrupting them).
what with the car companies actively campaigning against public transportation. I remember how shocked I was to find the plot to Who Framed Roger Rabbit was based on a true story.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm sure the aristocracy of England thought the same thing of those pesky colonists circa the 1770's."
Because nothing at all has changed since the 1700s, right? Nope. No new guns that shoot 1000+ rounds a SECOND. No new satellites. Nothing. Jeez. Now you're just being silly.
"cap all corporate profits at 30%"
An now you're just being TOO silly. This could never work, and I hardly even know where to begin with why, but I'll start with the simple fact that company's only turn a "profit" when it's convenient. That said, you're close. The Japanese did a cap on income based on 10x your lowest paid employee. Globalize that and change 'income' to 'wealth' and we might have something.
"While all men are created equal, that doesn't mean we all have to march in lockstep when it comes to philosophy"
There's your problem. You're busy thinking about philosophy and what you feel is fair. The people in charge are busy with the practical work of making you work 80 hours a week for subsistence wages and living like Gods off the result.The world is too complex a place for 'philosophy'; e.g. for hard and fast rules. All you do is try forcing the real world to match your ideals and end up losing to the practical guy with the 1000 round/sec machine gun.
You're darling. Look at you thinking a bunch of weekend warriors with rifles are going to do anything against a modern military (except get shot).
If you don't like being oppressed, you need something more than "Freedom". You need economic security. The reason those people don't speak out is they're just barely hanging on (Seriously. Studies shows less than 50% of Americans could weather a $1000 critical expense). That's real oppression. You want security? You need health care a guaranteed right and basic income to weather tough times when the rich crash our economy. The trouble with Libertarians is all they get is paradise
it's what you'll get. Libertarianism is used by the powers that be to encourage you to pointless acts of self reliance; like voting against unemployment insurance or single payer healthcare. It's also used for Dog Whistling to being the racists out without a backlash. You might not like it, but that's the practical effect of your ideals. You're signing away on any sort of security.
:) ). Anyway, the article ended with a good point, which was:
Then again That's OK, because you're doing OK right now. There was an article recently about a right wing senator that forgot to cherry pick his audience for a town hall and was grilled pretty bad on healthcare (The highlight of the whole thing was when he tried to say the US has the lowest mortality rate in the world, which is patently false. He's a Doctor, and someone called him on it
"Conservatives are the sort of people that don't believe anything unless they see and feel it first hand for themselves. He's alive and well and has great Government healthcare. Hey, what's the problem?"
I always find it amusing when the proles point out that the higher ups never get the axe. There's never any indignation, just the same blind faith that the invisible hand will mete out justice. Newsflash: these guys have tanked our economy every 5 to 10 years since 1970 and they seem to be doing just fine.
There's this myth that you can pay your sales staff like crap if you treat them nice enough. It stems from people comparing $100k/year salesmen to $30k/year salesmen. Yes, you can give a $100k/yr salesman a better work environment for very, very little money, and you'll get more out of him than if you gave him another $20k/year. The same is not true for the $30k/yr guy. It's because there's a world of difference between 100k and 30k. Scott Adams made a joke about it in one of the Dilbert books, the difference between owing a Ferrari and owing an Altima isn't as large as between shelter and being eaten by wolves. To put it another way, the $100k/yr guy can solve basic problems in his life with money (like buying his sick kid a new toy to make 'em feel better). The $30k/yr guy can't. Managers like to ignore facts like this because they don't play into their own personal narrative of boot straps and pulling. The fact that a large part of our economic philosophy is based around a physical impossibility worries me though...
Um... every single brick 'n mortor in the history of business operates that way unless they're selling ultra high margin items (read: Apple). Amazon is making it up on volume that's almost unimaginable. Reward knowlegable sales staff? If they're not good looking most people won't want to talk to 'em. For people that aren't tech savy ugly but knowledgeable is just as unpleasant an experience (again, see Apple). Want pretty people AND knowledgeable? Then you've got to do that 'Reward' thing in 'Reward sales staff'. That costs money you know? Despite what a bunch of dumb books on the subject have said, you can't reward a minimum wage monkey with intangibles (aka pats on the back) and get better performance. That doesn't work until about 1.5-2 times the medium income. If you pay them better you have to raise your prices, and then customers stop coming. If you develop them w/o the pay they just get training and leave.
Best Buy's problem has nothing to do with people grousing about bad service. It's two things a) people are done upgrading to LCDs and b) device convergence (e.g. you don't buy a phone, PDA, Camera & camcorder any more, you buy 1 phone that does all that). That, plus digital media services (dvd and CD sales are oh so profitable) and you've got a business model that's just plain going away.
At the risk of politicizing this discussion, I wonder what we're going to do with all these people we don't need any more? We're certainly not going to feed/cloth them for nothing, but there's nothing we need them to do...
it's backwards in Europe because of Coriolis forces.
Male Birth Control. It's not far off (although there's a joke in there). As we map the Genome we find why some men are sterile w/o having other problems/side effects. Using that data making shots and pills that are 100% effective and safe. Birth rates are already declining in every industrialized nation.
That's kinda our three most recognizable cultural exports. I recognize that Crocodile Dundee is kinda silly, but that Kangaroos and Fosters are about all most people see of Australia. Some of us have heard of Vegemite. Your culture (Pop or otherwise) hasn't made it that far. Sorry mate.
it's got the blood code, plus parallax scrolling.
You're right that apple gets singled out due to it's extraordinary profitability. But the reason they're singled out is, you'd think a company with a profit margin like that could let the workers live like humans, wouldn't you?
is looking forward to seeing how our masters will maintain scarcity.
of people with Masters in Engineering willing to work for $40k/yr. I guess that qualifies as a shortage. Still, doesn't matter. Engineers are primarily anti-union with libertarian leanings. You know, there's a reason the Lawyers have a Bar you know? Same for the doctor's Union, whoops, I mean AMA. The only way things will get better for US engineers is by banding together as single issue voters. No more giving a flying fsck if some welfare queen is getting by on tax dollars or having an abortion. You've got better things to worry about. If you tax me and extra 10k but my Union and single issue voting nets me another 30k, I'm still ahead you know.
Yeah, you can buy it for $60, but there's a chunk of pretty critical zero day DLC. Heck, Super Street Fighter II was $70 in 1995, and Phantasy Star was $80 in '84. But then again those were both commercial failures in the States...
so long as the only people that can afford to be on one are rich, retired or some combination thereof. I had a scary moment when I got called for a grand jury at my State Capital. I don't live in the State Capital. That, plus a 3 month trial and I'd be destitute. My job would fire me, I'd lose my house, etc, etc. So I sent a hardship letter and they excused me. In the end I can imagine the composition of that Jury, a bunch of rich, let's face it white, conservatives.
Unless you can figure out some way to elevate jury service to the level of Military service (e.g. with equivalent pay and protection), your wasting your time. But anyone who's ever read the history of this country can probably tell you that's sorta the point.
you need people that can afford to teach. Teachers love teaching. They'll give up a lot for it. But there are limits. In many places teachers are paid so little they can't survive as teachers. This has been the case since the 50s, but for a long time the bulk of teachers were woman and retires. The husbands brought home enough money that their wives could afford to earn less, and the retirees had pensions. As a result we had a pool of highly skilled teachers working for much less than a living wage. As real wages declined in the 70s this wasn't true anymore. People couldn't afford to retire. Woman needed more money to keep the family afloat. Teachers began to want a living wage, which raised the cost of education. We could do without the incentives if we just had an economic base that allowed people to teach.
'ability' in a child is mostly a function of the environment the mother lives in when the child is in the womb. So long as the woman has proper nutrition and avoids exposure to dangerous chemicals most children are quite capable. This is why the United States has WIC. From there it's a matter of them being raised properly.
Vouchers are a terrible idea. In practice they're used to send rich kids to good schools and poor kids to bad schools. You've no doubt seen the statistics that prove how effective they are. What you're ignoring is that the private schools that benefit from vouchers can and will expel any child whose performance falls below their desired metrics. Yes, they don't do this to the rich kids, but then the rich kids have professional tutors to give them the extra attention they need to succeed.
In the end, it's all about money. Money buys a healthy stress free life for the Mom, a safe healthy environment to learn in, the extra attention to grow and develop. The only question is, is there enough money? Well, money is just a representation of the wealth of a society, and I keep hearing about how automated factories are putting people out of work. Why can't these people teach the next generation?
The Neatherlands already fixed education. All you do is ban private schools and require all schools receive equal funding proportionate to their student body. When the rich kids have to go to the same quality of school as the poor kids, well what do you know? The schools get better. It's not rocket surgery.
very little is done for you. You'll be writing tonne of low level code you just don't need on Android. Read blogs from the guy who made Gratuitous Space Battles for more detail on this. Basically, since there's so few different iDevices you can get away with damn near writing to bare metal. If you've put the time in to do that, great. But if not Android is a nice platform.
Besides, it'll catch up on the next gen unless you're targeting the low end (like my Hauwei Ascend II from Cricket). Give it one more hardware gen and all this crap will go away.
Most mobile purchases are impusle. Like when you're stuck waiting a long time or trapped in a car on a long drive. The people that drive the market are not going to have any luck installing from untrusted sources. Yeah, for a /. poster it's easy as falling off a log, but joe & jane average just get lost in the menus. Now, what that says for the average mobile phone user I won't bother commenting on, but the model is sustainable.
can Valve?
either that or (god help me) Silverlight + C#/VB. Both do a really good job of separating GUI & program logic, and both have easy access to high performance display libraries (opengl for Droid, directx for Silverlight). I'm working on a combination Droid/Sliverlight app where the front end user data stuff runs off Android and the backend creations tools are in Silverlight. Oh, both have the added value of being free to develop on.
Nope, only the lawyers are entitled to millions. You get $15 bucks or a cheap plastic case. There's got to be a better way to keep companies honest than giving some schmuck lawyer millions of dollars and everyone else pittance. Christ, the last class action I qualified for I got a 10% off coupon for services from the company that screwed me. My settlement was participation in their marketing campaign for pete's sake.
but if this is all it takes to get those 'cut govmint waste!' tards off his back for the election year I'm all for it. Obama's doing this to shut them up, not because it's all that much money. But they're noisy and stupid and tend to convince other people to vote Republican. As bad a president as Obama was/is/will be, he's sunshine and sweetness next to Mitt (a man who, let's not forget, made his fortune buying companies up, borrowing billions on their good name, paying him said billions, and then bankrupting them).
what with the car companies actively campaigning against public transportation. I remember how shocked I was to find the plot to Who Framed Roger Rabbit was based on a true story.