The way America works, you're on the board for my company, and I'm on the board for yours. I think it's called 'the good ole boys network'; but it's just another name for our ruling class. That's why there's never any consequences for these people. They own America, and if you live there they own you.
The world's going to hell in a hand basket. Fear is being used to push radical right-wing ideologies just about everywhere. It's pretty hard to imagine anyone improving, much less everyone. This is all understood from context.
When he says Militarization, he means tanks, heavy automatic weapons and other military grade equipment & tactics. Also, he means the laws to back it up. The patriot act was used against American citizens on US Soil (e.g. provisions of it were employed to allow coordination against protestors). The level of organization, manpower and resources that went into crushing the Occupy Wall Street movement makes the 60s era anti-civil rights movement look like a bunch of hillbillies doing a civil war re-enactment.
or at least, one that counts as a military power. It's not a pleasant though, but we'll just blockade your country. We don't really bother with Cuba because they're just a wedge issue to keep Florida voting Blue, but rest assured if you rile up the American ruling class you're in trouble. I remember Belgium tried to do it. They were selling CD duplicating hardware w/o serial codes built in (so you couldn't trace back duplicates). We threatened a trade embargo and they backed down...
a) Blackberry only begrudgingly gives away development tools, and doesn't invest much in community support. (Android reason)
b) Blackberry doesn't give me access to a userbase flush with cash and with little or no inhibitions about spending it. It's mostly business' and they're tight wads (iPhone Reason).
and if the reason is copyright infringement, then they'll lose their safe harbor protection by approving the apps:(. In light of the last few days of takedowns + jailtime, Brave, but foolish...
we're the only country right now with a real military. Even China, for all it's populace, doesn't have the Navy to move them. We've been pouring 50% of our economy into war for 30 years now. Plus we've got 2 weak neighbors, tones of natural resources and a sheepish & divided populace. I'm seriously scared what gets done around the world in my name.... and ashamed.
because you're submitting anonymous, but I hate this sentiment. If it's one thing I've learned, you don't leave anything important to unregulated private industry. Fuck, they couldn't even get SAUSAGE MAKING right, let alone medical care. Leave private industry to itself and all but the super rich get taken advantage of.
Anyway, here we go: You can't make informed healthcare decisions because healthcare as a product is different than the crap Adam Smith was hawking in Wealth of Nations. You don't but it enough and the consequences for purchase are too high. Please read this and the STFUGO. Once again, fuck. Even Steve Jobs with all his money screwed up and bought the wrong product. He realized at the end that that homeopathic junk didn't do anything, but by then he was on the way out the door.
It's just another reason why, for anything really important, capitalism doesn't work. You want capitalism? You can have it for twinkies and video game consoles. Keep your capitalism off my body. It's dirty, and I'll get an infection.
"Of course I have little idea of how things work these days, whether she would get the same deal."
It doesn't, and she wouldn't. I think you're trying to argue, once again, that poor people living on the dole have it pretty good. You're missing the point though. Your girlfriend had a special deal available only to teachers that was worth the equivalent of $1600/mo adjusted for inflation. The deal was probably put in place to deal with a temporary shortage of teachers. As soon as that shortage of teachers is done away with, there goes you're girlfriend's free housing. The point you're missing is your girlfriend was in an extremely precarious position. You, OTOH, were making $90k/year (adjusted for inflation). You were in a much, much less precarious position. Certain expenses just don't go up that much. The most expensive place to buy gas in the US is $3.75, the cheapest $2.99. Outside of a few special cases (Hawaii mostly) food prices tend to top out too. Even housing prices tend to top out at 4 times national average. The reason, oddly, is basically the same thing that killed your girlfriend's free housing deal: the rich need servants, and servants need the basic necessities to serve the rich. Basically, you're girlfriend, like all poor people, is a 100 times more sensitive to changes in her situation. This is what people call 'living from paycheck to paycheck'.
But seriously, are you an astro turfer? Can there seriously be this many people that just don't get it around here?
Wow, wish I had 38k disposable per year. WTF, a burger flipping single mom makes 160 x 12 x 9.04 = $17,356.80/year (I'm using Washington because they're the highest, it's $13k where I live). And don't pull out that 'but she works overtime' crap. Businesses don't give overtime anymore, they just hire more workers. Hell, she's lucky if she gets 40/week.
So what you're saying is, according to his Missisippi study not only is she getting ALL living expenses paid in full (food, shelter, helathcare) but she's getting 21k/year cash on top of that. I call bull shit.
Hell, I call bull shit on the entire "study". Since Clinton you're limited to 4 years max for public cash assistance. Utility assistance is generally 50% max unless you're over 65). Oh, at federal minimum wage you're bumping up against the poverty line ($14k). Once you cross that you'll find lots and lots of those programs cutting you off. In Arizona 130% of poverty level 18/k per year) disqualifies you for food stamps. Cash assistance is even harder to get. And our local free health care gets cut off at $17k/year. I hear Mississippi (and all of the south) is worse. So I say again, I call bullshit.
You won't get healthcare or freedom. You'll be crushed under the jackboots of capitalist thugs. Just like those iPhone workers who aren't allowed to talk among themselves.
Oh, as for treatment: that works great for a broken bone. Try getting Chemotherapy so that your cancer goes into remission. Or try getting dental care so that your tooth infection doesn't spread to your brain and kill you. In America, if you get sick, better die quick.
And they're working on that whole 'Just drive down to the hospital and they WILL treat you' stuff anyway. Public emergency rooms are massively overcrowded. Instead of building more or expanding the current ones I'm seeing privately run urgent care centers crop up. They're private. They WON'T treat you. They'll tell you to go to the overcrowded public ones. The 1% are way ahead of you.
so you get paid for 70 hours of work instead of 60. You do know time and a half doesn't kick in until after 40 hours, right? That's a whopping $3480/year more. You managed to get your income up to about 25k. Oh, and that's assuming you can get the over time. Most people in that situation just work 2 jobs (because the bosses don't want to pay time and a half). The point I was (admittedly poorly) trying to make was, even if you can somehow scrap it together to pay for college on that kind of money all it takes is one very minor problem (broken down car + poor public transportation, sharp rise in the price of gas/food, having your apartment robbed) to bring down the whole house of cards. And if you're poor the odds of that happening are much, much higher.
I think the claim should instead be 'no one can pay for college without wealthy parents, a loan, or the kind of good fortune that normally wins lotteries'.
I wasn't suggesting you're liberal or conservative, I was just pointing out that the argument that everything would be fine if we'd all just work harder for less is a right wing construct. If you're liberal, then why the hell aren't you furious over how you've been taken advantage of? Don't you see you were? It's like Stockholm syndrome otherwise...
Finally, and you have a CS degree, and you're working at a pizza place. Dude, unless your Dad owned the pizza place there's something not right here. Even at it's worst I've never known anyone with a CS degree that couldn't do better than delivering pizza. Plus there isn't a single employer who wouldn't fall all over themselves you help you get your Masters. Google is buying up whole companies just to get to people that can code (there's a story of them shutting down a photo editing software they bought and absorbing the programmers into Picasa). None of this makes sense.
I hate saying this, but the whole thing stinks. Are you an Astroturfer? Anyone got the time/skill to trace back this guys comments and ids? I hate to say it, but it wouldn't be the first time I've tangled with an Astroturfer on/.... If you're really not, you need to start getting pissed off. You've been taken advantage of. You're being oppressed. Things have been getting worse for you for 30 years, and it's just beginning. You need to get fsckin' mad.
but these are the kind of arguments the right wing really makes. BTW, the answer, in case anyone missed it, is the child of that union. Science shows that inbreeding creates unhealthy offspring. There is not reliable evidence that children in gay couples are any worse off physically or psychologically.
For the record, I don't care two sh!ts about gay marriage. It's an issue the ruling class in America use to divide the poor so they can exploit them. I just want the issue to go away so we can get back to asking why are wages haven't gone up in 30 years.
to get your master earning 45 to 60k/yr then your bachelor's at $13k/yr. A 60 hour work week at $7.25/hr (current federal min wage) is $20,880 GROSS. If you don't have kids you pay about 12% of that in taxes just to state & fed, to say nothing of sales tax (Phoenix AZ taxes food you know).
You also probably had a supervisor happy to be supportive because he/she is looking forward to getting someone with a Masters Degree w/o having to engage HR. Oh, and my local University's science & engineering curriculum specifically states you should not be working even part time while trying to pass them. Try taking compilers or operating systems while working 60 hours a week. Yes, people do it. Rare geniuses for whom this stuff comes naturally. A certain percentage of the population is fully energized after a 4 hour sleep. These people have a natural edge. Maybe you're one of them. But if that's the case you're where you are today because of good fortune, dumb luck and the roll of the die. The other option is you went to a diploma mill that doesn't teach anything. I've got a few of those at my job. It's weird. Ask 'em what they learned and they can't tell you...
This is something I just can't get the right wing (who are the ones that bring this argument up the most) to get: The lives of People who make minimum wage are a never ending wave of problems. Life is different when you can't just fix stuff when it breaks, buy ice cream for your kid when they get hurt. You end up trying to make up for the lack of money with time and effort. If you're one of those rare people whose genetics makes it easy for you, well then bully for you. If you went to a diploma mill then all that happened is you got fleeced (wait till you get out of school with that 'Masters' degree. You think HR departments don't know a diploma mill when they see one:) ). It's like those stories about people cutting back and paying off $200k of debt in just a few years. They always neglect to tell you that the family that did it had $70 or $80 k/year coming in. You can only cut back so much before life becomes impossible. I don't care what Will Buckley's telling you...
I mean, compare Kim Kardashian to Farrah Fawcett? Then there's Debra Harry, Michelle Yeoh, heck even Dolly Parton. There's just no way it's even the 9th hottest.
it's perfectly possible to make encryption the pirates can't crack. If it wasn't they'd be making a killing intercepting credit card transactions online. What can't be done is make encryption the pirates can't crack that runs on cheap blu-ray players. Yes, the PS3 can make bullet proof encryption, it's also $250 after 7 years of price cuts. Try doing that on a $50 blu-ray player and remember, the disk has to play on both your expensive G1 PS3 and your cheap G5 player.
Now, wait another 5 or 10 years for hardware to catch up and you can kiss piracy goodbye. Depending on your opinion this is good or bad.
Patients can't do that. Healthcare diagnosis is too complex. There have been several stories on this and it's the other reason why private insurance based healthcare doesn't work. I won't try to explain it myself, just read this article. Long story short, buying 'healthcare' != 'pizza'.
Slashdot Mirror
The way America works, you're on the board for my company, and I'm on the board for yours. I think it's called 'the good ole boys network'; but it's just another name for our ruling class. That's why there's never any consequences for these people. They own America, and if you live there they own you.
There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode
high-speed pizza delivery
The world's going to hell in a hand basket. Fear is being used to push radical right-wing ideologies just about everywhere. It's pretty hard to imagine anyone improving, much less everyone. This is all understood from context.
When he says Militarization, he means tanks, heavy automatic weapons and other military grade equipment & tactics. Also, he means the laws to back it up. The patriot act was used against American citizens on US Soil (e.g. provisions of it were employed to allow coordination against protestors). The level of organization, manpower and resources that went into crushing the Occupy Wall Street movement makes the 60s era anti-civil rights movement look like a bunch of hillbillies doing a civil war re-enactment.
Yes, but what if he's a Scotsman?
or at least, one that counts as a military power. It's not a pleasant though, but we'll just blockade your country. We don't really bother with Cuba because they're just a wedge issue to keep Florida voting Blue, but rest assured if you rile up the American ruling class you're in trouble. I remember Belgium tried to do it. They were selling CD duplicating hardware w/o serial codes built in (so you couldn't trace back duplicates). We threatened a trade embargo and they backed down...
A web site is just a bookmark quickly forgotten. An app is an icon on the front page of their phone.
a) Blackberry only begrudgingly gives away development tools, and doesn't invest much in community support. (Android reason)
b) Blackberry doesn't give me access to a userbase flush with cash and with little or no inhibitions about spending it. It's mostly business' and they're tight wads (iPhone Reason).
Tux Racer?
they're taking advantage of the poor and uneducated people. This isn't a complex situation. Nobody cares. They're disposable.
Any gopher guts left?
and if the reason is copyright infringement, then they'll lose their safe harbor protection by approving the apps :(. In light of the last few days of takedowns + jailtime, Brave, but foolish...
we're the only country right now with a real military. Even China, for all it's populace, doesn't have the Navy to move them. We've been pouring 50% of our economy into war for 30 years now. Plus we've got 2 weak neighbors, tones of natural resources and a sheepish & divided populace. I'm seriously scared what gets done around the world in my name.... and ashamed.
because you're submitting anonymous, but I hate this sentiment. If it's one thing I've learned, you don't leave anything important to unregulated private industry. Fuck, they couldn't even get SAUSAGE MAKING right, let alone medical care. Leave private industry to itself and all but the super rich get taken advantage of.
Anyway, here we go: You can't make informed healthcare decisions because healthcare as a product is different than the crap Adam Smith was hawking in Wealth of Nations. You don't but it enough and the consequences for purchase are too high. Please read this and the STFUGO. Once again, fuck. Even Steve Jobs with all his money screwed up and bought the wrong product. He realized at the end that that homeopathic junk didn't do anything, but by then he was on the way out the door.
It's just another reason why, for anything really important, capitalism doesn't work. You want capitalism? You can have it for twinkies and video game consoles. Keep your capitalism off my body. It's dirty, and I'll get an infection.
"Of course I have little idea of how things work these days, whether she would get the same deal."
It doesn't, and she wouldn't. I think you're trying to argue, once again, that poor people living on the dole have it pretty good. You're missing the point though. Your girlfriend had a special deal available only to teachers that was worth the equivalent of $1600/mo adjusted for inflation. The deal was probably put in place to deal with a temporary shortage of teachers. As soon as that shortage of teachers is done away with, there goes you're girlfriend's free housing. The point you're missing is your girlfriend was in an extremely precarious position. You, OTOH, were making $90k/year (adjusted for inflation). You were in a much, much less precarious position. Certain expenses just don't go up that much. The most expensive place to buy gas in the US is $3.75, the cheapest $2.99. Outside of a few special cases (Hawaii mostly) food prices tend to top out too. Even housing prices tend to top out at 4 times national average. The reason, oddly, is basically the same thing that killed your girlfriend's free housing deal: the rich need servants, and servants need the basic necessities to serve the rich. Basically, you're girlfriend, like all poor people, is a 100 times more sensitive to changes in her situation. This is what people call 'living from paycheck to paycheck'.
But seriously, are you an astro turfer? Can there seriously be this many people that just don't get it around here?
Wow, wish I had 38k disposable per year. WTF, a burger flipping single mom makes 160 x 12 x 9.04 = $17,356.80 /year (I'm using Washington because they're the highest, it's $13k where I live). And don't pull out that 'but she works overtime' crap. Businesses don't give overtime anymore, they just hire more workers. Hell, she's lucky if she gets 40/week.
So what you're saying is, according to his Missisippi study not only is she getting ALL living expenses paid in full (food, shelter, helathcare) but she's getting 21k/year cash on top of that. I call bull shit.
Hell, I call bull shit on the entire "study". Since Clinton you're limited to 4 years max for public cash assistance. Utility assistance is generally 50% max unless you're over 65). Oh, at federal minimum wage you're bumping up against the poverty line ($14k). Once you cross that you'll find lots and lots of those programs cutting you off. In Arizona 130% of poverty level 18/k per year) disqualifies you for food stamps. Cash assistance is even harder to get. And our local free health care gets cut off at $17k/year. I hear Mississippi (and all of the south) is worse. So I say again, I call bullshit.
You won't get healthcare or freedom. You'll be crushed under the jackboots of capitalist thugs. Just like those iPhone workers who aren't allowed to talk among themselves.
Oh, as for treatment: that works great for a broken bone. Try getting Chemotherapy so that your cancer goes into remission. Or try getting dental care so that your tooth infection doesn't spread to your brain and kill you. In America, if you get sick, better die quick.
And they're working on that whole 'Just drive down to the hospital and they WILL treat you' stuff anyway. Public emergency rooms are massively overcrowded. Instead of building more or expanding the current ones I'm seeing privately run urgent care centers crop up. They're private. They WON'T treat you. They'll tell you to go to the overcrowded public ones. The 1% are way ahead of you.
so you get paid for 70 hours of work instead of 60. You do know time and a half doesn't kick in until after 40 hours, right? That's a whopping $3480/year more. You managed to get your income up to about 25k. Oh, and that's assuming you can get the over time. Most people in that situation just work 2 jobs (because the bosses don't want to pay time and a half). The point I was (admittedly poorly) trying to make was, even if you can somehow scrap it together to pay for college on that kind of money all it takes is one very minor problem (broken down car + poor public transportation, sharp rise in the price of gas/food, having your apartment robbed) to bring down the whole house of cards. And if you're poor the odds of that happening are much, much higher.
/. ... If you're really not, you need to start getting pissed off. You've been taken advantage of. You're being oppressed. Things have been getting worse for you for 30 years, and it's just beginning. You need to get fsckin' mad.
I think the claim should instead be 'no one can pay for college without wealthy parents, a loan, or the kind of good fortune that normally wins lotteries'.
I wasn't suggesting you're liberal or conservative, I was just pointing out that the argument that everything would be fine if we'd all just work harder for less is a right wing construct. If you're liberal, then why the hell aren't you furious over how you've been taken advantage of? Don't you see you were? It's like Stockholm syndrome otherwise...
Finally, and you have a CS degree, and you're working at a pizza place. Dude, unless your Dad owned the pizza place there's something not right here. Even at it's worst I've never known anyone with a CS degree that couldn't do better than delivering pizza. Plus there isn't a single employer who wouldn't fall all over themselves you help you get your Masters. Google is buying up whole companies just to get to people that can code (there's a story of them shutting down a photo editing software they bought and absorbing the programmers into Picasa). None of this makes sense.
I hate saying this, but the whole thing stinks. Are you an Astroturfer? Anyone got the time/skill to trace back this guys comments and ids? I hate to say it, but it wouldn't be the first time I've tangled with an Astroturfer on
but these are the kind of arguments the right wing really makes. BTW, the answer, in case anyone missed it, is the child of that union. Science shows that inbreeding creates unhealthy offspring. There is not reliable evidence that children in gay couples are any worse off physically or psychologically.
For the record, I don't care two sh!ts about gay marriage. It's an issue the ruling class in America use to divide the poor so they can exploit them. I just want the issue to go away so we can get back to asking why are wages haven't gone up in 30 years.
to get your master earning 45 to 60k/yr then your bachelor's at $13k/yr. A 60 hour work week at $7.25/hr (current federal min wage) is $20,880 GROSS. If you don't have kids you pay about 12% of that in taxes just to state & fed, to say nothing of sales tax (Phoenix AZ taxes food you know).
:) ). It's like those stories about people cutting back and paying off $200k of debt in just a few years. They always neglect to tell you that the family that did it had $70 or $80 k/year coming in. You can only cut back so much before life becomes impossible. I don't care what Will Buckley's telling you...
You also probably had a supervisor happy to be supportive because he/she is looking forward to getting someone with a Masters Degree w/o having to engage HR. Oh, and my local University's science & engineering curriculum specifically states you should not be working even part time while trying to pass them. Try taking compilers or operating systems while working 60 hours a week. Yes, people do it. Rare geniuses for whom this stuff comes naturally. A certain percentage of the population is fully energized after a 4 hour sleep. These people have a natural edge. Maybe you're one of them. But if that's the case you're where you are today because of good fortune, dumb luck and the roll of the die. The other option is you went to a diploma mill that doesn't teach anything. I've got a few of those at my job. It's weird. Ask 'em what they learned and they can't tell you...
This is something I just can't get the right wing (who are the ones that bring this argument up the most) to get: The lives of People who make minimum wage are a never ending wave of problems. Life is different when you can't just fix stuff when it breaks, buy ice cream for your kid when they get hurt. You end up trying to make up for the lack of money with time and effort. If you're one of those rare people whose genetics makes it easy for you, well then bully for you. If you went to a diploma mill then all that happened is you got fleeced (wait till you get out of school with that 'Masters' degree. You think HR departments don't know a diploma mill when they see one
I mean, compare Kim Kardashian to Farrah Fawcett? Then there's Debra Harry, Michelle Yeoh, heck even Dolly Parton. There's just no way it's even the 9th hottest.
it's perfectly possible to make encryption the pirates can't crack. If it wasn't they'd be making a killing intercepting credit card transactions online. What can't be done is make encryption the pirates can't crack that runs on cheap blu-ray players. Yes, the PS3 can make bullet proof encryption, it's also $250 after 7 years of price cuts. Try doing that on a $50 blu-ray player and remember, the disk has to play on both your expensive G1 PS3 and your cheap G5 player.
Now, wait another 5 or 10 years for hardware to catch up and you can kiss piracy goodbye. Depending on your opinion this is good or bad.
Oh, if you mean that link to Magic Johnson, it's the first hit in google for 'Magic Johnson thrives'.
What's a link farmer? I'm the parent and I don't know what that is...
Patients can't do that. Healthcare diagnosis is too complex. There have been several stories on this and it's the other reason why private insurance based healthcare doesn't work. I won't try to explain it myself, just read this article. Long story short, buying 'healthcare' != 'pizza'.