I don't know where you work, but aside from some crummy health insurance I pay $150/mo for (for just me, if I had my kid on it it's $450/mo) I don't get jack. And I've got one of the nicer positions in my neck of the woods. The top 10% are the only ones seeing gains that aren't pure wages, and even they're starting to lose out to the top 1%.
And History has nothing to do with it. It's just what lead us here. The farmers were absorbed into the factories. We have nothing to replace the factories, but we've still got all these people. Modern conservative capitalism says if you don't got a job, you don't get to eat, and it's your own damn fault for not working hard enough. That's where I get 70% of the populace starving. We let millions starve to death in Africa every year, any reason why we won't do the same here at home when we have no use for these people? Are you going to give them a portion of your income? No. They either tell me what you're going to do with them or admit you're going to let them starve and die. As for statistics, the 20% unemployment is just the tip of the iceberg. It's going to get a lot worse, and really fast.
And who the hell was using China as an example of what we should do. I was just noting that they have a progressive movement building that is DIRECTLY CAUSED BY AN INCREASINGLY EDUCATED POPULACE. Seriously, did you even read my post? As for people pinning hopes on the Internet, how the hell else is the middle class suppose to function and grow in an increasingly global world? They don't own private jets you know? If you have any constructive ideas I'd love to hear 'em.
but that doesn't change the fact that he was right:(. My idea of quality of life is a rising income higher than my parents, good schools and good health care. All of those are disappearing fast. Real wages have been stagnant since the 70s, school funding is being slashed (and what little money there is goes to wealthy schools thanks to the property tax scam) and the only thing going up faster than insurance premiums is the speed they deny your claims. Here in Arizona we literally just let two people die because we didn't want to pay for organ transplants.
As for the manufacturing, the big threat to Americans isn't Outsourcing, it's computers & robotics. I know keep bringing this up in my posts, but there is a sleeping bag factory making 2 MILLION bags a year with a total workforce (including salesmen, marketing, accounting and all other non-manufacturing jobs) of JUST 120 people. Fact is, it's not just that we're outsourcing, we just don't need all these people. So far the only answer I've heard to this is "Tough titties, at least they're free to starve to death in the streets".
A free, inexpensive Internet is seen by a lot of progressives as the only hope. China is starting to see some progressive movements (very little, I know) because they have a well educated middle class whose brains work well enough now to realize they're being taken advantage of. If the schools & centralized media fail us, the only hope is people on the Internet. It's not much, but I still like it better than saying 'Oh well, time for 70% of our populace to die in a gutter'.
That's the only way you could enforce this, when they try to walk out the door they set off an alarm and some poor dumb slob has to embarrass the hell out of a guest. OTHO, it'll get around pretty fast and it won't go over well. $16k isn't much money for a hotel you know. Just let it go.
and they trust the app store. You just need a trusted central authority reviewing everything. My Firefox Plugin has a binary component in it to make the MP3s, so every time I submit a new version it takes a week or two to show up on Mozilla's site, but the awesome thing is they review it for me so that my users don't worry I'm trying to pull a fast one.
If you're wondering what happened to the Republicans, they've always been like this. The stuff they're doing has been brewing since the 60s when they started to get ahold of the situation created by labor shortages & an over educated populace (GI Bill) following WWII. You just never noticed, because things were going pretty well for you back then for reasons unrelated (e.g. cold war prevented outsourcing in the 80s and internet boom in the 90s). You're waking up now because there's nothing to shield you anymore from the giant dump the Republicans are taking on you.
I'll take the liberal. Why? Because at least right now liberal means progressive, and at least that's progress. Yes, there's 'Blue dog' liberals, ones that aren't really liberals, but we can weed them out with time and effort. It's like my buddy keeps telling me: "why should I bother voting? I'm just going to lose!". The answer is, if you don't vote, if you don't do SOMETHING to keep the bastards in check and try to make PROGRESS, they're run roughshod all over you. Frankly, I would care if they did that to you, but you end up dragging me down with you.
So get off your high horse and go vote FOR SOMETHING. And for God's sake, if you're poor or middle class, read up on what the conservatives are actually proposing. Unless your rich (or astroturfing for the rich) You'll be a liberal before you know it.
This is what 8 years of Bush bought us folks, a Supreme Court on the take (look it up, it's a fact that Clarance Thomas took bribes). Hopefully a few of 'em 'll retire while the Dems are in and Obama'll man up and put some liberals in.
Nope, not joking. If you look into it, there really never was much, if any danger. The USSR was a broken country with few, if any, missiles that could reach us. Hell, after WWII they didn't have enough gas to get their tanks back home. They pulled them with horses & mules (look it up). The entire thing was an invention of Eisenhower. He thought w/o a credible threat our entire economy would collapse. There are quotes floating around where he talks about regretting the decisions; he basically created the Military Industrial Complex (can't remember if he coined the term though).
Anyway, start by reading "A People's History of the United States" and go from there. You'll find we live in a pretty screwed and screwed up country (unless you're one of the haves).
Fear over a the cold war kept jobs in the United States... Maybe if I had enough $$$ to be 'global' I'd be happier, but as it stands I'm stuck here locally...
Ah, I'm sorry, you're right. We should just forget about scientific progress all together and focus on the important stuff, like new Bentley's for the rich!
And I don't know what the hell you googled for, but it's a vaccine. You take it once and bam, done. No more childhood Leukemia. At least, not the variety it cures. Cancer is a very complex disease. It's really a class of diseases more than a disease itself, so you probably just came across one of many research projects NOT BEING CONDUCTED IN THE UNITED STATES.
Sorry if I sound bitter, but I am. I guess the point I'm making is, the world is a complex place, we need to take a long view, and the only one doing that is the Government, specifically the European ones.
Businesses don't bother with anything that doesn't have big, short term profit. They let the Guv'mint (sic) pay for it:(. Right now there's work being done on a Leukemia vaccine... in Europe. No company in the states would pay a dime for the research, because it'd be a one time vaccine that only benefits a few million people (many too poor to pay $$$ for medicine).
Also, most of the major advances in basic science are done on the public dime, and then companies swoop in to monetize it. Look up the history of the Rail Roads in the US. Fact is, you can't build the giant cartel we know & love today w/o the Gov'mint (sic, again).
the fact that it's not really legal (since Federal Law trumps state law)? On a side note, there's a goofy song about how easy it is to get medical marijuana, but it occurs to me that's only true if you've got health care. The current system of medical marijuana works great if you're wealthy. You get to smoke all you want, and you still get to call the cops of there's poor people in your neighborhood and have them arrested:(. Based on this I wonder if we'll ever see it made truly legal so long as it's safe for People That Matter...
Nintendo & Sony weren't exactly in a hurry to replace the N64 & PSOne, then along came the Dreamcast. Nintendo's in a position to do the same thing, but then again Sony could hype'em to death with the PS4. Sega made a lot of really, really bad decisions though ($100 mil for Shenmue was nuts, and the Dreamcast ad campaigns never showed those amazing games, just Sonic rapping with the NBA). Nintendo is a lot more Savvy then Sega, after all.
Glad I'm not a Nintendo engineer though. All the investors are expecting another Wii; something to turn the industry on it's head. I thought the Wii was a joke when it came out (lost count of the # of 'Play with my Wii' posts). Shows how wrong I was.
I've called Qwest before, and they put me on hold w/o music until I disconnect (the IVR, not the reps). I've heard AT&T's business support is great though, but I've never experienced it (or Qwest for that matter, when I've called for small businesses I used to do support for, they always skimped and managed to get residential service to their business:(... ).
They did a find job killing Linux Netbooks. Anyone remember that half drunk rant from an Asus CEO (or was it ACER) about MS strong arming them? I guess it doesn't matter since they don't run MS-Office, and oo.org isn't a serious competitor (nice software, but too much retraining, and if you don't think that's true, you haven't done enough tech support with end users). So how does Microsoft kill these Android phone/tablets so they don't bite into their market?
it was pretty clear from the get-go that retailers were going to get the short end of the stick with the PSP Go. They make money on software, not hardware, and the PSP Go doesn't need boxed software. They tried selling download keys in plastic cases, but there isn't a retailer alive dumb enough to fall for that. I remember the PSP Go kiosk at Best buy was just an empty PSP Go, no games:). The rumor was the only reason they had it was Sony threatened to stop shipping PS3s to them if they didn't. The retailers killed it dead.
There's a sleeping back factory that cranks out 2 million + bags/yr with 120 employees (including the sales staff, CEO, accountants, etc). It's only because human life is so cheap and worthless that manufacturing is hell.
Now, if we can just figure out what to do with all those people we don't need to manufacture stuff anymore... I guess die in the streets will do, so far it seems to be what the USA is moving towards...
He's using the iPad to highlight it, but the fact is that Americans were promised jobs in the new 'information economy' after all the manufacturing went away, and now we're seeing those jobs either aren't there or are going away. Expert systems are starting to replace knowledge workers. Factories are making millions of product with a few hundred workers (there's a sleeping bag company that cranks out 2 million bags/yr with 120 employees, and Sony just shut down a CD press factory that made 20/mil disc month with about the same). The white elephant in the room is, what are we going to do with all these people we just don't NEED?
Maybe this is a false dichotomy, but I see us either becoming a socialist nation that redistributes the wealth created by automation, or a third world hell hole were 1% of the population has everything and the other 99% fights among themselves for the scraps so they don't die in the streets.
Most people I pose that dichotomy too don't offer a third alternative, but they do say they'd rather everyone die in the streets than move to socialism ("Better Dead Than Red"). Of course, they've already convinced themselves through the lens of 'American Exceptionalism' that it'll never happen to them or theirs. Their much to smart/savvy/lucky/good looking/whatever for that. Plus nobody in this country can accept the idea that they might need civilization because they've convinced themselves if they do it means their a failure.
Hate to be a pessimist, but damn, America is a fark'd up place...
If Opera, Mozilla and Google can all make their browsers run just fine on Windows XP/Vista, why the heck can't Microsoft? Or did you really buy into that 'native HTML5' stuff?
Something still doesn't add up. Legally downloaded by who? If she legally downloaded the songs why would she have a friend make a compilation for her instead of doing it herself? I guess maybe if the music service has such a feature. I don't live in New Zealand, but I know eMusic doesn't do that, and I don't think iTunes does either. Could be something else I guess, but it still sounds like back peddling.
I do like that an elected official who has portion of the fate of her nation in her hands (albeit a small one) isn't bright enough to know how file sharing works....
the Tea Party needs to be dismantled first. Not saying it can't be done (the Tea Party's basically a construct of far right think tanks, and when the money's gone it'll evaporate), just saying it'll be years until they can pull this one off.
The Bean counters look at the specs and software you're running, never mind the fact that the last 10 patches have tripled the memory footprint and quadrupled CPU usage.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know where you work, but aside from some crummy health insurance I pay $150/mo for (for just me, if I had my kid on it it's $450/mo) I don't get jack. And I've got one of the nicer positions in my neck of the woods. The top 10% are the only ones seeing gains that aren't pure wages, and even they're starting to lose out to the top 1%.
And History has nothing to do with it. It's just what lead us here. The farmers were absorbed into the factories. We have nothing to replace the factories, but we've still got all these people. Modern conservative capitalism says if you don't got a job, you don't get to eat, and it's your own damn fault for not working hard enough. That's where I get 70% of the populace starving. We let millions starve to death in Africa every year, any reason why we won't do the same here at home when we have no use for these people? Are you going to give them a portion of your income? No. They either tell me what you're going to do with them or admit you're going to let them starve and die. As for statistics, the 20% unemployment is just the tip of the iceberg. It's going to get a lot worse, and really fast.
And who the hell was using China as an example of what we should do. I was just noting that they have a progressive movement building that is DIRECTLY CAUSED BY AN INCREASINGLY EDUCATED POPULACE. Seriously, did you even read my post? As for people pinning hopes on the Internet, how the hell else is the middle class suppose to function and grow in an increasingly global world? They don't own private jets you know? If you have any constructive ideas I'd love to hear 'em.
but that doesn't change the fact that he was right :(. My idea of quality of life is a rising income higher than my parents, good schools and good health care. All of those are disappearing fast. Real wages have been stagnant since the 70s, school funding is being slashed (and what little money there is goes to wealthy schools thanks to the property tax scam) and the only thing going up faster than insurance premiums is the speed they deny your claims. Here in Arizona we literally just let two people die because we didn't want to pay for organ transplants.
As for the manufacturing, the big threat to Americans isn't Outsourcing, it's computers & robotics. I know keep bringing this up in my posts, but there is a sleeping bag factory making 2 MILLION bags a year with a total workforce (including salesmen, marketing, accounting and all other non-manufacturing jobs) of JUST 120 people. Fact is, it's not just that we're outsourcing, we just don't need all these people. So far the only answer I've heard to this is "Tough titties, at least they're free to starve to death in the streets".
A free, inexpensive Internet is seen by a lot of progressives as the only hope. China is starting to see some progressive movements (very little, I know) because they have a well educated middle class whose brains work well enough now to realize they're being taken advantage of. If the schools & centralized media fail us, the only hope is people on the Internet. It's not much, but I still like it better than saying 'Oh well, time for 70% of our populace to die in a gutter'.
So, yeah, he was trolling. But ye was also right.
That's the only way you could enforce this, when they try to walk out the door they set off an alarm and some poor dumb slob has to embarrass the hell out of a guest. OTHO, it'll get around pretty fast and it won't go over well. $16k isn't much money for a hotel you know. Just let it go.
Just as soon as we work out the patent license. :(.
and they trust the app store. You just need a trusted central authority reviewing everything. My Firefox Plugin has a binary component in it to make the MP3s, so every time I submit a new version it takes a week or two to show up on Mozilla's site, but the awesome thing is they review it for me so that my users don't worry I'm trying to pull a fast one.
If you're wondering what happened to the Republicans, they've always been like this. The stuff they're doing has been brewing since the 60s when they started to get ahold of the situation created by labor shortages & an over educated populace (GI Bill) following WWII. You just never noticed, because things were going pretty well for you back then for reasons unrelated (e.g. cold war prevented outsourcing in the 80s and internet boom in the 90s). You're waking up now because there's nothing to shield you anymore from the giant dump the Republicans are taking on you.
I'll take the liberal. Why? Because at least right now liberal means progressive, and at least that's progress. Yes, there's 'Blue dog' liberals, ones that aren't really liberals, but we can weed them out with time and effort. It's like my buddy keeps telling me: "why should I bother voting? I'm just going to lose!". The answer is, if you don't vote, if you don't do SOMETHING to keep the bastards in check and try to make PROGRESS, they're run roughshod all over you. Frankly, I would care if they did that to you, but you end up dragging me down with you.
So get off your high horse and go vote FOR SOMETHING. And for God's sake, if you're poor or middle class, read up on what the conservatives are actually proposing. Unless your rich (or astroturfing for the rich) You'll be a liberal before you know it.
This is what 8 years of Bush bought us folks, a Supreme Court on the take (look it up, it's a fact that Clarance Thomas took bribes). Hopefully a few of 'em 'll retire while the Dems are in and Obama'll man up and put some liberals in.
Nope, not joking. If you look into it, there really never was much, if any danger. The USSR was a broken country with few, if any, missiles that could reach us. Hell, after WWII they didn't have enough gas to get their tanks back home. They pulled them with horses & mules (look it up). The entire thing was an invention of Eisenhower. He thought w/o a credible threat our entire economy would collapse. There are quotes floating around where he talks about regretting the decisions; he basically created the Military Industrial Complex (can't remember if he coined the term though).
Anyway, start by reading "A People's History of the United States" and go from there. You'll find we live in a pretty screwed and screwed up country (unless you're one of the haves).
Fear over a the cold war kept jobs in the United States... Maybe if I had enough $$$ to be 'global' I'd be happier, but as it stands I'm stuck here locally...
is there some reason we can't just call it an Alpha?
Ah, I'm sorry, you're right. We should just forget about scientific progress all together and focus on the important stuff, like new Bentley's for the rich!
And I don't know what the hell you googled for, but it's a vaccine. You take it once and bam, done. No more childhood Leukemia. At least, not the variety it cures. Cancer is a very complex disease. It's really a class of diseases more than a disease itself, so you probably just came across one of many research projects NOT BEING CONDUCTED IN THE UNITED STATES.
Sorry if I sound bitter, but I am. I guess the point I'm making is, the world is a complex place, we need to take a long view, and the only one doing that is the Government, specifically the European ones.
Businesses don't bother with anything that doesn't have big, short term profit. They let the Guv'mint (sic) pay for it :(. Right now there's work being done on a Leukemia vaccine... in Europe. No company in the states would pay a dime for the research, because it'd be a one time vaccine that only benefits a few million people (many too poor to pay $$$ for medicine).
Also, most of the major advances in basic science are done on the public dime, and then companies swoop in to monetize it. Look up the history of the Rail Roads in the US. Fact is, you can't build the giant cartel we know & love today w/o the Gov'mint (sic, again).
the fact that it's not really legal (since Federal Law trumps state law)? On a side note, there's a goofy song about how easy it is to get medical marijuana, but it occurs to me that's only true if you've got health care. The current system of medical marijuana works great if you're wealthy. You get to smoke all you want, and you still get to call the cops of there's poor people in your neighborhood and have them arrested :(. Based on this I wonder if we'll ever see it made truly legal so long as it's safe for People That Matter...
Nintendo & Sony weren't exactly in a hurry to replace the N64 & PSOne, then along came the Dreamcast. Nintendo's in a position to do the same thing, but then again Sony could hype'em to death with the PS4. Sega made a lot of really, really bad decisions though ($100 mil for Shenmue was nuts, and the Dreamcast ad campaigns never showed those amazing games, just Sonic rapping with the NBA). Nintendo is a lot more Savvy then Sega, after all.
Glad I'm not a Nintendo engineer though. All the investors are expecting another Wii; something to turn the industry on it's head. I thought the Wii was a joke when it came out (lost count of the # of 'Play with my Wii' posts). Shows how wrong I was.
I've called Qwest before, and they put me on hold w/o music until I disconnect (the IVR, not the reps). I've heard AT&T's business support is great though, but I've never experienced it (or Qwest for that matter, when I've called for small businesses I used to do support for, they always skimped and managed to get residential service to their business :(... ).
If you want to make phone calls, why are you using AT&T?
They did a find job killing Linux Netbooks. Anyone remember that half drunk rant from an Asus CEO (or was it ACER) about MS strong arming them? I guess it doesn't matter since they don't run MS-Office, and oo.org isn't a serious competitor (nice software, but too much retraining, and if you don't think that's true, you haven't done enough tech support with end users). So how does Microsoft kill these Android phone/tablets so they don't bite into their market?
it was pretty clear from the get-go that retailers were going to get the short end of the stick with the PSP Go. They make money on software, not hardware, and the PSP Go doesn't need boxed software. They tried selling download keys in plastic cases, but there isn't a retailer alive dumb enough to fall for that. I remember the PSP Go kiosk at Best buy was just an empty PSP Go, no games :). The rumor was the only reason they had it was Sony threatened to stop shipping PS3s to them if they didn't. The retailers killed it dead.
There's a sleeping back factory that cranks out 2 million + bags/yr with 120 employees (including the sales staff, CEO, accountants, etc). It's only because human life is so cheap and worthless that manufacturing is hell.
Now, if we can just figure out what to do with all those people we don't need to manufacture stuff anymore... I guess die in the streets will do, so far it seems to be what the USA is moving towards...
He's using the iPad to highlight it, but the fact is that Americans were promised jobs in the new 'information economy' after all the manufacturing went away, and now we're seeing those jobs either aren't there or are going away. Expert systems are starting to replace knowledge workers. Factories are making millions of product with a few hundred workers (there's a sleeping bag company that cranks out 2 million bags/yr with 120 employees, and Sony just shut down a CD press factory that made 20/mil disc month with about the same). The white elephant in the room is, what are we going to do with all these people we just don't NEED?
Maybe this is a false dichotomy, but I see us either becoming a socialist nation that redistributes the wealth created by automation, or a third world hell hole were 1% of the population has everything and the other 99% fights among themselves for the scraps so they don't die in the streets.
Most people I pose that dichotomy too don't offer a third alternative, but they do say they'd rather everyone die in the streets than move to socialism ("Better Dead Than Red"). Of course, they've already convinced themselves through the lens of 'American Exceptionalism' that it'll never happen to them or theirs. Their much to smart/savvy/lucky/good looking/whatever for that. Plus nobody in this country can accept the idea that they might need civilization because they've convinced themselves if they do it means their a failure.
Hate to be a pessimist, but damn, America is a fark'd up place...
If Opera, Mozilla and Google can all make their browsers run just fine on Windows XP/Vista, why the heck can't Microsoft? Or did you really buy into that 'native HTML5' stuff?
Something still doesn't add up. Legally downloaded by who? If she legally downloaded the songs why would she have a friend make a compilation for her instead of doing it herself? I guess maybe if the music service has such a feature. I don't live in New Zealand, but I know eMusic doesn't do that, and I don't think iTunes does either. Could be something else I guess, but it still sounds like back peddling.
I do like that an elected official who has portion of the fate of her nation in her hands (albeit a small one) isn't bright enough to know how file sharing works....
the Tea Party needs to be dismantled first. Not saying it can't be done (the Tea Party's basically a construct of far right think tanks, and when the money's gone it'll evaporate), just saying it'll be years until they can pull this one off.
The Bean counters look at the specs and software you're running, never mind the fact that the last 10 patches have tripled the memory footprint and quadrupled CPU usage.