Average American makes $51k/yr. And that's the Average, it's much higher than the median Even at $102k/yr you're getting a steal. H1-Bs are already trained, are trained on a specific tech, are completely disposable and work 60-80/hr/week without complaint.
Make it 4 times the Average and you might have something, but then we'll have to fight to keep them from redefining "Average".
It's like Wargames, the only winning move it not to play. End the program. If we need them here they can immigrate, just like everybody else. No more temp workers.
You'll notice it's an _additional_ 20k. They'll use diploma mills to get the workers they want. Meanwhile your wages and mine will drop.
Also, it's not 20k _total_. It's 20k this year, 20k more the next. The work visas are good for 4-6 years at least. There's already over 800k H1-Bs in this country. Why do you think it is you can't turn your head in STEM without seeing them or that they're having to cram them 5 to an apartment?
I don't think any abuses are going to be curtailed. It's going to get worse, but since Trump ran on cutting these abuses he'll have his media engine push that narrative to us tech workers. As always, watch carefully what they _do_, not what they say. I keep repeating this, but Trump still hasn't made good on his promise to revoke Obama's executive order allowing Spouses to work...
This is what I hate about corporate media. They're left on social issue but hard right on economics.
Companies get 65k H1-Bs every year. Those visas are good for 4-6 years. There's over 800,000 H1-B visa workers in this country. Most of them tech workers.
If Trump wants my attention he can start by reversing the Obama era executive order that let H1-B spouses work. That basically doubled the number of H1-Bs to 1.6 million overnight. That would also put upward pressure on H1-B wages since they'd have to pay for a stay at home spouse. He promised that during the campaign. It's been over 2 years and I'm still waiting. And no, the courts don't matter. It's an executive order. If anything the courts would side with reversing it. Obama overstepped his bounds signing the order.
This same Congress is getting ready to double the number of H2-Bs, by the way. With the help of the Clinton Democrats like Pelosi and Chuck Shumer, I might add. I'm not expecting anything here. Donald Trump's also staffed his admin with the same ex-Goldman Sach's people who've been running the country since Clinton.
If anyone wants to vote the bums out you'll get your chance in 2011. Show up at your primary. Also, and I know this isn't popular to say, but don't vote GOP. The Dems have Clinton Democrats, and those bastards need to be primaried, but the Dems have a _few_ pro worker folks like Bernie and Liz Warren. Yeah, they won't gut immigration, but birth rates are down, do you really want it gutted? What's gonna happen to your 401k if we're short workers. No, what you want is for some of that money the immigrants are earning to make it to you and your community. The GOP has been pushing trickle down economics again. The Tax Cut Trump did proved that. And it's not working, like always. GOP is out of ideas, Clinton Democrats are out of ideas. Time to give the Berniecrats a go.
those are distinct things, but it's a fact that minorities are more likely to be poor. I mean, seriously, that's just a fact.
It's also a fact that there are more poor white children than black. The takeaway there is that poverty is indeed a class problem, hence calling out the class.
So why call out race at all? Because of de facto segregation tactics. These are most commonly used in the south, but there's lots. For example, after schools were desegregated in the 60s white folks pushed heavily to fund schools with property taxes and then set up new school districts while passing laws against sending your kids to a school outside your district.
Now think about cashless society and the poor. Imagine you're a racist, or your clientel is. You don't want blacks in your shop but you can't legally refuse service. So you go cashless, knowing that most of them don't have credit cards. Maybe some do, but you can then use another defacto segregation technique: using zip codes to influence credit scores, to weed more of them out. Well, you don't personally, but your buddy on the board of directors of so and so does....
If all this sounds nuts it's because it is. Racism isn't rational except in that the ruling class uses it to divide and conqueror the working class. But for your everyday racist they're not thinking, they're feeling. Or their nuts. Same difference.
I know it's a faux pas to accuse folks of racism, but IIRC the 9/11 hijackers were here legally and we knew they were preparing a terrorist attack. Our illustrious police forces decided to "let the fish swim" so to speak. Then it came time for Bush Jr to be re-elected and he'd fucked up pretty bad so he dragged us into war with Iraq to get re-elected. Don't forget, the two countries we went to war with (and the 6 we added later) did not attack us. The hijackers were Saudis, but they were carefully escorted out of the country post 9/11 by Bush Jr...
Seriously, kick all the Mexicans you want out of the country. They're not committing acts of terror. Tight borders won't fix anything. Unless by "tight borders" you really mean "White Christians only". In which case say so.
and it had nothing to do with taking care of old people and everything to do with bloody laws that prevent us from negotiating drug prices.
Oh, and for my $1 trillion I get something (the old and poor taken care of). For the $600 billion (that we know of) we spent on the army last year all I got was a news story about us dropping a $21 million dollar bomb on some goat herders with old Russian AK47s. Sad thing is that when our president ordered it his poll numbers shot up. I suppose that's from guys like you?
Seriously, this isn't defense. It's empire. But I don't even get cheap gas for all that empire building. Screw war. It's a bad deal for everyone but the folks at the top pulling our strings and lying about bone spurs.
a lot of the Trump faithful decreased withholding following the tax cut. But they don't earn enough for the tax cut to matter. They're in for a rude awakening in April....
at least you get an interview. Nowadays thanks to H1-Bs you won't even get the time of day w/o a degree of some sort. Not everybody's got the chops for a STEM degree. You make due with what you've got when it comes to brains.
who are trying to keep the working class divided per instructions by their owners; aka the 1%; aka the ruling class.
A ruling class always needs to keep the working class fighting among themselves because if they stop they'll notice the ruling class laughing all the way to the bank. This is also why we have racism.
and probably not in her right mind. That's not me being flippant. Just that the actual probability was that she wasn't. Most homeless folks have mental problems. The reason we've got so many of them is we closed the asylums when Reagan was president.
As for the driver, maybe she should have caught it. Probably. But that doesn't change a god damn thing about how safety measures were turned off by engineers to impress their boss with the "smooth ride".
I'm reminded of that recent plane crash caused when Boeing enabled a safety feature without training the pilots. It appears they did this so they didn't scare off customers with expensive pilot training programs. This is like that in reverse; e.g. a safety feature was turned off. But was the driver told? Were they aware that they should be at a heightened awareness of risk? By all accounts no. Because like Boeing the engineers responsible probably knew they were doing something wrong.
Half a billion gone just like that and we still don't have a single credible threat to our military. We've got 19 air craft carriers. China has 1. That they got from Russia if memory serves. Oh wait, they've got two now. Woopee. Meanwhile I don't have reliable access to medicine.
I might not have explained it well, I'm not a professional orator.
It's not that Home owners, car or rental insurance covers 100%. That's not the point. The point is they kick in when disaster strikes and help you deal with the worst of the financial hits.
Healthcare is no longer about the aftermath of a disaster. It's about adverting the disaster in the first place. aka Maintenance. Not a lot of folks buy maintenance contracts on their homes because they're not a good value. You can't pick the guy that fixes stuff. That guy often just jury rigs things because he's paid a flat rate for the job. Etc, etc.
You're right about one thing, the crusade is personal. I've got several friends & family born with illnesses (a cancer survivor and one with Type 1 Diabetes comes to mind). The current system would have killed them all. They're alive today because of a patchwork of single payer systems in the US.
you're just temporarily inconvenienced millionaires, right?
The boomers didn't have Credit Cards coming out their ears either. They didn't need them.
Next, You're probably going to trot out statistics on bigger homes. Fair enough, but we live in America. Land is cheap. Building homes is cheap. The only thing that isn't cheap is infrastructure (roads, water lines, sewer lines, electric lines, etc, etc). The boomers got that for free. GenX (my Gen) got the tail end of that. Millenials got shafted. If you can afford a home you can afford a big one because that's not where most of the cost is. Home prices are sky rocketing because without the government subsidizing building by doing the hard/expensive part that's what happens.
It's pretty well documented that Millenials make 20% less than boomers. I keep seeing again and again these articles of folks deep in debt and they can't understand why. It comes down to trying to live like their parents did even when their parents shafted them by voting for Trickle down economics just to get some short term tax cuts and maybe "stiggit" to the libs a bit. TFA is just more fuel on that fire.
For me the the question is will the Millenials stop voting for these chumps? Not sure. They tried with Trump, but, well, we can see how that worked out. They're still voting on their gut instead of on policy. Their parents and grandparents got away with that for a variety of external reasons (post WWII boom followed by.com and housing bubbles). They will not.
that's what an environmental impact study _is_. The point of TFA is that Musk tried to break his project into small enough chunks to get out of doing exactly that.
the whole point of a tunnel is to reduce traffic. It's like a freeway, it lets you by pass the surface streets.
I think they're more worried about sink holes, damage to the ground water and pipes and maybe even a gas explosion or two. Musk was pretty obviously trying to break down his project into smaller projects to get around a proper impact study. That is more than a bit suspicious.
As for why these things only come up in wealthy neighborhoods, it's because poor people don't have time and money to fight it when a big company wants to do something shitty in their neighborhood. It's why about half of poor rural communities don't have drinkable water right now. A rich neighborhood has stay at home moms who can spend 8 hours at city council meetings and hire lawyers to file paper work they otherwise would have got wrong and missed deadlines for. It's one of the many, many advantages of being rich.
Regulations can have a variety of purposes. For example, there are regulations about using your house as a hotel. This can seem like a give away to the hotel industry at first glance. Until you find out that investors used to buy up properties and use them as short term rentals in popular areas, preventing regular folk from buying houses in cities where they worked and resulting in soul crushingly long commutes and a general decline in quality of life all around.
Regulations create an environment where everybody can succeed. Now, it just so happens this tends to maximize over all GDP. What it does _not_ do it maximize profit. That's because making the most money and making a good place for people to live and work aren't compatible. But a good place for people to live and work generates more overall wealth.
That's the trouble with the real world, it's more than a bit counter intuitive. If you study any scientific field you figure this out pretty quick. I wish this country had more education. It would really help.
it's a common mistake by Americans. The problem is that healthcare delivery is fundamentally not insurable. That stopped being the case when medicine became more advanced than a few pills and the occasional operation. We're past the "disaster recovery" stage of medicine and well into maintenance mode.
I have life insurance. About $500k total. Why? Because if I get in a car wreck and die I don't leave a lifetime of poverty for my family behind me. This way the kids have money to finish college and get set up in life. That's insurance: something to protect against a very rare disaster. It's also cheap. I pay $15/mo all told and I'm probably overpaying.
Now, healthcare "insurance" is a scam. I pay for it and unless I hit a pretty high out of pocket max they don't pay a dime. But I use it regularly for various maintenance activities. It's no longer a slot machine if I need the chips from the machine to live...
We know the solution: stop having my company hand a portion of my check to a private company and just give it to the gov't. Then let the gov't pay the doctors. Single Payer works in every country it's been tried in.
tl;dr: You're mixing up the value of actual insurance with the scam that is the US healthcare system, causing some confusion with the points I made above.
and strong regulations help keep it that way. I don't know enough about what Musk is proposing to comment on it's relative safety, but I can imagine there's lots of good reasons to control where somebody digs a tunnel. The most obvious ones are having your house collapse under you or a gas explosion.
Now, you might counter that with "We've been digging like this for ages and that never happens". But here's the crux: We've been digging like that for ages under one of two conditions:
a. Relatively little city build up (especially compared to Los Angeles).
b. Strict gov't regulation of the sort Musk just ran into.
See, here's the crazy part. Contrary to what you're being told in mainstream media regulations exist for a reason. Yes, there are cases where zoning is abused (usually old people who don't want the extra traffic from new shops) but there's lots of cases where it's _not_ being abused. Most regulations were created because there was already a problem or disaster and the regulation is a response to that. American laws aren't very proactive.
Again though, watch something like Fox News, CNN or MSNBC and you won't get this. That's their pro-corporate bias showing through.
Seriously. The reason for the Clergy being so prevalent in Iran is that when we overthrew their democratically elected gov't and installed the Shah the one place their people could foment a rebellion was in the Mosques. So we've got ourselves to thank for radicalizing Iran.
As for the Military, the most powerful nation on earth has repeatedly signaled a desire to invade. They're gonna want a strong military. They can't win, but they can hope to give us a bloody enough nose that we turn around and go home.
the insurance industry, for example, is heavily regulated to ensure people get value out of it.
The reason the industry won't self-regulate is they know damn well that gambling mechanics with real money being exchanged means an AO rating.
As for preventing terrible life decisions, those people's decisions effect you too. The most obvious is you get worse games. The less obvious is that people turn to crime to feed their addictions. You don't live life in a vacuum. No man is an island. And you can't just put your fingers in your ears and chant "freedom" and make out alright.
Loot boxes take advantage of well known defects in human thought and personality. They're very well known because they're the same defects that make gambling work. That's because loot boxes === gambling (using 3 equal signs to indicate exact match here).
It's about a trillion out of 15.6 trillion. We owe most of the debt to ourselves. Meanwhile what we own to other countries can largely be thought of as tribute. Folks don't seem to realize that with a big military comes an empire, and America has an empire like any other nation with a big army. You don't need 19 aircraft carriers to defend yourself against Canada & Mexico...
that "Plane full of cash and gold" was us giving them back money that was theirs. We'd gotten ahold of about $6 billion of their money and basically stole it. You can do that if you're at war. We're not.
And they don't have nukes. Even after Trump reneged on the deal they keep following it. Just like Iraq there are no weapons of mass destruction. We've got independent investigators confirming that.
Fact it, Trump wants a war. Just like Bush needed one to stay in power. You know this. You're either Trolling or being paid to Troll. Either way it pisses me off. We're spending trillions overthrowing governments. Meanwhile we don't have universal healthcare and tuition free college. Both of which are killing us on the competitive world stage.
Slashdot Mirror
Average American makes $51k/yr. And that's the Average, it's much higher than the median Even at $102k/yr you're getting a steal. H1-Bs are already trained, are trained on a specific tech, are completely disposable and work 60-80/hr/week without complaint.
Make it 4 times the Average and you might have something, but then we'll have to fight to keep them from redefining "Average".
It's like Wargames, the only winning move it not to play. End the program. If we need them here they can immigrate, just like everybody else. No more temp workers.
You'll notice it's an _additional_ 20k. They'll use diploma mills to get the workers they want. Meanwhile your wages and mine will drop.
Also, it's not 20k _total_. It's 20k this year, 20k more the next. The work visas are good for 4-6 years at least. There's already over 800k H1-Bs in this country. Why do you think it is you can't turn your head in STEM without seeing them or that they're having to cram them 5 to an apartment?
I don't think any abuses are going to be curtailed. It's going to get worse, but since Trump ran on cutting these abuses he'll have his media engine push that narrative to us tech workers. As always, watch carefully what they _do_, not what they say. I keep repeating this, but Trump still hasn't made good on his promise to revoke Obama's executive order allowing Spouses to work...
meant 2020. Stupid /. not letting me edit comments.
This is what I hate about corporate media. They're left on social issue but hard right on economics.
Companies get 65k H1-Bs every year. Those visas are good for 4-6 years. There's over 800,000 H1-B visa workers in this country. Most of them tech workers.
If Trump wants my attention he can start by reversing the Obama era executive order that let H1-B spouses work. That basically doubled the number of H1-Bs to 1.6 million overnight. That would also put upward pressure on H1-B wages since they'd have to pay for a stay at home spouse. He promised that during the campaign. It's been over 2 years and I'm still waiting. And no, the courts don't matter. It's an executive order. If anything the courts would side with reversing it. Obama overstepped his bounds signing the order.
This same Congress is getting ready to double the number of H2-Bs, by the way. With the help of the Clinton Democrats like Pelosi and Chuck Shumer, I might add. I'm not expecting anything here. Donald Trump's also staffed his admin with the same ex-Goldman Sach's people who've been running the country since Clinton.
If anyone wants to vote the bums out you'll get your chance in 2011. Show up at your primary. Also, and I know this isn't popular to say, but don't vote GOP. The Dems have Clinton Democrats, and those bastards need to be primaried, but the Dems have a _few_ pro worker folks like Bernie and Liz Warren. Yeah, they won't gut immigration, but birth rates are down, do you really want it gutted? What's gonna happen to your 401k if we're short workers. No, what you want is for some of that money the immigrants are earning to make it to you and your community. The GOP has been pushing trickle down economics again. The Tax Cut Trump did proved that. And it's not working, like always. GOP is out of ideas, Clinton Democrats are out of ideas. Time to give the Berniecrats a go.
those are distinct things, but it's a fact that minorities are more likely to be poor. I mean, seriously, that's just a fact.
It's also a fact that there are more poor white children than black. The takeaway there is that poverty is indeed a class problem, hence calling out the class.
So why call out race at all? Because of de facto segregation tactics. These are most commonly used in the south, but there's lots. For example, after schools were desegregated in the 60s white folks pushed heavily to fund schools with property taxes and then set up new school districts while passing laws against sending your kids to a school outside your district.
Now think about cashless society and the poor. Imagine you're a racist, or your clientel is. You don't want blacks in your shop but you can't legally refuse service. So you go cashless, knowing that most of them don't have credit cards. Maybe some do, but you can then use another defacto segregation technique: using zip codes to influence credit scores, to weed more of them out. Well, you don't personally, but your buddy on the board of directors of so and so does....
If all this sounds nuts it's because it is. Racism isn't rational except in that the ruling class uses it to divide and conqueror the working class. But for your everyday racist they're not thinking, they're feeling. Or their nuts. Same difference.
I know it's a faux pas to accuse folks of racism, but IIRC the 9/11 hijackers were here legally and we knew they were preparing a terrorist attack. Our illustrious police forces decided to "let the fish swim" so to speak. Then it came time for Bush Jr to be re-elected and he'd fucked up pretty bad so he dragged us into war with Iraq to get re-elected. Don't forget, the two countries we went to war with (and the 6 we added later) did not attack us. The hijackers were Saudis, but they were carefully escorted out of the country post 9/11 by Bush Jr...
Seriously, kick all the Mexicans you want out of the country. They're not committing acts of terror. Tight borders won't fix anything. Unless by "tight borders" you really mean "White Christians only". In which case say so.
and it had nothing to do with taking care of old people and everything to do with bloody laws that prevent us from negotiating drug prices.
Oh, and for my $1 trillion I get something (the old and poor taken care of). For the $600 billion (that we know of) we spent on the army last year all I got was a news story about us dropping a $21 million dollar bomb on some goat herders with old Russian AK47s. Sad thing is that when our president ordered it his poll numbers shot up. I suppose that's from guys like you?
Seriously, this isn't defense. It's empire. But I don't even get cheap gas for all that empire building. Screw war. It's a bad deal for everyone but the folks at the top pulling our strings and lying about bone spurs.
a lot of the Trump faithful decreased withholding following the tax cut. But they don't earn enough for the tax cut to matter. They're in for a rude awakening in April....
at least you get an interview. Nowadays thanks to H1-Bs you won't even get the time of day w/o a degree of some sort. Not everybody's got the chops for a STEM degree. You make due with what you've got when it comes to brains.
who are trying to keep the working class divided per instructions by their owners; aka the 1%; aka the ruling class.
A ruling class always needs to keep the working class fighting among themselves because if they stop they'll notice the ruling class laughing all the way to the bank. This is also why we have racism.
and probably not in her right mind. That's not me being flippant. Just that the actual probability was that she wasn't. Most homeless folks have mental problems. The reason we've got so many of them is we closed the asylums when Reagan was president.
As for the driver, maybe she should have caught it. Probably. But that doesn't change a god damn thing about how safety measures were turned off by engineers to impress their boss with the "smooth ride".
I'm reminded of that recent plane crash caused when Boeing enabled a safety feature without training the pilots. It appears they did this so they didn't scare off customers with expensive pilot training programs. This is like that in reverse; e.g. a safety feature was turned off. But was the driver told? Were they aware that they should be at a heightened awareness of risk? By all accounts no. Because like Boeing the engineers responsible probably knew they were doing something wrong.
Half a billion gone just like that and we still don't have a single credible threat to our military. We've got 19 air craft carriers. China has 1. That they got from Russia if memory serves. Oh wait, they've got two now. Woopee. Meanwhile I don't have reliable access to medicine.
I might not have explained it well, I'm not a professional orator.
It's not that Home owners, car or rental insurance covers 100%. That's not the point. The point is they kick in when disaster strikes and help you deal with the worst of the financial hits.
Healthcare is no longer about the aftermath of a disaster. It's about adverting the disaster in the first place. aka Maintenance. Not a lot of folks buy maintenance contracts on their homes because they're not a good value. You can't pick the guy that fixes stuff. That guy often just jury rigs things because he's paid a flat rate for the job. Etc, etc.
You're right about one thing, the crusade is personal. I've got several friends & family born with illnesses (a cancer survivor and one with Type 1 Diabetes comes to mind). The current system would have killed them all. They're alive today because of a patchwork of single payer systems in the US.
you're just temporarily inconvenienced millionaires, right?
.com and housing bubbles). They will not.
The boomers didn't have Credit Cards coming out their ears either. They didn't need them.
Next, You're probably going to trot out statistics on bigger homes. Fair enough, but we live in America. Land is cheap. Building homes is cheap. The only thing that isn't cheap is infrastructure (roads, water lines, sewer lines, electric lines, etc, etc). The boomers got that for free. GenX (my Gen) got the tail end of that. Millenials got shafted. If you can afford a home you can afford a big one because that's not where most of the cost is. Home prices are sky rocketing because without the government subsidizing building by doing the hard/expensive part that's what happens.
It's pretty well documented that Millenials make 20% less than boomers. I keep seeing again and again these articles of folks deep in debt and they can't understand why. It comes down to trying to live like their parents did even when their parents shafted them by voting for Trickle down economics just to get some short term tax cuts and maybe "stiggit" to the libs a bit. TFA is just more fuel on that fire.
For me the the question is will the Millenials stop voting for these chumps? Not sure. They tried with Trump, but, well, we can see how that worked out. They're still voting on their gut instead of on policy. Their parents and grandparents got away with that for a variety of external reasons (post WWII boom followed by
that's what an environmental impact study _is_. The point of TFA is that Musk tried to break his project into small enough chunks to get out of doing exactly that.
the whole point of a tunnel is to reduce traffic. It's like a freeway, it lets you by pass the surface streets.
I think they're more worried about sink holes, damage to the ground water and pipes and maybe even a gas explosion or two. Musk was pretty obviously trying to break down his project into smaller projects to get around a proper impact study. That is more than a bit suspicious.
As for why these things only come up in wealthy neighborhoods, it's because poor people don't have time and money to fight it when a big company wants to do something shitty in their neighborhood. It's why about half of poor rural communities don't have drinkable water right now. A rich neighborhood has stay at home moms who can spend 8 hours at city council meetings and hire lawyers to file paper work they otherwise would have got wrong and missed deadlines for. It's one of the many, many advantages of being rich.
you're putting words in my mouth. Please stop.
Regulations can have a variety of purposes. For example, there are regulations about using your house as a hotel. This can seem like a give away to the hotel industry at first glance. Until you find out that investors used to buy up properties and use them as short term rentals in popular areas, preventing regular folk from buying houses in cities where they worked and resulting in soul crushingly long commutes and a general decline in quality of life all around.
Regulations create an environment where everybody can succeed. Now, it just so happens this tends to maximize over all GDP. What it does _not_ do it maximize profit. That's because making the most money and making a good place for people to live and work aren't compatible. But a good place for people to live and work generates more overall wealth.
That's the trouble with the real world, it's more than a bit counter intuitive. If you study any scientific field you figure this out pretty quick. I wish this country had more education. It would really help.
it's a common mistake by Americans. The problem is that healthcare delivery is fundamentally not insurable. That stopped being the case when medicine became more advanced than a few pills and the occasional operation. We're past the "disaster recovery" stage of medicine and well into maintenance mode.
I have life insurance. About $500k total. Why? Because if I get in a car wreck and die I don't leave a lifetime of poverty for my family behind me. This way the kids have money to finish college and get set up in life. That's insurance: something to protect against a very rare disaster. It's also cheap. I pay $15/mo all told and I'm probably overpaying.
Now, healthcare "insurance" is a scam. I pay for it and unless I hit a pretty high out of pocket max they don't pay a dime. But I use it regularly for various maintenance activities. It's no longer a slot machine if I need the chips from the machine to live...
We know the solution: stop having my company hand a portion of my check to a private company and just give it to the gov't. Then let the gov't pay the doctors. Single Payer works in every country it's been tried in.
tl;dr: You're mixing up the value of actual insurance with the scam that is the US healthcare system, causing some confusion with the points I made above.
and strong regulations help keep it that way. I don't know enough about what Musk is proposing to comment on it's relative safety, but I can imagine there's lots of good reasons to control where somebody digs a tunnel. The most obvious ones are having your house collapse under you or a gas explosion.
Now, you might counter that with "We've been digging like this for ages and that never happens". But here's the crux: We've been digging like that for ages under one of two conditions:
a. Relatively little city build up (especially compared to Los Angeles).
b. Strict gov't regulation of the sort Musk just ran into.
See, here's the crazy part. Contrary to what you're being told in mainstream media regulations exist for a reason. Yes, there are cases where zoning is abused (usually old people who don't want the extra traffic from new shops) but there's lots of cases where it's _not_ being abused. Most regulations were created because there was already a problem or disaster and the regulation is a response to that. American laws aren't very proactive.
Again though, watch something like Fox News, CNN or MSNBC and you won't get this. That's their pro-corporate bias showing through.
Seriously. The reason for the Clergy being so prevalent in Iran is that when we overthrew their democratically elected gov't and installed the Shah the one place their people could foment a rebellion was in the Mosques. So we've got ourselves to thank for radicalizing Iran.
As for the Military, the most powerful nation on earth has repeatedly signaled a desire to invade. They're gonna want a strong military. They can't win, but they can hope to give us a bloody enough nose that we turn around and go home.
the insurance industry, for example, is heavily regulated to ensure people get value out of it.
The reason the industry won't self-regulate is they know damn well that gambling mechanics with real money being exchanged means an AO rating.
As for preventing terrible life decisions, those people's decisions effect you too. The most obvious is you get worse games. The less obvious is that people turn to crime to feed their addictions. You don't live life in a vacuum. No man is an island. And you can't just put your fingers in your ears and chant "freedom" and make out alright.
I mean Drug war? What Drug war?
Loot boxes take advantage of well known defects in human thought and personality. They're very well known because they're the same defects that make gambling work. That's because loot boxes === gambling (using 3 equal signs to indicate exact match here).
It's about a trillion out of 15.6 trillion. We owe most of the debt to ourselves. Meanwhile what we own to other countries can largely be thought of as tribute. Folks don't seem to realize that with a big military comes an empire, and America has an empire like any other nation with a big army. You don't need 19 aircraft carriers to defend yourself against Canada & Mexico...
if you don't want your brain pumped full of advertisements just don't walk into the advertising zones.
Now if you'll excuse me it's time for a smoke and a shot of popsi. Ah, the circle of consumption...
that "Plane full of cash and gold" was us giving them back money that was theirs. We'd gotten ahold of about $6 billion of their money and basically stole it. You can do that if you're at war. We're not.
And they don't have nukes. Even after Trump reneged on the deal they keep following it. Just like Iraq there are no weapons of mass destruction. We've got independent investigators confirming that.
Fact it, Trump wants a war. Just like Bush needed one to stay in power. You know this. You're either Trolling or being paid to Troll. Either way it pisses me off. We're spending trillions overthrowing governments. Meanwhile we don't have universal healthcare and tuition free college. Both of which are killing us on the competitive world stage.