with overwhelming power. The left believes in regulation. The right believes winner take all, might makes right and to the victor go the spoils.
Sad thing is if you ever got you're way you'd be eaten alive by the right. Entrenched wealth and power is too much for anyone or anything besides a powerful central government to stand up to. As for that powerful central government, you use democracy and education to keep it in line. Beats the hell out of an aristocracy if you ask me. But maybe I'd change my tune if I was born a king. Oh, there's another feature of the left: We don't think anyone, including ourselves, is above reproach.
When you speak "right" and "left" what you do personally doesn't matter. You're talking about politics and how the government is run. It's all well and good that you do good things. Keep it up. But your actions don't happen in a vacuum, and your good deeds are dwarfed by the horrors that are routinely committed in your name by your government.
As for the government taking over your efforts to do good, I'm sorry, but the government needs to be in charge of those things. That doesn't mean you can't work in parallel with the government, but ask yourself this: When in the entire history of human civilization has personal charity been enough to solve systemic problems in a society?
Again, the good you do isn't worthless, but it gets drowned out by the evil done in your name. It's like trying to pay for retirement by skipping a cup of coffee in the morning when you make $2 bucks an hour. You need a broader solution. And going by history those solutions have always come from government.
Lastly the trouble with trying to live in a world of "small government" is that the ruling class just won't let you do that. If you don't build power structures to improve your life and the lives of your community others will. Well, except without the "community" part.
Yeah, I know, off topic. But maybe not. If we can replace the few honest news anchors left with robots that parrot the party line then it'll be establishment propaganda 24/7. Heck, they'll have to make it 25/8 just to fit all that nonsense in. And it's not like they can't change it, since they'll make the rules.
you're attacking. Problem A) is Facebook is too big and powerful. We already have ways to break up natural monopolies like that. We did it to AT&T until we stopped and they bought up all the bells we broke them up into.
Problem B) is the real problem, e.g. that America has a ruling class and that we haven't been taking steps to reign them in (e.g. we let AT&T buy up all the old companies we spent so much effort splitting them up into).
The solution there is more Democracy. Automatic voter registration, vote by mail in all states, mandatory voting (like Jury duty it's a civic duty), no more taking away voting rights for _any_ reason, etc, etc. All of these things are needed to prevent voter suppression and maintain actual Democracy. From there, Ranked Choice voting is a nice step into an eventual parliamentary system (our current system is explicitly designed to break Democracy. It was built that way as a compromise with the slave owners because they didn't want the North to free the slaves, look it up). Lastly education. Lots of it. A well informed electorate doesn't screw up constantly and doesn't fall for classic Strong Man arguments and fearmongering.
We can look at European & Scandinavian countries where these polices work like a charm; so it's not as though we don't know they work. But there's a lot of folks who don't _want_ democracy. A good 20%-30% of the population sees themselves as members of the Aristocracy and fight to maintain it. Yes, most of those people are dirt poor. I never said they were being rational. But I never said they were stupid either. That's where education comes in.
ever. I might occasionally see eye to eye with them. But anyone with that much raw power shouldn't be trusted.
We need to realize that past a certain point money isn't money anymore. It's power. And by allowing the 1% to have that much wealth we've given them the bulk of the power in this world. We've made them an aristocracy. Kings and Queens. This is one of the reasons why we had a top tax bracket of 90%. That power has to go somewhere. Ignoring that is naive to the point of madness.
Bernie is the left. Liz Warren is the left. Alexandria Ocasio-cortez is the left.
Zuck is a member of the ruling class. He's not one of our own. He and the left might occasionally see eye to eye on social issues, but where it matters (economics) he's as far right as any member of the American ruling class.
On a side note, the left does not eat it's own, but we don't have Reagan's 11th commandment. That's because our goal is to make the world a better place. The right, OTOH, have a different purpose. They're goal is to shift as much money to the top as they can, taking some of it for themselves along the way. You can see this in their economic policies. In how they talk about "Job Creators" instead of higher wages. In their emphasis on strong men (like our current president). In their support for corporate welfare (re: Amazon's HeliPad) and constant opposition to social programs like Medicare of All.
The left squabble over how best to improve the world. The right don't have that problem because, well, they're not trying to do that...
the Model is fine. It's not accurate enough to say if a city is going to get missed, it's just accurate enough to tell folks when to evacuate.
That's the trouble with science, it's not exact. Not yet anyway. Folks like yourself are exploiting that for profit, or trying to. It'll bite you in the ass eventually. Your masters will turn on you.
when he's under investigation for violation of the emoluments clause. Which he will be soon. The Dems, assuming they have any backbone, will be nailing him to the wall over that. Not because of partisanship (though they could do with a bit more of that, ever since that bastard Gingrich started open war in the House the Dems have been getting their asses kicked and the country is much worse off for it) but because having a president who can and will be bought off by foreign powers is terrifying. That's something we should all agree on.
they've already delayed the lawsuit by several months. A defensive weapon is still a weapon. Now all they have to do is keep buying off politicians (and get voters to keep voting for bought politicians) and they're all set.
And at the risk of being modded troll (because nobody likes bringing the parties into it), once again this wouldn't be happening if Trump wasn't in office. If we can stave his man Pai off for 2 more years we've got a chance to restore Net Neutrality, but that means voting for a Democrat. The question for the Trumpers is, is Net Neutrality worth it? We'll find out.
Donald Trump is dumb as a blade of grass, but he's tremendously charismatic. Trump could have gotten away with Benghzi. He'd have said the same things, done the same things, and none of it would stick. Keep in mind Trump called getting an STD from sleeping around his Vietnam and got out of the war by claiming bone spurs while playing sports. Nothing sticks to him because he's got Charisma.
Point is, intelligence is not the same thing as Charisma.
and go after him for violations of the emoluments clause. Then we can worry about little things like this. I don't want political theater designed to keep Clinton Democrats busy, I want the rule of law restored.
which is why you won't see much talk about this outside of forums like/. Even talking about it is heavily discouraged. It doesn't help that you're inevitably lumped in with racists. If anything I really, really wish racism would go away so we could have an honest discussion about immigration and it's impact on wages.
my Dad got screwed by his. Had to go back to work when the market crash took his retirement out. That's kind of the problem with 401ks. The stock market is too cyclic to rely on for retirement. The creator of the things himself said that. 401k was a tool for high income earners (think $300k+/yr in 2018 dollars) to save a little extra. It was never supposed to be a primary retirement tool; it got turned into one when the rich stole our pensions.
the ruling class have the Military. They'll send drone strikes and bomb you into pulp. Best case scenario you become like Afghanistan; a small group of terrorists pushed into the land nobody wants and occasionally coming down to blow up a school bus or something. Worst case the Military "joins" your revolution and you get Juntu and a change of masters for the worse.
If you want to stop this now's the time. Do it before turning to violence. Violence just plain doesn't work. You lose out to the "King Rat". The most violent of the violent. That's what happened with Mao & Stalin.
Vote. Especially in your primary. Look for candidates who refuse corporate PAC money (google "Our Revolution" and "Justice Democrats", sorry, but I don't think you'll find a GOP equivalent, yes, this is a partisan issue now...). Demand vote by mail if you don't already have it. Demand an end to voter suppression. If you're going to take back the country now's the time.
they won't hire me for programming gigs. One guy said the Indians were "Java Savants". It was mostly the new guys who didn't realize they were committing a crime. I've also seen job postings specifically asking for H1-Bs (posted where the other H1-Bs were to see it and pass it along back home).
My State doesn't really have a labor department and with a Whitehouse packed full of ex-Goldman Sachs employees I haven't bothered to report it. I'm not so naive that I think anything is going to be done. I've been showing up at my state's primary elections to try and get folks like this in office since they refuse corporate PAC money. I figure that's a good place to start, no more politicians who get bought off.
because they won't release those stats. They use contractors to hide it. The published stats are for FTEs. A huge part of the reason to use contractor firms for that is to hide those stats.
Anecdotally the last 4 places I've worked at are pushing 80%.
American elites decided to ruin our middle and working classes for the benefit of themselves.
FTFY.
Things did NOT get better in Mexico with NAFTA. Our cheap corn imports wrecked their economy and the low paying manufacturing jobs are poisoning them. Meanwhile our drug war has made a mess of their country and their neighbor's countries.
China didn't get better because of us, they industrialized. Industrialization and the modernization that goes with it is overall a good thing. But the relentless drive for cheap consumer goods is preventing their working class from organizing and demanding better wages. America has become dependent on cheap Chinese goods for our own economic security because it's the only thing offsetting the constant drop in wages TFA is talking about.
The solution isn't isolationism or trade wars. It's Unionization & worker solidarity across borders. Demand a higher standard of living for the Mexicans and the Chinese and it'll raise yours too. You're trapped in a race to the bottom. The only winning move is not to play.
you're thinking like a member of the working class. The Ruling Class is global now, and they get along just fine with China. Sure, there's the occasional bit of back and forth, but it's all in good fun.
Now, as a member of the working class the Chinese government is about the worst thing ever. They massively drive down wages and standards of living across the globe. But good luck doing anything about that. It's hard to say no to a 50" TV for $200 bucks.
the problem is rent seeking. Owning property is traditionally how working class Americans build wealth. You own your house and don't pay rent. Then you can take the money you save on rent and invest it in education, if not for yourself then your kids. This is how things worked for the boomers, but they seem to have broken that for Gen X.
The boomers gave up their pensions for the promise of big cash payouts tax cuts and deregulation. The didn't get the tax cuts, and the deregulation tanked the economy and destroyed what little they had in their 401ks. They're taking their limited savings and buying houses to rent to Gen Xers and Millennials. Those Gen Xers & Millennials have even less money since they didn't have the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s to build wealth like the boomers did. We got wiped out by the 2000 crash and outsourcing bonanza that shifted trillions to the 1%.
The Millennials have it especially bad. Us GenXers at least had the tail end of the.com boom and housing booms to store a little away. Those poor bastards walked out of college with $100k+ in debt into the worst economy since the 1930s. They tried to protest at that "Occupy Wall Street" thing and were shut down by the FBI & provisions in the patriot act. Man, what a world.
Sorry to be so harsh, but it's worth saying. Yes, there are bad workers coming here on Visa contracts. But in aggregate they're just fine. They also work longer hours and, since they're contractors, companies don't worry about burning them out. They also don't have to worry about them Unionizing and they have tremendous leverage of the employee since they can fire them at any time and send them back to their native country, usually with a large pay cut when they go back.
If these workers were a bad deal for companies then that would show up in the market. Companies that didn't use them would have poorer results and eventually the programs would wither and die. That is the exact opposite of what happens. Every year companies demand the caps be increased (and some, like Hillary Clinton, wanted no caps whatsoever). The companies that rely on them are some of the most profitable in human history.
The H1-B visa program works great for companies. But not so much for American workers. I think if we had more social programs and less dog-eat-dog capitalism that wouldn't be the case (e.g. if the average American worker got some sort of benefit from all that cheap labor), but as it stands it's a raw deal.
more than anything. Before Y2K you had the cold war keeping jobs from going overseas and from cheap work visas flooding tech. That kept wages high.
I'm not saying we should go back to isolationism and xenophobia. I don't think we could if we wanted to, cat's out of the bag on that. And it wasn't good for the 30% of the population that wasn't white (just ask a black person over 60 what life was like 40 years ago, bonus points if they're from the South).
The solution, at least for America, is more social services. Medicare for All, jobs guarantees, etc, etc. Right now nobody's getting any benefit from the global economy unless they're in the top 15% or so (e.g. rich enough to invest in the stock market). For everyone else globalization hasn't got us anything but cheap TVs and Playstations. If the tax dollars those immigrants paid gave me healthcare, schools, jobs, roads, etc, etc we'd have a lot less friction.
subsidized by somebody else then no, you're not dumb. You're doing something perfectly rational. I think the phrase is "tragedy of the commons" but I could be wrong.
Workers are now paying for their own educations thanks to massive cuts to state and federal college funding.
Also, cheap work visas let you get workers trained overseas. These workers are either trained by their governments or (again) often on their own time/dime because of the intensely competitive economies they come from. India is especially bad about this as they've got a massive educated class and not nearly enough to do with them.
What I'm saying is that workers have been made into disposable commodities. But pride keeps us from facing that harsh reality head on and taking the steps needed to mitigate the damage (read: Unionize and solidarity).
they've got the H1-B program. They can pit you against workers from around the globe. Workers who trained themselves. Billions of them. So many that a few are bound to work out. Plus they can work them 80+ hours a week and not worry about burnout since there's a 100+ guys right behind them and behind those 100 guys is you.
This is what happens when workers get too confident in their abilities to start to think they can make it on their own. A single employee can't effectively negotiate with a mega corporation unless that employee is in the top 10% of geniuses, and, well, the reality is 90% of us aren't. If we were we'd know that, because 100-10=90...
they all did. She talked with Colin Powell about it. She knew it was wrong to store public documents and a private server. To her one and only credit she didn't throw Powell under the bus over it. But by then the media feeding frenzy was in full gear and her one and only noble gesture (taking responsibility for the whole fiasco) went nowhere.
Hilary is very, very intelligent. Not saying she uses that intelligence in the most upstanding manor. But make no mistake, her failing was arrogance, not stupidity.
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with overwhelming power. The left believes in regulation. The right believes winner take all, might makes right and to the victor go the spoils.
Sad thing is if you ever got you're way you'd be eaten alive by the right. Entrenched wealth and power is too much for anyone or anything besides a powerful central government to stand up to. As for that powerful central government, you use democracy and education to keep it in line. Beats the hell out of an aristocracy if you ask me. But maybe I'd change my tune if I was born a king. Oh, there's another feature of the left: We don't think anyone, including ourselves, is above reproach.
I'm speaking in context.
When you speak "right" and "left" what you do personally doesn't matter. You're talking about politics and how the government is run. It's all well and good that you do good things. Keep it up. But your actions don't happen in a vacuum, and your good deeds are dwarfed by the horrors that are routinely committed in your name by your government.
As for the government taking over your efforts to do good, I'm sorry, but the government needs to be in charge of those things. That doesn't mean you can't work in parallel with the government, but ask yourself this: When in the entire history of human civilization has personal charity been enough to solve systemic problems in a society?
Again, the good you do isn't worthless, but it gets drowned out by the evil done in your name. It's like trying to pay for retirement by skipping a cup of coffee in the morning when you make $2 bucks an hour. You need a broader solution. And going by history those solutions have always come from government.
Lastly the trouble with trying to live in a world of "small government" is that the ruling class just won't let you do that. If you don't build power structures to improve your life and the lives of your community others will. Well, except without the "community" part.
how to badger left wing candidates for sound bites they can later use against them and read the same script of right wing talking points
Yeah, I know, off topic. But maybe not. If we can replace the few honest news anchors left with robots that parrot the party line then it'll be establishment propaganda 24/7. Heck, they'll have to make it 25/8 just to fit all that nonsense in. And it's not like they can't change it, since they'll make the rules.
you're attacking. Problem A) is Facebook is too big and powerful. We already have ways to break up natural monopolies like that. We did it to AT&T until we stopped and they bought up all the bells we broke them up into.
Problem B) is the real problem, e.g. that America has a ruling class and that we haven't been taking steps to reign them in (e.g. we let AT&T buy up all the old companies we spent so much effort splitting them up into).
The solution there is more Democracy. Automatic voter registration, vote by mail in all states, mandatory voting (like Jury duty it's a civic duty), no more taking away voting rights for _any_ reason, etc, etc. All of these things are needed to prevent voter suppression and maintain actual Democracy. From there, Ranked Choice voting is a nice step into an eventual parliamentary system (our current system is explicitly designed to break Democracy. It was built that way as a compromise with the slave owners because they didn't want the North to free the slaves, look it up). Lastly education. Lots of it. A well informed electorate doesn't screw up constantly and doesn't fall for classic Strong Man arguments and fearmongering.
We can look at European & Scandinavian countries where these polices work like a charm; so it's not as though we don't know they work. But there's a lot of folks who don't _want_ democracy. A good 20%-30% of the population sees themselves as members of the Aristocracy and fight to maintain it. Yes, most of those people are dirt poor. I never said they were being rational. But I never said they were stupid either. That's where education comes in.
ever. I might occasionally see eye to eye with them. But anyone with that much raw power shouldn't be trusted.
We need to realize that past a certain point money isn't money anymore. It's power. And by allowing the 1% to have that much wealth we've given them the bulk of the power in this world. We've made them an aristocracy. Kings and Queens. This is one of the reasons why we had a top tax bracket of 90%. That power has to go somewhere. Ignoring that is naive to the point of madness.
Bernie is the left. Liz Warren is the left. Alexandria Ocasio-cortez is the left.
Zuck is a member of the ruling class. He's not one of our own. He and the left might occasionally see eye to eye on social issues, but where it matters (economics) he's as far right as any member of the American ruling class.
On a side note, the left does not eat it's own, but we don't have Reagan's 11th commandment. That's because our goal is to make the world a better place. The right, OTOH, have a different purpose. They're goal is to shift as much money to the top as they can, taking some of it for themselves along the way. You can see this in their economic policies. In how they talk about "Job Creators" instead of higher wages. In their emphasis on strong men (like our current president). In their support for corporate welfare (re: Amazon's HeliPad) and constant opposition to social programs like Medicare of All.
The left squabble over how best to improve the world. The right don't have that problem because, well, they're not trying to do that...
seriously, it's not a problem.
the Model is fine. It's not accurate enough to say if a city is going to get missed, it's just accurate enough to tell folks when to evacuate.
That's the trouble with science, it's not exact. Not yet anyway. Folks like yourself are exploiting that for profit, or trying to. It'll bite you in the ass eventually. Your masters will turn on you.
when he's under investigation for violation of the emoluments clause. Which he will be soon. The Dems, assuming they have any backbone, will be nailing him to the wall over that. Not because of partisanship (though they could do with a bit more of that, ever since that bastard Gingrich started open war in the House the Dems have been getting their asses kicked and the country is much worse off for it) but because having a president who can and will be bought off by foreign powers is terrifying. That's something we should all agree on.
they've already delayed the lawsuit by several months. A defensive weapon is still a weapon. Now all they have to do is keep buying off politicians (and get voters to keep voting for bought politicians) and they're all set.
And at the risk of being modded troll (because nobody likes bringing the parties into it), once again this wouldn't be happening if Trump wasn't in office. If we can stave his man Pai off for 2 more years we've got a chance to restore Net Neutrality, but that means voting for a Democrat. The question for the Trumpers is, is Net Neutrality worth it? We'll find out.
Donald Trump is dumb as a blade of grass, but he's tremendously charismatic. Trump could have gotten away with Benghzi. He'd have said the same things, done the same things, and none of it would stick. Keep in mind Trump called getting an STD from sleeping around his Vietnam and got out of the war by claiming bone spurs while playing sports. Nothing sticks to him because he's got Charisma.
Point is, intelligence is not the same thing as Charisma.
and go after him for violations of the emoluments clause. Then we can worry about little things like this. I don't want political theater designed to keep Clinton Democrats busy, I want the rule of law restored.
which is why you won't see much talk about this outside of forums like /. Even talking about it is heavily discouraged. It doesn't help that you're inevitably lumped in with racists. If anything I really, really wish racism would go away so we could have an honest discussion about immigration and it's impact on wages.
my Dad got screwed by his. Had to go back to work when the market crash took his retirement out. That's kind of the problem with 401ks. The stock market is too cyclic to rely on for retirement. The creator of the things himself said that. 401k was a tool for high income earners (think $300k+/yr in 2018 dollars) to save a little extra. It was never supposed to be a primary retirement tool; it got turned into one when the rich stole our pensions.
the ruling class have the Military. They'll send drone strikes and bomb you into pulp. Best case scenario you become like Afghanistan; a small group of terrorists pushed into the land nobody wants and occasionally coming down to blow up a school bus or something. Worst case the Military "joins" your revolution and you get Juntu and a change of masters for the worse.
If you want to stop this now's the time. Do it before turning to violence. Violence just plain doesn't work. You lose out to the "King Rat". The most violent of the violent. That's what happened with Mao & Stalin.
Vote. Especially in your primary. Look for candidates who refuse corporate PAC money (google "Our Revolution" and "Justice Democrats", sorry, but I don't think you'll find a GOP equivalent, yes, this is a partisan issue now...). Demand vote by mail if you don't already have it. Demand an end to voter suppression. If you're going to take back the country now's the time.
they won't hire me for programming gigs. One guy said the Indians were "Java Savants". It was mostly the new guys who didn't realize they were committing a crime. I've also seen job postings specifically asking for H1-Bs (posted where the other H1-Bs were to see it and pass it along back home).
My State doesn't really have a labor department and with a Whitehouse packed full of ex-Goldman Sachs employees I haven't bothered to report it. I'm not so naive that I think anything is going to be done. I've been showing up at my state's primary elections to try and get folks like this in office since they refuse corporate PAC money. I figure that's a good place to start, no more politicians who get bought off.
because they won't release those stats. They use contractors to hide it. The published stats are for FTEs. A huge part of the reason to use contractor firms for that is to hide those stats.
Anecdotally the last 4 places I've worked at are pushing 80%.
FTFY.
Things did NOT get better in Mexico with NAFTA. Our cheap corn imports wrecked their economy and the low paying manufacturing jobs are poisoning them. Meanwhile our drug war has made a mess of their country and their neighbor's countries.
China didn't get better because of us, they industrialized. Industrialization and the modernization that goes with it is overall a good thing. But the relentless drive for cheap consumer goods is preventing their working class from organizing and demanding better wages. America has become dependent on cheap Chinese goods for our own economic security because it's the only thing offsetting the constant drop in wages TFA is talking about.
The solution isn't isolationism or trade wars. It's Unionization & worker solidarity across borders. Demand a higher standard of living for the Mexicans and the Chinese and it'll raise yours too. You're trapped in a race to the bottom. The only winning move is not to play.
you're thinking like a member of the working class. The Ruling Class is global now, and they get along just fine with China. Sure, there's the occasional bit of back and forth, but it's all in good fun.
Now, as a member of the working class the Chinese government is about the worst thing ever. They massively drive down wages and standards of living across the globe. But good luck doing anything about that. It's hard to say no to a 50" TV for $200 bucks.
the problem is rent seeking. Owning property is traditionally how working class Americans build wealth. You own your house and don't pay rent. Then you can take the money you save on rent and invest it in education, if not for yourself then your kids. This is how things worked for the boomers, but they seem to have broken that for Gen X.
.com boom and housing booms to store a little away. Those poor bastards walked out of college with $100k+ in debt into the worst economy since the 1930s. They tried to protest at that "Occupy Wall Street" thing and were shut down by the FBI & provisions in the patriot act. Man, what a world.
The boomers gave up their pensions for the promise of big cash payouts tax cuts and deregulation. The didn't get the tax cuts, and the deregulation tanked the economy and destroyed what little they had in their 401ks. They're taking their limited savings and buying houses to rent to Gen Xers and Millennials. Those Gen Xers & Millennials have even less money since they didn't have the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s to build wealth like the boomers did. We got wiped out by the 2000 crash and outsourcing bonanza that shifted trillions to the 1%.
The Millennials have it especially bad. Us GenXers at least had the tail end of the
Sorry to be so harsh, but it's worth saying. Yes, there are bad workers coming here on Visa contracts. But in aggregate they're just fine. They also work longer hours and, since they're contractors, companies don't worry about burning them out. They also don't have to worry about them Unionizing and they have tremendous leverage of the employee since they can fire them at any time and send them back to their native country, usually with a large pay cut when they go back.
If these workers were a bad deal for companies then that would show up in the market. Companies that didn't use them would have poorer results and eventually the programs would wither and die. That is the exact opposite of what happens. Every year companies demand the caps be increased (and some, like Hillary Clinton, wanted no caps whatsoever). The companies that rely on them are some of the most profitable in human history.
The H1-B visa program works great for companies. But not so much for American workers. I think if we had more social programs and less dog-eat-dog capitalism that wouldn't be the case (e.g. if the average American worker got some sort of benefit from all that cheap labor), but as it stands it's a raw deal.
more than anything. Before Y2K you had the cold war keeping jobs from going overseas and from cheap work visas flooding tech. That kept wages high.
I'm not saying we should go back to isolationism and xenophobia. I don't think we could if we wanted to, cat's out of the bag on that. And it wasn't good for the 30% of the population that wasn't white (just ask a black person over 60 what life was like 40 years ago, bonus points if they're from the South).
The solution, at least for America, is more social services. Medicare for All, jobs guarantees, etc, etc. Right now nobody's getting any benefit from the global economy unless they're in the top 15% or so (e.g. rich enough to invest in the stock market). For everyone else globalization hasn't got us anything but cheap TVs and Playstations. If the tax dollars those immigrants paid gave me healthcare, schools, jobs, roads, etc, etc we'd have a lot less friction.
Of course, somebody is profiting from that...
subsidized by somebody else then no, you're not dumb. You're doing something perfectly rational. I think the phrase is "tragedy of the commons" but I could be wrong.
Workers are now paying for their own educations thanks to massive cuts to state and federal college funding.
Also, cheap work visas let you get workers trained overseas. These workers are either trained by their governments or (again) often on their own time/dime because of the intensely competitive economies they come from. India is especially bad about this as they've got a massive educated class and not nearly enough to do with them.
What I'm saying is that workers have been made into disposable commodities. But pride keeps us from facing that harsh reality head on and taking the steps needed to mitigate the damage (read: Unionize and solidarity).
they've got the H1-B program. They can pit you against workers from around the globe. Workers who trained themselves. Billions of them. So many that a few are bound to work out. Plus they can work them 80+ hours a week and not worry about burnout since there's a 100+ guys right behind them and behind those 100 guys is you.
This is what happens when workers get too confident in their abilities to start to think they can make it on their own. A single employee can't effectively negotiate with a mega corporation unless that employee is in the top 10% of geniuses, and, well, the reality is 90% of us aren't. If we were we'd know that, because 100-10=90...
they all did. She talked with Colin Powell about it. She knew it was wrong to store public documents and a private server. To her one and only credit she didn't throw Powell under the bus over it. But by then the media feeding frenzy was in full gear and her one and only noble gesture (taking responsibility for the whole fiasco) went nowhere.
Hilary is very, very intelligent. Not saying she uses that intelligence in the most upstanding manor. But make no mistake, her failing was arrogance, not stupidity.