It's why every Youtube video ask you to comment on the video now. It tells the Advertisers you were paying attention to the content and therefor were more likely to notice the adverts. Otherwise you might have just scrolled right past their ads, or worse if you're a paid "influencer" folks might be ignoring you.
in 2020. The one thing that's kept my meager standard of living up is cheap goods from China. It's not like tariffs will stop the flow of cheap labor from India flooding IT. Meanwhile Trump's tax cut wasn't as big as folks think. A lot of people set their withholding lower than they should and are going to get an unpleasant surprise in April when they either have a smaller than average refund or maybe even owe.
Normally the decisions made by a president don't show up immediately. It took close to 8 years for Obama to repair the damage from the 2008 crash. But tariffs and tax cuts are immediate. If folks don't see a positive effect they're gonna get uppity. We'll know in a few years.
I can stream for a decent price, and I have so much content that if somebody doesn't want me seeing their stuff I'll just move onto something else.
I do kinda miss eMusic. When it was cheap I could pull 7 albums for $20/mo. I probably only liked 1 enough to listen to more than once, but I didn't mind paying $140/yr for 12 good albums. But I needed to be able to pull 84 and sift though them. Some of my favorite stuff I didn't like much at first and then it grew on my. Ensiferum was like that. In Flames too.
Yes, the Dow is up a lot over time. But as a worker you don't invest the full amount of your retirement savings 20, 30 or 40 years ago. You put a little in each year. You put less in at the start of your career because, well, you probably earned less. Meanwhile inflation and fees eat away at that little. Matching funds compensate for some of it.
The real problem is the cyclic nature of our economy. We have a boom/bust about every 8-12 years. e.g. there's been a major crash every 8-12 years since I was born. My Dad's retirement happened to land during one of those crashes, and the way most retirement programs are structured if you retire during one of those busts you get screwed.
The inventor of the 401k is on record saying his program is being abused. That it was never meant to replace pensions. That it was a tool for high income earners to shore up their savings. This is because even he understood that the stock market is a gamble. You're not gambling on companies. You're gambing on when the next crash is gonna be.
Tuition was $12k/year for years 1&2 and $16k/yr for the last two. Then there's books, food, rent, the car (got by w/o one for the 1st 2 years but after that she's got Clinicals for Nursing and unless she's got some sort of mutant teleportation power I missed all these years it's physically impossible to get from one to the other in time. They're across town. By bike it'd be an hour, by bus 2 hours). All told it's around $35-$40k/yr (depending on the year).
I could save about $6k/yr if she lived at home, but I'm pretty sure she'd go stir crazy and do something stupid like try to get a job while going to school full time. It was made very, very clear by her counselors that the surest fire way for a kid to drop out is for them to try and work during their 300+ level courses. It'd be one thing if she could find a cushy job, but the one she found she had to quit because it conflicted with her school schedule. Oh, that's another thing. You don't pick your schedule like you did when I was a kid. They tell you what your schedule is and if you can't get to class then fuck you, drop out and go work at Walmart. There were 200 other kids in line for her 300 level courses this semester rocking 3.8 or higher GPAs, so they've got plenty of kids to replace her.
or volunteer. Or get involved in politics. Or play video games. Or build model airplanes. Or teach a community college class. Or do any one of a million things folks can do when they're not working all the time. There's plenty of ways to be relevant w/o working full time.
Yes, there are some folks who don't know what to do with themselves if they're not working. But they myth that most folks are that way is, well, a myth. One I suspect the wealthy put in our heads like the old "Idle hands are the devil's plaything" bullshit.
I'm an amateur and I can still mop the floor with a pad player when I'm on keyboard & mouse. The accuracy is just too much. That's why Microsoft never did this. They ran some tests a while back and found amateurs with mice could beat pros with gamepads after a few hours play to learn the maps.
I'm assuming they'll be some way to exclude the mouse players from games. Otherwise XBox is about to become headshot city.
couple of family member illnesses hit in 2006. Then the 2008 crash wiped me out when I started getting back on my feet. By the time the Affordable Care Act's protections kicked in my career and finances were pretty well shot. Right around the time I recovered from that kid got to be college age. Of course nothing saved (even though I made 2x median income and lived like crap driving a 20 year old car). Suddenly had $20k+/year in school bills. I could borrow, but what's the point? They're gauranteed loans. I can never default. They'll just garnish my wages and toss me in jail if I can't/don't pay.
The American working class got shafted since Clinton. The double whammy of Clinton Democrats and the GOP both siding with mega corporations against me left me screwed. H1-Bs flooded the market and my wages plummeted. I think the Berniecrats will eventually fix it, but I'm pretty sure I'll be dead by then.
or the stock market crashes and takes out your investments. Or your company outsources your job in your 50s and nobody'll hire you. Or any one of a dozen things out of your control happen.
because nobody expected Trump to win except 538 and a few folks on the far left sounding the gone (notably Secular Talk on Youtube) because of how pissed off the working class was.
Trump was a failed business man (albeit a successful actor). This came out in numerous lawsuits, notably when he sued a journalist who (rightly as it turned out) pointed out that Trump wasn't a billionaire. He had a mountain of lawsuits against him and had made a career of using his brand to sell cheap merchandise and defraud people with his phony school. He had a raft of sex scandals and was running with the party of family values. Finally he had decades of mob ties he wouldn't want drugged out into the light and was likely to run a self destructive campaign.
Trump won because the Dems ignored the working class (same reason Brexit passed). Hilary bought into the "Blue Wall". Meanwhile Trump ran as a left wing populist. That said, the election was close. Damn close. The Dems ignored that. The Russians didn't. The watched the polls and threw in for Trump. It's likely they were a deciding factor.
Don't get me wrong, getting a president as bad as Trump is a total and complete breakdown of this country's systems. But that wasn't lost on the Russians. This time around folks are taking that shit seriously.
And if you think a national election where the winning candidate lost the popular vote by 3 million and won the electoral collect by about 100,000 votes wasn't impacted by a wide scale campaign from an ex-KGB guy who specialized in information warfare, well, I don't even know if I should call that naive. There needs to be a stronger word for it. Perhaps something German?
the entire American Intelligence community is beating this drum. There's no one outside the right wing that isn't saying that Russia interfered with our last election, and virtually everyone (again everyone outside the right wing) says the interference was largely successful.
We're a weaker and more divided nation since the last election. That our President had an advert that multiple networks refused to run this last election speaks volumes to how how much of a mess things are right now.
seriously. We don't solve problems by immediately giving up. What the hell happened to this country? To this world? Mother loving Gen-Xers. There's a point when healthy skepticism gives way to cynicism, defeatism and borderline cowardice.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, but it's a price we can pay pretty easily. We can close the loop holes but raising the top marginal rates back to 90%. We can elect politicians who won't be bought by demanding ones that refuse corporate PAC money and passing Liz Warren's anti-corruption law. We can combat ignorance with education. We can win. But you have to at least try. You don't even have to try very hard. But right now you're not even trying.
this is why. ICE was a secondary and borderline paramilitary police force created in the wake of the 9/11 hysteria. We already had plenty of existing power structures in place to control immigration, we didn't need another. You should be very, very careful when folks are asking for entirely new police forces. Ask yourself, what can this new police force do that the old ones couldn't? You probably wouldn't like the answer.
to corporate welfare, but I want us workers to get some of it too. Start with Single Payer healthcare. Then a $15/hr min wage with yearly inflation adjustment. Then a Jobs Guarantee and infrastructure spending. End the 8 bloody wars we're fighting too while we're at it.
we put a man on the moon, I think we can keep a town or two from burning down. Seriously, what happened to America's can do attitude? What happened to seeing a problem and then solving it?
As other folks on the forum pointed out, you just need to clear the dead tree matter. It's laborious and expensive, but that's it. It means money, and that means taxes. Probably taxes paid by the folks not living there, since a small town near a forest can't afford to protect themselves. Maybe in 20, 30 years that small town becomes a city. That's what economic growth is. We all support each other and that way the country grows and prospers.
stop doing this to us? There's plenty of ways to stop them, and we can debate which are the best, but we're not even trying. In fact I'll wager a good number of people on this forum consider this kind of behavior praiseworthy as opposed to the anti-social and outright destructive policy it is.
True fact: Scott Adam's of Dilbert fame cracked jokes about a CEO moving the headquarters to be near his parents home for free babysitting. It's even more ironic when you realize Adam's would now (given his political views) probably side with Bezos.
with the fact that he graduated from Princeton. Not that he isn't bright, but It's naive to think the contacts he got from going to an Ivy league school didn't help matters.
the point of the GIS is you need to leave your media bubble. Here's another more specific place to start.
You're being had. Right wing politics and anti-SJW bullshit is just a trick to get you to side with the Mega corps. They let you hate on feminists and you let them have all the money and land. Doesn't seem like a fair trade to me.
Slashdot Mirror
eventually they'll steer folks to deals. Ever since google stopped paying them they've been looking for new sources of revenue.
It's why every Youtube video ask you to comment on the video now. It tells the Advertisers you were paying attention to the content and therefor were more likely to notice the adverts. Otherwise you might have just scrolled right past their ads, or worse if you're a paid "influencer" folks might be ignoring you.
in 2020. The one thing that's kept my meager standard of living up is cheap goods from China. It's not like tariffs will stop the flow of cheap labor from India flooding IT. Meanwhile Trump's tax cut wasn't as big as folks think. A lot of people set their withholding lower than they should and are going to get an unpleasant surprise in April when they either have a smaller than average refund or maybe even owe.
Normally the decisions made by a president don't show up immediately. It took close to 8 years for Obama to repair the damage from the 2008 crash. But tariffs and tax cuts are immediate. If folks don't see a positive effect they're gonna get uppity. We'll know in a few years.
I can stream for a decent price, and I have so much content that if somebody doesn't want me seeing their stuff I'll just move onto something else.
I do kinda miss eMusic. When it was cheap I could pull 7 albums for $20/mo. I probably only liked 1 enough to listen to more than once, but I didn't mind paying $140/yr for 12 good albums. But I needed to be able to pull 84 and sift though them. Some of my favorite stuff I didn't like much at first and then it grew on my. Ensiferum was like that. In Flames too.
Yes, the Dow is up a lot over time. But as a worker you don't invest the full amount of your retirement savings 20, 30 or 40 years ago. You put a little in each year. You put less in at the start of your career because, well, you probably earned less. Meanwhile inflation and fees eat away at that little. Matching funds compensate for some of it.
The real problem is the cyclic nature of our economy. We have a boom/bust about every 8-12 years. e.g. there's been a major crash every 8-12 years since I was born. My Dad's retirement happened to land during one of those crashes, and the way most retirement programs are structured if you retire during one of those busts you get screwed.
The inventor of the 401k is on record saying his program is being abused. That it was never meant to replace pensions. That it was a tool for high income earners to shore up their savings. This is because even he understood that the stock market is a gamble. You're not gambling on companies. You're gambing on when the next crash is gonna be.
major public universities are well north of $12k after fees. Community colleges OTOH are dirt cheap, but you won't get nearly as good a job with one.
Tuition was $12k/year for years 1&2 and $16k/yr for the last two. Then there's books, food, rent, the car (got by w/o one for the 1st 2 years but after that she's got Clinicals for Nursing and unless she's got some sort of mutant teleportation power I missed all these years it's physically impossible to get from one to the other in time. They're across town. By bike it'd be an hour, by bus 2 hours). All told it's around $35-$40k/yr (depending on the year).
I could save about $6k/yr if she lived at home, but I'm pretty sure she'd go stir crazy and do something stupid like try to get a job while going to school full time. It was made very, very clear by her counselors that the surest fire way for a kid to drop out is for them to try and work during their 300+ level courses. It'd be one thing if she could find a cushy job, but the one she found she had to quit because it conflicted with her school schedule. Oh, that's another thing. You don't pick your schedule like you did when I was a kid. They tell you what your schedule is and if you can't get to class then fuck you, drop out and go work at Walmart. There were 200 other kids in line for her 300 level courses this semester rocking 3.8 or higher GPAs, so they've got plenty of kids to replace her.
See here. Folks underestimate just how productive modern workers are. If anything we need fewer folks working, not more.
or volunteer. Or get involved in politics. Or play video games. Or build model airplanes. Or teach a community college class. Or do any one of a million things folks can do when they're not working all the time. There's plenty of ways to be relevant w/o working full time.
Yes, there are some folks who don't know what to do with themselves if they're not working. But they myth that most folks are that way is, well, a myth. One I suspect the wealthy put in our heads like the old "Idle hands are the devil's plaything" bullshit.
I'm an amateur and I can still mop the floor with a pad player when I'm on keyboard & mouse. The accuracy is just too much. That's why Microsoft never did this. They ran some tests a while back and found amateurs with mice could beat pros with gamepads after a few hours play to learn the maps.
I'm assuming they'll be some way to exclude the mouse players from games. Otherwise XBox is about to become headshot city.
couple of family member illnesses hit in 2006. Then the 2008 crash wiped me out when I started getting back on my feet. By the time the Affordable Care Act's protections kicked in my career and finances were pretty well shot. Right around the time I recovered from that kid got to be college age. Of course nothing saved (even though I made 2x median income and lived like crap driving a 20 year old car). Suddenly had $20k+/year in school bills. I could borrow, but what's the point? They're gauranteed loans. I can never default. They'll just garnish my wages and toss me in jail if I can't/don't pay.
The American working class got shafted since Clinton. The double whammy of Clinton Democrats and the GOP both siding with mega corporations against me left me screwed. H1-Bs flooded the market and my wages plummeted. I think the Berniecrats will eventually fix it, but I'm pretty sure I'll be dead by then.
or the stock market crashes and takes out your investments. Or your company outsources your job in your 50s and nobody'll hire you. Or any one of a dozen things out of your control happen.
But it's a good thing we didn't gut the social safety net and that nobody is doing anything that could impact your plans to retire.
I'm sure knowing all that is a real load off the old minderooni.
because nobody expected Trump to win except 538 and a few folks on the far left sounding the gone (notably Secular Talk on Youtube) because of how pissed off the working class was.
Trump was a failed business man (albeit a successful actor). This came out in numerous lawsuits, notably when he sued a journalist who (rightly as it turned out) pointed out that Trump wasn't a billionaire. He had a mountain of lawsuits against him and had made a career of using his brand to sell cheap merchandise and defraud people with his phony school. He had a raft of sex scandals and was running with the party of family values. Finally he had decades of mob ties he wouldn't want drugged out into the light and was likely to run a self destructive campaign.
Trump won because the Dems ignored the working class (same reason Brexit passed). Hilary bought into the "Blue Wall". Meanwhile Trump ran as a left wing populist. That said, the election was close. Damn close. The Dems ignored that. The Russians didn't. The watched the polls and threw in for Trump. It's likely they were a deciding factor.
Don't get me wrong, getting a president as bad as Trump is a total and complete breakdown of this country's systems. But that wasn't lost on the Russians. This time around folks are taking that shit seriously.
See here. Heck, the wikipedia artcile has tons of sources.
And if you think a national election where the winning candidate lost the popular vote by 3 million and won the electoral collect by about 100,000 votes wasn't impacted by a wide scale campaign from an ex-KGB guy who specialized in information warfare, well, I don't even know if I should call that naive. There needs to be a stronger word for it. Perhaps something German?
can turn a holiday out of anything.
is that 22% of Americans are employed by Facebook or have a close relative who is.
the entire American Intelligence community is beating this drum. There's no one outside the right wing that isn't saying that Russia interfered with our last election, and virtually everyone (again everyone outside the right wing) says the interference was largely successful.
We're a weaker and more divided nation since the last election. That our President had an advert that multiple networks refused to run this last election speaks volumes to how how much of a mess things are right now.
seriously. We don't solve problems by immediately giving up. What the hell happened to this country? To this world? Mother loving Gen-Xers. There's a point when healthy skepticism gives way to cynicism, defeatism and borderline cowardice.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, but it's a price we can pay pretty easily. We can close the loop holes but raising the top marginal rates back to 90%. We can elect politicians who won't be bought by demanding ones that refuse corporate PAC money and passing Liz Warren's anti-corruption law. We can combat ignorance with education. We can win. But you have to at least try. You don't even have to try very hard. But right now you're not even trying.
Stand up and be counted.
this is why. ICE was a secondary and borderline paramilitary police force created in the wake of the 9/11 hysteria. We already had plenty of existing power structures in place to control immigration, we didn't need another. You should be very, very careful when folks are asking for entirely new police forces. Ask yourself, what can this new police force do that the old ones couldn't? You probably wouldn't like the answer.
to corporate welfare, but I want us workers to get some of it too. Start with Single Payer healthcare. Then a $15/hr min wage with yearly inflation adjustment. Then a Jobs Guarantee and infrastructure spending. End the 8 bloody wars we're fighting too while we're at it.
I don't watch Netflix, but other folks in my house do. Same for Hulu. But I do watch Crunchy roll, which nobody else does.
we put a man on the moon, I think we can keep a town or two from burning down. Seriously, what happened to America's can do attitude? What happened to seeing a problem and then solving it?
As other folks on the forum pointed out, you just need to clear the dead tree matter. It's laborious and expensive, but that's it. It means money, and that means taxes. Probably taxes paid by the folks not living there, since a small town near a forest can't afford to protect themselves. Maybe in 20, 30 years that small town becomes a city. That's what economic growth is. We all support each other and that way the country grows and prospers.
stop doing this to us? There's plenty of ways to stop them, and we can debate which are the best, but we're not even trying. In fact I'll wager a good number of people on this forum consider this kind of behavior praiseworthy as opposed to the anti-social and outright destructive policy it is.
True fact: Scott Adam's of Dilbert fame cracked jokes about a CEO moving the headquarters to be near his parents home for free babysitting. It's even more ironic when you realize Adam's would now (given his political views) probably side with Bezos.
with the fact that he graduated from Princeton. Not that he isn't bright, but It's naive to think the contacts he got from going to an Ivy league school didn't help matters.
the point of the GIS is you need to leave your media bubble. Here's another more specific place to start.
You're being had. Right wing politics and anti-SJW bullshit is just a trick to get you to side with the Mega corps. They let you hate on feminists and you let them have all the money and land. Doesn't seem like a fair trade to me.