Google is still small potatoes compared to Goldman Sachs, Monsato, Amazon, Wal-Mart... I'll stop here.
I don't see much point in getting worried over companies being evil if we're not going to do anything to stop them from being evil. At the end of the day we elect the same charismatic people who accept corporate money left and right.
What I'd really like to see is more movements like this that use the "No corporate PAC money" as a litmus test. You can't serve two masters. But they haven't gotten a lot of traction and I don't know of any Republican equivalent.
There's no middle tier because the middle class has been hollowed out and, well, the middle tier was for them. By "middle class" I don't mean the numeric definition but the more generalized one of a class that has a significant amount of discretionary income.
One thing that's important to realize is that the notion that people are "living beyond their means" is generally a false narrative used by the rich and powerful to keep you and me from questioning the system. There's tons of data to back this up. All the gains since 2008 have gone to the top 1%. Wages stopped growing (and is large swaths declined) in the 70s even as productivity exploded. Essentials like Housing and education are eating up 60+% of peoples income. The commodities market was deregulated resulting in massive food price inflation. For me, I'm going to pay approximately 50% of my income between taxes and healthcare this year and my roads are falling apart, I pay for my kid's school out of pocket and I hesitate to go to the doctor. Meanwhile my country's fighting 8 (count 'em) offensive wars (meaning wars against countries that didn't attack us).
Basically, there's a fall scale class war going on that only one side is fighting...
at least in America. It's not just because they're short sighted, see here or read up some more via google
This is also why 99 cent stores are a harbinger of doom for an economy. They make most of their money selling essentials (toothpaste, soap, toilet paper, etc) in reduced sizes at very high markups to poor people who only have a few dollars left after paying their bills. Me? I buy that stuff at a warehouse store and it saves me about $100 bucks a year vs a grocery store and closer to $300 vs a 99 cent store.
I've been watching a bunch of Youtube videos on Atheism (Dawkins, Aronra, Chistopher Hutches, Genetic Skeptic). One of the main talking points for the Creationist side is that you need the supernatural to explain morality (supernatural here doesn't mean ghosts & magic, it means something beyond nature). The Atheists for their part argue that morality can exist without supernatural explanations.
Facebook is a mega corporation, so odds are they're going to win the election either way. There's a few anti-corporation candidates, but not nearly enough that even something as tame as Liz Warren's current bill will pass (and Trump would just Veto it anyway). Basically, I don't think they have any particular agenda to push. They're not as left wing as everybody likes to make them out to be (they really only kicked Alex Jones off out of fear of a negligence lawsuit and they've left a lot of his hanger-ons alone).
OTOH if they keep ignoring election interference sooner or later somebody's gonna regulate. And if there's any sign of playing sides that'll hurt too. They've already got multiple Republicans talking about regulating or nationalizing them, and the Republicans are in power (and likely to continue to be). I suspect they're going to do everything in their power to shut both sides down from the kind of crap that happened in 2016.
philosophically anyway. It lends credence to the idea that social behaviors can be traced back to certain chemical responses. The reason that matters is stuff like religion and the origin of morality. There's a pretty big debate on, for example, whether you can have morality without God. This is a notch on the atheist's side since it implies socializing might have a generalized chemical factor to it.
If you're wondering why this feels like entrapment even though legally it's not; it's because Amazon treats their workers badly enough (and keeps them financially desperate enough) that temping them with something so minor is enough to push them over the edge. Want people to stop risking their jobs and jail time for what's maybe a $20 package? Pay them enough to live.
on the historic data. We're talking the late 1800s and early 1900s. That was not, by all accounts, a good time to be alive. America in particular was trapped in a permanent Japan style depression. Pre WWI Europe was reeling from multiple violent revolutions and brewing more of them. And Post WWI Germany was a hell hole crushed by war reparations that led to the populace looking the other way for the Nazis. If you want to tell me that was good times comparable to the 50s, 60s and 70s and they hey day of Union labor you've got your work cut out for you. If you even want to convince me that it was anything other than the two World Wars that got our species out of that ruling class dominated rut you've got even more work to do (and maybe a doctoral thesis in history to be written).
given the massive amount of automation we're currently doing. We're going to run out of work here. When that happens we either take care of people who do nothing or let them starve. If you do that in a country with an army you'll have wars. Big ones. They'll come to your house to take your stuff. Or you'll get conscripted into an army to do the taking. Meanwhile you'll have fascist dictatorships spring up when they promise food to the starving masses.
You're talking about billions of people with nothing to lose and access to modern military weapons. That's not going to end well for anybody.
they're just going to ignore us. Same as we currently ignore people suffering all around the world. Seriously, go google what's going on in Yemen right now. Or Flint, MI's water. Or the 45,000 people who die of preventable diseases in America every year. It's easy. Out of sight out of mind.
it's automation with a bit of machine learning, but it's easier to say "A.I." as shorthand for it. If this stuff works then yeah, China & India are pretty boned. They're going to have massive surplus populations and nothing to do with them. But they're also going to be straddled with a "if you don't work you don't eat" culture. They'll end up with dictators and massive wars. Eventually the US will get dragged into it too, just like we did with WWII. Same for the EU.
There's basically two scenarios where this doesn't happen. 1st, the tech doesn't actually work. That doesn't seem to be the case. The tech works just fine it just takes time to roll it out. Hence the timelines given in TFA. 2nd China & India pass laws blocking the tech roll out and retarding development in order to preserve jobs. There's a third possibility, which is make work projects, but that means paying taxes for people to do useless things, which the gov'ts will get called out on in most cases. #2 might actually happen though, but again, it's tough to get it past people. Again, people don't like paying for things they don't have too, and that includes paying for workers who could be replaced.
What this means is that the dystopia scenario is by far the most likely. And it's not like it's sci-fi even. The same thing happened during the last industrial revolution. Luddites weren't just scared of tech, they lost their livelihoods. There was nearly 80 years of technology unemployment until WWI & II came along and blew up enough stuff that we had to pay folks to put it back together.
the manufacturing jobs aren't coming back. Even if the factories do they'll have so much automation they're never going to employ the kinds of numbers they used to. There's multiple studies showing this. We've doubled our manufacturing output in the last 40 years while cutting our workforce by 1/3 ( source).
Thing is this is why Hilary didn't think it was much of an issue in the campaign. She's trapped in an iron bubble and she thought people would be reasonable about manufacturing jobs and just accept they're not coming back. Of course, if she wasn't such an arrogant **** (substitute your own curse word kiddies) she'd have offered up a solution to the jobs problem besides "Hey, I went to a posh college and graduated with honors, so can everybody else". Trump for his part saw millions of ex factory workers being ignored (well, Paul Manafort did, he's the one that told Trump to campaign in the rust belt on jobs).
they want everyone to have both and to pay around $160/mo for the landline and $70/mo (+$35 for your phone) for the wireless.
Thing is, I don't think voters are going to do anything about it. Texas, for example, has a senate candidate (Beto O'Rouke) who refuses corporate PAC money but he's behind in the polls by 9 points. Nancy Pelosi beat her primary challenger and she's as corrupt as they come. So far the voters still vote for whoever has the most money, regardless of where that money came from.
than the sub $200 ones, and there's no clear indication which is which. You might spend $300 and get decent performance or $500 and get a dog. What's needed is somebody to market it. If I were Samsung I'd partner with Epic to release a Fortnite themed Chromebook.
there's a decidedly different experience for the shopper of taking things off a shelf vs getting it handed to you by a machine. It also means a lot less maintenance and shelves that are much easier to stock.
There's a reason why Automats went away even when stores were (briefly) Unionized; and it wasn't just the lack of a $1 coin.
Sorry, but this is a sticking point for me. Every place I've ever been hired is at will. Lately I've been hired as a contract-to-hire so the company didn't have to pay unemployment if they didn't want to keep me. My bro just changed jobs and he's taking a huge risk in a desperate bid to get a promotion before he's too old to work anymore. As an employee you have zero rights and tons of obligations. This is why we had Unions.
To be fair this is an American perspective. I understand things are better in Europe and Australia.
As an example in the 2008 market crash we knew exactly who was responsible. There was no talk whatsoever of who was or wasn't at fault. The entire thing was played off as a hostage situation where the people who caused the crash had to be propped up or they'd take the entire economy with them. Since we couldn't just have the gov't let them fail and step in to prop the economy itself up (that'd be socialism, which is bad m'kay) we bailed them out with no penalties.
We know who the 1% are too. We know exactly who's making these decisions. We're actively choose not to punish them or remove them from power. As far as I can tell we're doing that because we're afraid that if we take the power away from them someone else is just going to get it to abuse.
Seems to me better solutions exist (mandatory voting & algorithmic based voter districts to prevent voter suppression plus a parliamentary system to replace the anti-democratic Senate & Electoral college) but folks don't like that either. So we're kind of stuck where we're at, with our current ruling class and a slow, steady slide back to serfdom...
like Final Fantasy 8/9, Chrono Cross, Ape Escape, Mario 64, Tekken 3, Gran Tourismo and Panzer Dragoon the 32 bit gen holds up well.
The trouble I see is folks comparing Bubsy 3D to Mario World. To be fair it was easier to make something at least playable in 2D (Bubsy is still more tolerable than it's 3D counter part). But go spend some time with Hard Nova, Shaq Fu, Fantasia, Awesome Possum or, god help us, Mondu's Fight Palace. The 8-bit era was even worse (LJN X-Men anyone?).
Us auto sales in 207 were around 17 million. source. There's 222 million drivers in America. That's around 7% of drivers buying new cars.
Somehow this doesn't seem sustainable. It's also probably why used car prices are so crazy. E.g. a low mileage used car is within 10% of the price of a new one. I paid $12.5k for a 2014 Sentra not long ago and only got it that cheap because it'd been in a fender bender....
OTOH I wish I could come up with a way to snatch trade ins from dealers and put them in the hands of buyers. A coworker just took a nice, 4 year old, low mileage car to the dealer for trade in and got $4k for it. That dealer will turn around and sell it for $10-$13.
one of the things I'm wondering is if stuff like PUBG and Fortnite will see native Chrome OS support. One of the things that keeps folks on Windows is gaming, but in 2018 there's a lot of folks who just play one of the big multiplayer titles.
one time at I had to go through one of these personality tests to tell me which group I fit into. I was annoying, but me and my coworkers went from pretty annoyed to pissed when we learned the company paid $2k/each for the privilege. They could have just given us that $2k as a bonus and out moral woulda shot up. This was when I made a lot less money and $2k would have been an event.
My point is this personality crap is usually just an excuse to sell corporate seminars.
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Google is still small potatoes compared to Goldman Sachs, Monsato, Amazon, Wal-Mart... I'll stop here.
I don't see much point in getting worried over companies being evil if we're not going to do anything to stop them from being evil. At the end of the day we elect the same charismatic people who accept corporate money left and right.
What I'd really like to see is more movements like this that use the "No corporate PAC money" as a litmus test. You can't serve two masters. But they haven't gotten a lot of traction and I don't know of any Republican equivalent.
living paycheck to paycheck.
There's no middle tier because the middle class has been hollowed out and, well, the middle tier was for them. By "middle class" I don't mean the numeric definition but the more generalized one of a class that has a significant amount of discretionary income.
One thing that's important to realize is that the notion that people are "living beyond their means" is generally a false narrative used by the rich and powerful to keep you and me from questioning the system. There's tons of data to back this up. All the gains since 2008 have gone to the top 1%. Wages stopped growing (and is large swaths declined) in the 70s even as productivity exploded. Essentials like Housing and education are eating up 60+% of peoples income. The commodities market was deregulated resulting in massive food price inflation. For me, I'm going to pay approximately 50% of my income between taxes and healthcare this year and my roads are falling apart, I pay for my kid's school out of pocket and I hesitate to go to the doctor. Meanwhile my country's fighting 8 (count 'em) offensive wars (meaning wars against countries that didn't attack us).
Basically, there's a fall scale class war going on that only one side is fighting...
at least in America. It's not just because they're short sighted, see here or read up some more via google
This is also why 99 cent stores are a harbinger of doom for an economy. They make most of their money selling essentials (toothpaste, soap, toilet paper, etc) in reduced sizes at very high markups to poor people who only have a few dollars left after paying their bills. Me? I buy that stuff at a warehouse store and it saves me about $100 bucks a year vs a grocery store and closer to $300 vs a 99 cent store.
That's literally the only logical explanation for what you just wrote.
I've been watching a bunch of Youtube videos on Atheism (Dawkins, Aronra, Chistopher Hutches, Genetic Skeptic). One of the main talking points for the Creationist side is that you need the supernatural to explain morality (supernatural here doesn't mean ghosts & magic, it means something beyond nature). The Atheists for their part argue that morality can exist without supernatural explanations.
Facebook is a mega corporation, so odds are they're going to win the election either way. There's a few anti-corporation candidates, but not nearly enough that even something as tame as Liz Warren's current bill will pass (and Trump would just Veto it anyway). Basically, I don't think they have any particular agenda to push. They're not as left wing as everybody likes to make them out to be (they really only kicked Alex Jones off out of fear of a negligence lawsuit and they've left a lot of his hanger-ons alone).
OTOH if they keep ignoring election interference sooner or later somebody's gonna regulate. And if there's any sign of playing sides that'll hurt too. They've already got multiple Republicans talking about regulating or nationalizing them, and the Republicans are in power (and likely to continue to be). I suspect they're going to do everything in their power to shut both sides down from the kind of crap that happened in 2016.
philosophically anyway. It lends credence to the idea that social behaviors can be traced back to certain chemical responses. The reason that matters is stuff like religion and the origin of morality. There's a pretty big debate on, for example, whether you can have morality without God. This is a notch on the atheist's side since it implies socializing might have a generalized chemical factor to it.
this.
If you're wondering why this feels like entrapment even though legally it's not; it's because Amazon treats their workers badly enough (and keeps them financially desperate enough) that temping them with something so minor is enough to push them over the edge. Want people to stop risking their jobs and jail time for what's maybe a $20 package? Pay them enough to live.
on the historic data. We're talking the late 1800s and early 1900s. That was not, by all accounts, a good time to be alive. America in particular was trapped in a permanent Japan style depression. Pre WWI Europe was reeling from multiple violent revolutions and brewing more of them. And Post WWI Germany was a hell hole crushed by war reparations that led to the populace looking the other way for the Nazis. If you want to tell me that was good times comparable to the 50s, 60s and 70s and they hey day of Union labor you've got your work cut out for you. If you even want to convince me that it was anything other than the two World Wars that got our species out of that ruling class dominated rut you've got even more work to do (and maybe a doctoral thesis in history to be written).
given the massive amount of automation we're currently doing. We're going to run out of work here. When that happens we either take care of people who do nothing or let them starve. If you do that in a country with an army you'll have wars. Big ones. They'll come to your house to take your stuff. Or you'll get conscripted into an army to do the taking. Meanwhile you'll have fascist dictatorships spring up when they promise food to the starving masses.
You're talking about billions of people with nothing to lose and access to modern military weapons. That's not going to end well for anybody.
they're just going to ignore us. Same as we currently ignore people suffering all around the world. Seriously, go google what's going on in Yemen right now. Or Flint, MI's water. Or the 45,000 people who die of preventable diseases in America every year. It's easy. Out of sight out of mind.
then the rest of the industry is probably going to follow suit soon.
it's automation with a bit of machine learning, but it's easier to say "A.I." as shorthand for it. If this stuff works then yeah, China & India are pretty boned. They're going to have massive surplus populations and nothing to do with them. But they're also going to be straddled with a "if you don't work you don't eat" culture. They'll end up with dictators and massive wars. Eventually the US will get dragged into it too, just like we did with WWII. Same for the EU.
There's basically two scenarios where this doesn't happen. 1st, the tech doesn't actually work. That doesn't seem to be the case. The tech works just fine it just takes time to roll it out. Hence the timelines given in TFA. 2nd China & India pass laws blocking the tech roll out and retarding development in order to preserve jobs. There's a third possibility, which is make work projects, but that means paying taxes for people to do useless things, which the gov'ts will get called out on in most cases. #2 might actually happen though, but again, it's tough to get it past people. Again, people don't like paying for things they don't have too, and that includes paying for workers who could be replaced.
What this means is that the dystopia scenario is by far the most likely. And it's not like it's sci-fi even. The same thing happened during the last industrial revolution. Luddites weren't just scared of tech, they lost their livelihoods. There was nearly 80 years of technology unemployment until WWI & II came along and blew up enough stuff that we had to pay folks to put it back together.
the manufacturing jobs aren't coming back. Even if the factories do they'll have so much automation they're never going to employ the kinds of numbers they used to. There's multiple studies showing this. We've doubled our manufacturing output in the last 40 years while cutting our workforce by 1/3 ( source).
Thing is this is why Hilary didn't think it was much of an issue in the campaign. She's trapped in an iron bubble and she thought people would be reasonable about manufacturing jobs and just accept they're not coming back. Of course, if she wasn't such an arrogant **** (substitute your own curse word kiddies) she'd have offered up a solution to the jobs problem besides "Hey, I went to a posh college and graduated with honors, so can everybody else". Trump for his part saw millions of ex factory workers being ignored (well, Paul Manafort did, he's the one that told Trump to campaign in the rust belt on jobs).
they want everyone to have both and to pay around $160/mo for the landline and $70/mo (+$35 for your phone) for the wireless.
Thing is, I don't think voters are going to do anything about it. Texas, for example, has a senate candidate (Beto O'Rouke) who refuses corporate PAC money but he's behind in the polls by 9 points. Nancy Pelosi beat her primary challenger and she's as corrupt as they come. So far the voters still vote for whoever has the most money, regardless of where that money came from.
than the sub $200 ones, and there's no clear indication which is which. You might spend $300 and get decent performance or $500 and get a dog. What's needed is somebody to market it. If I were Samsung I'd partner with Epic to release a Fortnite themed Chromebook.
there's a decidedly different experience for the shopper of taking things off a shelf vs getting it handed to you by a machine. It also means a lot less maintenance and shelves that are much easier to stock.
There's a reason why Automats went away even when stores were (briefly) Unionized; and it wasn't just the lack of a $1 coin.
Sorry, but this is a sticking point for me. Every place I've ever been hired is at will. Lately I've been hired as a contract-to-hire so the company didn't have to pay unemployment if they didn't want to keep me. My bro just changed jobs and he's taking a huge risk in a desperate bid to get a promotion before he's too old to work anymore. As an employee you have zero rights and tons of obligations. This is why we had Unions.
To be fair this is an American perspective. I understand things are better in Europe and Australia.
As an example in the 2008 market crash we knew exactly who was responsible. There was no talk whatsoever of who was or wasn't at fault. The entire thing was played off as a hostage situation where the people who caused the crash had to be propped up or they'd take the entire economy with them. Since we couldn't just have the gov't let them fail and step in to prop the economy itself up (that'd be socialism, which is bad m'kay) we bailed them out with no penalties.
We know who the 1% are too. We know exactly who's making these decisions. We're actively choose not to punish them or remove them from power. As far as I can tell we're doing that because we're afraid that if we take the power away from them someone else is just going to get it to abuse.
Seems to me better solutions exist (mandatory voting & algorithmic based voter districts to prevent voter suppression plus a parliamentary system to replace the anti-democratic Senate & Electoral college) but folks don't like that either. So we're kind of stuck where we're at, with our current ruling class and a slow, steady slide back to serfdom...
like Final Fantasy 8/9, Chrono Cross, Ape Escape, Mario 64, Tekken 3, Gran Tourismo and Panzer Dragoon the 32 bit gen holds up well.
The trouble I see is folks comparing Bubsy 3D to Mario World. To be fair it was easier to make something at least playable in 2D (Bubsy is still more tolerable than it's 3D counter part). But go spend some time with Hard Nova, Shaq Fu, Fantasia, Awesome Possum or, god help us, Mondu's Fight Palace. The 8-bit era was even worse (LJN X-Men anyone?).
Us auto sales in 207 were around 17 million. source. There's 222 million drivers in America. That's around 7% of drivers buying new cars.
Somehow this doesn't seem sustainable. It's also probably why used car prices are so crazy. E.g. a low mileage used car is within 10% of the price of a new one. I paid $12.5k for a 2014 Sentra not long ago and only got it that cheap because it'd been in a fender bender....
OTOH I wish I could come up with a way to snatch trade ins from dealers and put them in the hands of buyers. A coworker just took a nice, 4 year old, low mileage car to the dealer for trade in and got $4k for it. That dealer will turn around and sell it for $10-$13.
in Congress. The closest was Rand Paul, and he's been falling in line with the mainstream Republican party for some time now...
one of the things I'm wondering is if stuff like PUBG and Fortnite will see native Chrome OS support. One of the things that keeps folks on Windows is gaming, but in 2018 there's a lot of folks who just play one of the big multiplayer titles.
True, but the US is generally too big a market to ignore. Especially for AAA.
one time at I had to go through one of these personality tests to tell me which group I fit into. I was annoying, but me and my coworkers went from pretty annoyed to pissed when we learned the company paid $2k/each for the privilege. They could have just given us that $2k as a bonus and out moral woulda shot up. This was when I made a lot less money and $2k would have been an event.
My point is this personality crap is usually just an excuse to sell corporate seminars.