it's not about being better off, it's about controlling how well off everyone is. That way you can make them do what you say (because you control how much of everything they have). It's especially effective if you control their access to food, shelter and healthcare since in that case you literally hold the power of life and death over them. At that point they'll do anything you tell them...
If you want to make a controller for a game console expect to buy a license. The XBone's controller has DRM in it that's protected by the DMCA. It also has code covered by patents (a common trick of Nintendo's that they used to force you to buy carts from them).
that's not how a ruling class works, silly. Now don't forget to vote for establishment candidates with populist rhetoric in the mid-terms. And pay special attention to meaningless wedge issues while you're at it. Can't have your pretty little head getting all woozy with thoughts about the economy and the impact of mega corporations can we?
because I've yet to read a single serious study that doesn't say automation is coming for at least 50% of the jobs. And that's in the next 20-30 years. If you want to spread it out to the entire century than screw a 4 day work week, we'll be lucky if there's enough work to go around for 2 or 3.
And it's not just Automation btw. Don't forget that stuff is getting better. My company just ditched an aging.Net app for a web one. The.Net app required about 10-15 hours of high level maintenance a week that's just gone now. As long as you don't block our CDNs the web app just works. Cars are lasting longer and electric cars have crazy uptime. Hell, buddy of mine just ran some plastic piping in his house that's rated to last 50+ years. The junk they had when I was a kid you'd be lucky to get 20 out of. And let's think about what's going to happen to car insurance companies and body shops when self driving cars are a thing. Those folks won't just go work on the maintenance because, like I said, electric cars need a lot less maintenance and you can bet that's what a fleet of robot drivers will be.
Except for the high end stuff like cryptography and surgeons expect to see a lot less work in the future. Baring another war where we blow everything up again we're not gonna have enough for folks to do...
this is not to say Venezuela's gov't is all sunshine and kittens. Venezuela was a third world hell hole who inexplicably became a first world nation almost overnight when their populist government took their oil profits and spent them on the people instead of handing them over to multinationals like most of the rest of the world does. When that oil money dried up they were bound to have problems. Having the most powerful country in human history hitting them with sanctions like a ton of bricks cinched it.
The United States has been fucking with South America for hundreds of years. Always at the behest of corporations and against the interests of South American people. 30 seconds on google will tell you as much. My country's behavior on the national stage has been abhorrent in everything except WWII (and there's some nasty examples around that war too...). As a result a more than half of my tax dollars go to fighting the wars we caused and I don't get guaranteed healthcare, advanced education for my kids or any of the other things a civilized country with this much wealth should have.
It's always cheaper to drop food than bombs. You'd think we'd 've learned that in post WII. Damn, but we never learn a god damn thing in this country.
The US Seized their assets because they defaulted on loans. It was _not_ done in retaliation for Venezuela seizing US company assets. And perhaps Venezuela would stop seizing US assets if we'd stop meddling in their affairs and attacking them with economic sanctions because we disagree with their politics...
It's sure what it looks like. The Az attorney general isn't exactly known for NY style offensives against anti consumer practices and the timing is suspect. Plus there's been a lot of chatter on right wing media about doing "something" about the ban. Heck a it's been kind of funny to watch the party of small government taking about regulating private entities to prevent the bans...
won't supply and demand solve the cost of living thing all by itself? I mean, assuming there aren't external forces working against supply and demand. But that never happens, right?
Oh, as for CA turning into Venezuela, is the United States Federal Government going to lock them out of external banking systems and foreign aid via sanctions? No? Then I think they'll do just fine. And that's before we factor in that their economy is much, much stronger. Nice straw man though. You guys are really getting a lot of mileage out of Venezuela's misery. Plus the US got to seize all their overseas assets when they defaulted on the loans. Kind of a win-win for those sanctions and it didn't even cost all that much.
those corporate entities won't just stay home eating cookies. They'll form power structures of their own that are just like governments but without all that pesky "democracy" stuff to get in the way of profits and whatever little project strikes the CEO's fancy (Jeff Bezos is spending his $260 million/day on space travel, which would be peachy if I wasn't paying tax dollars to feed his underpaid/overworked staff)
to figure out which ISP funded this story? And I'd much rather have my info in the hands of my democratically elected government than a mega corporation that I have zero say in unless I'm a top shareholder.
there was a sizable population of divorcees ordered to carry insurance by the court who bought these policies to satisfy a legal requirement. Those guys and gals were basically forced to buy actual insurance.
Of course the proper solution, one that every other civilized nation uses, is single payer. We even have the system in place. All we need to do is expand Medicare to cover everyone. I mean, it's not like I'm not already being taxed. They call them premium, but it's really just a tax I pay to a mega -corp.
that covered nothing whatsoever. They existed for divorced guys who were ordered to have insurance by the court and folks who couldn't afford healthcare but needed to pretend they had insurance or they couldn't sleep at night.
They cost $50-$100/mo, a lot less than the $200-$400 of a "real" policy. But they were literally useless. They covered almost nothing and had deductibles in the tens of thousands.
Anyway the bulk of the 1.5% was made up of these types of policies that were literally made illegal by the law.
but that sort of implies the slightest attempt to hide what they're doing. Hell, this is what the voters wanted. Less regulation. Well, consumer protection rules are regulation folks. And we just got less of them.
I'm sure the savings will trickle down eventually...
but most estimates place it somewhere between $9-$20/mo for 100 mbps. This is based on their SEC filings. You'll generally pay $80-$100/mo for that service. $140 if you don't want a bandwidth cap (or if you go much over your cap).
ISPs go out of their way to hide this figure because if folks knew how cheap modern telecom is they'd be furious.
and money to be laundered. Those two things form the backbone of the crypto economy because they're both things that have a high risk tolerance. You don't care if somebody doesn't pay you for your dime bag because you're selling a bag of literal weeds for $100 bucks. If 10 folks stiff you and one pays you're way out ahead. The same's true for generic money laundering. The money's no good if you can't use it cleanly and without being caught, so you don't care if you lose half of it to transaction fees.
There's growing pressure to crack down on money laundering via bitcoin; mostly because governments have just plain caught up and caught on. And there's growing pressure to legalize drugs. There's where your ceiling is. A few more high profile money launderers will get caught (Bitcoin really isn't that good for it, it just took a while for the gov't to notice it was being used) and a few wins by left wing parties and that'll kind of be that when it comes to crypto.
as Fortnite just proved. You can download a dev kit right now and make and sell Android apps w/o google's permission. You do have to adhere to the OS's permission rules, meaning everytime you install an app on a user's computer it will ask them to grant permission for each thing your app does (network, camera, file system etc).
I wish Windows had that level of security. It makes Malware a lot harder since if I go install a dumb little single player game and it wants access to my network, contacts list and camera and microphone I know I'm dealing with a scam.
when you're on/. it's easy to live in the tech bubble, but fact is most people just want tech to work. They're a means to an end not an end themselves. If they pay a little (some cases a lot) extra to have it work that's well worth it. And so it giving up the control of an old school PC experience.
Also, there's a huge difference between somebody who likes gadgets and a technophile. We often conflate the two and think there's more technophiles than there really are.
and it's going to support "hundreds" of jobs? And I wouldn't be surprised to find out some of those jobs are in building the thing....
So anyway we're heading for a post-work world folks. Or at the very least another industrial revolution. And the last few times that happened there were decades of unemployment & social strife until either tech caught up or, more likely, we had a big enough war that everything blew up and had to be rebuilt.
Sure, if you pay close attention to what they're doing (tariffs, imposing regulations on states to protect corporations in defiance of the 10th amendment, record H1-B labor imports, etc, etc). But if you don't care about policy (or only care about the two big wedge issues, gun control and abortion) they're still on point. They still use rhetoric of low taxes & small government.
The trouble is swing voters. Swing voters don't usually pay attention to policy, they pay attention to how the candidate makes them feel. That's why the beer poll exists and why it's damn near impossible to win without it. And it's why we got Trump (well, that an Hilary was the worst campaigner in human history).
Isn't a tariff just a tax you impose on goods as they enter your country? Wasn't the problem with the Japanese electronics that they were cheaper?
Also, as I recall those tariffs were pretty reasonable. The Japanese gov't was heavily subsidizing it's electronic industry to target foreign industries. The tariffs were in response to that. The reason Japan still came out on top, at least for a lot of American electronics (sorry, I'm a Yank) is the American stuff was kind of crap. And American cars were laughably bad at the time.
On paper we're at full unemployment. But funny enough there's a ton of resentment around not having jobs in America. Of course, everyone knows the unemployment stats are nonsense. But we act like they're not.
This leads to some crazy political theater. For one thing we've got economists trying to come up with excuses about why wages aren't climbing despite "full" employment. And now we've got Trump needing to explain to businesses where they'll get workers needed to run factories when on paper those workers already have jobs. I mean, I suppose Trump could argue that he'll do mass immigration. I'm sure that'll go over swell at his monthly rallies.
I'm saying we should change it's purpose to remove the punishment aspect and be either completely rehabilitative or a place to store individuals who are broken in ways we don't yet know how to fix and who would be a danger to the community if let lose.
We do not 'give up' on them. We rehabilitate every one we can. But I'm not so naive that I think we can reach a 100% rate. I'm saying a few criminally insane will exist. People who have demonstrated they are a danger to the community and who we lack the tools to rehabilitate. Those people need to be locked up, but at the same time it should be done humanely. We should recognize the fact that we're locking them up isn't a failure on their part, it's a failure on ours for being unable to fix what's broken in them.
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it's not about being better off, it's about controlling how well off everyone is. That way you can make them do what you say (because you control how much of everything they have). It's especially effective if you control their access to food, shelter and healthcare since in that case you literally hold the power of life and death over them. At that point they'll do anything you tell them...
If you want to make a controller for a game console expect to buy a license. The XBone's controller has DRM in it that's protected by the DMCA. It also has code covered by patents (a common trick of Nintendo's that they used to force you to buy carts from them).
that's not how a ruling class works, silly. Now don't forget to vote for establishment candidates with populist rhetoric in the mid-terms. And pay special attention to meaningless wedge issues while you're at it. Can't have your pretty little head getting all woozy with thoughts about the economy and the impact of mega corporations can we?
because I've yet to read a single serious study that doesn't say automation is coming for at least 50% of the jobs. And that's in the next 20-30 years. If you want to spread it out to the entire century than screw a 4 day work week, we'll be lucky if there's enough work to go around for 2 or 3.
.Net app for a web one. The .Net app required about 10-15 hours of high level maintenance a week that's just gone now. As long as you don't block our CDNs the web app just works. Cars are lasting longer and electric cars have crazy uptime. Hell, buddy of mine just ran some plastic piping in his house that's rated to last 50+ years. The junk they had when I was a kid you'd be lucky to get 20 out of. And let's think about what's going to happen to car insurance companies and body shops when self driving cars are a thing. Those folks won't just go work on the maintenance because, like I said, electric cars need a lot less maintenance and you can bet that's what a fleet of robot drivers will be.
And it's not just Automation btw. Don't forget that stuff is getting better. My company just ditched an aging
Except for the high end stuff like cryptography and surgeons expect to see a lot less work in the future. Baring another war where we blow everything up again we're not gonna have enough for folks to do...
I'll have you know that America already voted to wreck the Internet.
this is not to say Venezuela's gov't is all sunshine and kittens. Venezuela was a third world hell hole who inexplicably became a first world nation almost overnight when their populist government took their oil profits and spent them on the people instead of handing them over to multinationals like most of the rest of the world does. When that oil money dried up they were bound to have problems. Having the most powerful country in human history hitting them with sanctions like a ton of bricks cinched it.
The United States has been fucking with South America for hundreds of years. Always at the behest of corporations and against the interests of South American people. 30 seconds on google will tell you as much. My country's behavior on the national stage has been abhorrent in everything except WWII (and there's some nasty examples around that war too...). As a result a more than half of my tax dollars go to fighting the wars we caused and I don't get guaranteed healthcare, advanced education for my kids or any of the other things a civilized country with this much wealth should have.
It's always cheaper to drop food than bombs. You'd think we'd 've learned that in post WII. Damn, but we never learn a god damn thing in this country.
The US Seized their assets because they defaulted on loans. It was _not_ done in retaliation for Venezuela seizing US company assets. And perhaps Venezuela would stop seizing US assets if we'd stop meddling in their affairs and attacking them with economic sanctions because we disagree with their politics...
It's sure what it looks like. The Az attorney general isn't exactly known for NY style offensives against anti consumer practices and the timing is suspect. Plus there's been a lot of chatter on right wing media about doing "something" about the ban. Heck a it's been kind of funny to watch the party of small government taking about regulating private entities to prevent the bans...
won't supply and demand solve the cost of living thing all by itself? I mean, assuming there aren't external forces working against supply and demand. But that never happens, right?
Oh, as for CA turning into Venezuela, is the United States Federal Government going to lock them out of external banking systems and foreign aid via sanctions? No? Then I think they'll do just fine. And that's before we factor in that their economy is much, much stronger. Nice straw man though. You guys are really getting a lot of mileage out of Venezuela's misery. Plus the US got to seize all their overseas assets when they defaulted on the loans. Kind of a win-win for those sanctions and it didn't even cost all that much.
those corporate entities won't just stay home eating cookies. They'll form power structures of their own that are just like governments but without all that pesky "democracy" stuff to get in the way of profits and whatever little project strikes the CEO's fancy (Jeff Bezos is spending his $260 million/day on space travel, which would be peachy if I wasn't paying tax dollars to feed his underpaid/overworked staff)
and while he didn't spend hours in traffic he spent that same amount of time to get anywhere. Air was cleaner though.
to figure out which ISP funded this story? And I'd much rather have my info in the hands of my democratically elected government than a mega corporation that I have zero say in unless I'm a top shareholder.
there was a sizable population of divorcees ordered to carry insurance by the court who bought these policies to satisfy a legal requirement. Those guys and gals were basically forced to buy actual insurance.
Of course the proper solution, one that every other civilized nation uses, is single payer. We even have the system in place. All we need to do is expand Medicare to cover everyone. I mean, it's not like I'm not already being taxed. They call them premium, but it's really just a tax I pay to a mega -corp.
that covered nothing whatsoever. They existed for divorced guys who were ordered to have insurance by the court and folks who couldn't afford healthcare but needed to pretend they had insurance or they couldn't sleep at night.
They cost $50-$100/mo, a lot less than the $200-$400 of a "real" policy. But they were literally useless. They covered almost nothing and had deductibles in the tens of thousands.
Anyway the bulk of the 1.5% was made up of these types of policies that were literally made illegal by the law.
but that sort of implies the slightest attempt to hide what they're doing. Hell, this is what the voters wanted. Less regulation. Well, consumer protection rules are regulation folks. And we just got less of them.
I'm sure the savings will trickle down eventually...
but most estimates place it somewhere between $9-$20/mo for 100 mbps. This is based on their SEC filings. You'll generally pay $80-$100/mo for that service. $140 if you don't want a bandwidth cap (or if you go much over your cap).
ISPs go out of their way to hide this figure because if folks knew how cheap modern telecom is they'd be furious.
and money to be laundered. Those two things form the backbone of the crypto economy because they're both things that have a high risk tolerance. You don't care if somebody doesn't pay you for your dime bag because you're selling a bag of literal weeds for $100 bucks. If 10 folks stiff you and one pays you're way out ahead. The same's true for generic money laundering. The money's no good if you can't use it cleanly and without being caught, so you don't care if you lose half of it to transaction fees.
There's growing pressure to crack down on money laundering via bitcoin; mostly because governments have just plain caught up and caught on. And there's growing pressure to legalize drugs. There's where your ceiling is. A few more high profile money launderers will get caught (Bitcoin really isn't that good for it, it just took a while for the gov't to notice it was being used) and a few wins by left wing parties and that'll kind of be that when it comes to crypto.
as Fortnite just proved. You can download a dev kit right now and make and sell Android apps w/o google's permission. You do have to adhere to the OS's permission rules, meaning everytime you install an app on a user's computer it will ask them to grant permission for each thing your app does (network, camera, file system etc).
I wish Windows had that level of security. It makes Malware a lot harder since if I go install a dumb little single player game and it wants access to my network, contacts list and camera and microphone I know I'm dealing with a scam.
when you're on /. it's easy to live in the tech bubble, but fact is most people just want tech to work. They're a means to an end not an end themselves. If they pay a little (some cases a lot) extra to have it work that's well worth it. And so it giving up the control of an old school PC experience.
Also, there's a huge difference between somebody who likes gadgets and a technophile. We often conflate the two and think there's more technophiles than there really are.
and it's going to support "hundreds" of jobs? And I wouldn't be surprised to find out some of those jobs are in building the thing....
So anyway we're heading for a post-work world folks. Or at the very least another industrial revolution. And the last few times that happened there were decades of unemployment & social strife until either tech caught up or, more likely, we had a big enough war that everything blew up and had to be rebuilt.
Anyway, We gonna do anything about it?
all year, "Practice how to be happy doing good".
Sure, if you pay close attention to what they're doing (tariffs, imposing regulations on states to protect corporations in defiance of the 10th amendment, record H1-B labor imports, etc, etc). But if you don't care about policy (or only care about the two big wedge issues, gun control and abortion) they're still on point. They still use rhetoric of low taxes & small government.
The trouble is swing voters. Swing voters don't usually pay attention to policy, they pay attention to how the candidate makes them feel. That's why the beer poll exists and why it's damn near impossible to win without it. And it's why we got Trump (well, that an Hilary was the worst campaigner in human history).
Isn't a tariff just a tax you impose on goods as they enter your country? Wasn't the problem with the Japanese electronics that they were cheaper?
Also, as I recall those tariffs were pretty reasonable. The Japanese gov't was heavily subsidizing it's electronic industry to target foreign industries. The tariffs were in response to that. The reason Japan still came out on top, at least for a lot of American electronics (sorry, I'm a Yank) is the American stuff was kind of crap. And American cars were laughably bad at the time.
On paper we're at full unemployment. But funny enough there's a ton of resentment around not having jobs in America. Of course, everyone knows the unemployment stats are nonsense. But we act like they're not.
This leads to some crazy political theater. For one thing we've got economists trying to come up with excuses about why wages aren't climbing despite "full" employment. And now we've got Trump needing to explain to businesses where they'll get workers needed to run factories when on paper those workers already have jobs. I mean, I suppose Trump could argue that he'll do mass immigration. I'm sure that'll go over swell at his monthly rallies.
I'm saying we should change it's purpose to remove the punishment aspect and be either completely rehabilitative or a place to store individuals who are broken in ways we don't yet know how to fix and who would be a danger to the community if let lose.
We do not 'give up' on them. We rehabilitate every one we can. But I'm not so naive that I think we can reach a 100% rate. I'm saying a few criminally insane will exist. People who have demonstrated they are a danger to the community and who we lack the tools to rehabilitate. Those people need to be locked up, but at the same time it should be done humanely. We should recognize the fact that we're locking them up isn't a failure on their part, it's a failure on ours for being unable to fix what's broken in them.