My first accident was caused by it. I'm driving down a major thoroughfare (5 lanes, it's a small town) and I see someone trying to do a left from a stop sign start to just go. So I slow down. Bear in mind she's at a dead stop and I'm doing 45 on a major street. So she stops and I, thinking she sees me, speed back up to be about my way. She floors it and t-bones me.
Later when I asked her why she said she saw me slowing and thought I was going to stop. In the middle of the street. A 5 lane street.
Now, the girl was a ditz, it's true. But had I not slowed down she never would have gone.
if any of this is going to change how anyone votes? Even a little. I realize this might not be a big enough issue to make the "single issue voter" grade, but so far as I can tell while it annoys people it's not something that even registers with even the most tech savvy voter. And so long as the FCC knows they can get away with it why stop? Especially when the gravy train of sweet post FCC cush jobs awaits.
I wouldn't mind seeing corruption be a bigger issue for Americans. They claim it is, but when it's time to vote they won't make it an issue. Not in any practical way.
What we really need is more guys like these who refuse corporate & PAC money. We should make refusing bribes a litmus test for all politicians. No refusal means no vote in the primary.
and had an older CPU. It's a cooling issue. I wouldn't normally blame a CPU manufacturer for that but it's a bloody Ultrabook, which is an Intel spec for thin notebooks that they crammed down the manufacturers throats so hard my company can't get anything but.
and not because it's technically impossible, but the nationally ruling party has already signaled they're going to block CA on their higher car emissions. I could see them moving against them on this too. After all, CA is so big that where they go the nation follows.
I have it drummed into my head that this is the greatest country on earth. It was big news when a dumb show about corrupt politicians had a phony TV politician asked about American Exceptionalism and go on a rant about how we're not in the top 5 for anything except prisons. And I've never heard a real politician make that point. Even Bernie has to shy away from it.
anymore? My bro doesn't, and he's in a fairly well paid job (just shy of $50k/yr, good money where he is). When I was a dumb kid working fast food nobody got those holidays except the other dumb kids (are parents wouldn't let us work). I'd be willing to bet less than half the population gets holiday time/pay anymore. I know retail employees don't.
to most Americans. They couldn't afford nice houses in nice neighborhoods with nice schools and clean air if they didn't spend 2 hours a day commuting to work. Public transit isn't an option because nobody wants to pay for it, because people love cars (you get a lot of happy memories associated with them from when you were a teenager and your parents paid for it) and because you feel like a poor person riding the bus.
This might change, but only because wages are plummeting and pretty soon most Americans won't be able to afford their own cars.
have been spending so much to win local elections. They've spent the last 30 years stacking the courts. Now it's paid off.
And I know it's not popular to call out one party because there's a bunch of pro-corporate Dems who helped stack those courts. But the Democrats at least have a party wing that refuses corporate & PAC money (they're called Justice Democrats, look 'em up). I know of no such animal for the other side. The Dems seem somewhat redeemable. e.g. the pro-consumer elements might take over at some point in a future I could conceive of. Barring a seismic shift like we got in the 60s after the civil rights movement I don't see that happening to the Republican party. At a certain point it's time to call a spade a spade.
I can't tell you the number of times I've seen hacks like that because queries were failing due to performance issues and you couldn't get the suits to pony up for more RAM or a faster CPU (or nowadays another per-CPU license, thanks Oracle!).
when you're too young to make decisions for yourself. This is how things like the puritanical work ethic survives repeated cycles of long term (20+years) technology unemployment. It's also why, as Richard Dawkins pointed out, your religion is generally decided by where your born.
is improved WiFi? Seriously, I know we're at the end of Moore's law and all but come on. My work laptop is dog slow with a clean load of Windows. Maybe do something about that first please?
Boycotts don't work because companies just merge until you have to do business with them or starve. There's an info graphic floating around the web that shows 10 companies own everything you buy, but even that ignores the fact that it's the same people sitting on the board of directors for those 10 companies.
There is no such thing as a sharing economy. That is a narrative pushed by Uber and the like to classify employees as contractors so they can strip employees of hard won protections. This is obvious because nobody drives Uber to share, they do it to make a living (such as it is).
Collective Bargaining means Unions. But Unions need large numbers of employees who are employed in a single location and likely a single industry and/or organization (and therefor can organize). The modern economy doesn't work like that. Automation means the manufacturing jobs aren't huge employers outside of third world countries where people are treated so poorly they're cheaper than machines. And that's just the beginning. An entire new class of automation is happening now (and being incorrectly called "AI" because a bit of machine learning is in play) that is going to make 30-40% of workers obsolete.
tl;dr. Your first two suggestions don't work, your last one has been broken down by technology and globalization. That leaves us with socialism as the only viable solution. I know folks don't like it (it feels too much like being told what to do, and about 20% of the population hates that, even though they're tacitly being told what to do by mega corps), but now isn't the time to get hung up on feelings...
laws a lot of times. I'm in agreement that existing law regarding telcos covers the internet. There's nothing magic about the internet, it's just another telecom utility. There's plenty of existing law if it's just enforced.
I find it funny that the same folks who complain about excess legal cruft gumming up our system seem to always be ready to pass yet another law when the current ones are plenty good enough.
to save NN. The expectation is they'll pass a phony baloney law with no teeth and won't even enforce the occasional gumming of the cable & telcos the law requires. Crap like this is why Congress has a 12% approval rating.
Of course that's over all. Somehow every congress critter seems to hang onto a 48% approval rating in their district which is just enough to stay in office. Aren't winner take all political systems wonderful?
and that it let them re-patriot billions of dollars of profits virtually tax free (all of which went into the pockets of the CEOs and top shareholders in the form or stock buy backs) I think they can let this one slide.
Seriously, this is all just a distraction from the plundering of our nations commons that's been going on since Reagan declared "Government isn't the solution, it's the problem".
on economic issues. So is Hollywood when you look into it. There's a slight bent to the left on social issues, mostly Abortion & Gun Control. Anything that touches the economy at large are media is hard right. This is why Bernie Sanders was buried by MSNBC during the primary. They got caught when the guy who runs The Young Turks Youtube show wouldn't play ball, for all the good it did.
and getting lead out of gasoline (and therefor air) generally regarded as the reason for the drop in crime rates. It's not surprising other contaminates are a problem.
Sad thing is the current administration is trying to roll back air quality rules (especially in CA, where they're held to a higher standard and often define the rest of the nation). Funny thing is the car companies hate it, since it takes 8-10 years to design & build cars and they've got no idea if this administration will last long enough to roll out cars on the lower emission scale. But in the meantime we've got a push for more coal fired plants...
source: I know a few convicted felons. You typically need references plus a good chunk of money for court fees (something hard to do when you've got a conviction on your record). That's why it's called voter suppression. You never make it completely impossible to vote. If you did that then the jig is up. You just make it really, really hard.
they're not realizing otherwise. They're getting scared of losing what little they have and turning conservative. Meanwhile the mega-corporations run their candidates on conservative rhetoric (all the while pushing radical policies like starting wars with nations that didn't attack us, forcing arbitration on us all and giving themselves massive subsidies while fighting against anything that would increase wages).
But even that's not really a problem. Polls show Americans support single payer healthcare. They support the "New New Deal" and ending the 8 wars we're fighting (again, against nations that have never once attacked us). But _voters_ OTOH... they're not so sure.
The point of mandatory voting isn't get get young folks to vote. It's to end voter suppression. I waited 3 hours in line to vote for Bernie in my primary. That was not an accident. In my state there were police stationed in riot gear outside polls in poor (and especially black) neighborhoods. And now we've got this Voter Id crap whree they just make it so you can't get an Id if you're not somebody who's "supposed" to vote.
wanted to put an end to 'Net metering'. That's a fancy way of saying they pay you for the electricity your solar generates. Well, that's a pretty popular thing in my neck of the woods. So it didn't seem possible for them to do it. They needed a law, you see.
So they ran ads. The ads had a bunch of old folks sitting around a table talking about something scary. They didn't say what, just that it was scary as hell. The ad ended with an impassioned reminder to vote yes (or no, I can't remember) on proposition such and such. At no point in time did they discuss what the proposition was. It passed in a landslide.
Don't get me wrong. I'm still in favor of democracy. But something has to be done to counterbalance old folks with dementia being manipulated into voting for things they don't actually want because they can't understand. I'm in favor of mandatory voting. Force everyone to the polls with a few exceptions (e.g. if you're declared mentally unfit, and no, being convicted of a crime or even in jail shouldn't keep you from voting, that's the oldest voter suppression trick in the book).
2 to write and 1 to make the docs pretty. What's the problem? You do understand that pol science is hard, right? It's essentially statistics. Same with being an Economic cultural researcher. Again, math.
And it's not even hard to imagine why they're saying all this. Capitalism as we practice it today makes people's lives better by growing faster than the ruling class can monopolize the wealth. Remember the.com boom? The housing bubble? Regular people made money because there was just plain so much of it. But a lot of that money was real and was due to massive increases in productivity. Manufacturing's doubled in 50 years. Farm yields are through the roof. Did you know those farm yields require oil, and not just to run tractors? We use oil by products to replenish soil so we can grow without waiting for the land to recover.
Their point is we can't keep that up. Climate Change won't let us. We can't "grow ourselves out of a recession" anymore. At some point we're going to need social solutions. That means reigning in what we let the ruling class have/do. It means that the scraps the working class has traditionally been left with, which have been mighty tasty scraps of late, are about to go back to what they used to be; scraps. We either fix that with socialism or we go back to feudalism with kings, queens and knights being the crap out of us peasants.
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My first accident was caused by it. I'm driving down a major thoroughfare (5 lanes, it's a small town) and I see someone trying to do a left from a stop sign start to just go. So I slow down. Bear in mind she's at a dead stop and I'm doing 45 on a major street. So she stops and I, thinking she sees me, speed back up to be about my way. She floors it and t-bones me.
Later when I asked her why she said she saw me slowing and thought I was going to stop. In the middle of the street. A 5 lane street.
Now, the girl was a ditz, it's true. But had I not slowed down she never would have gone.
so I don't really care where the quote came from.
Mongo only pawn in game of life.
if any of this is going to change how anyone votes? Even a little. I realize this might not be a big enough issue to make the "single issue voter" grade, but so far as I can tell while it annoys people it's not something that even registers with even the most tech savvy voter. And so long as the FCC knows they can get away with it why stop? Especially when the gravy train of sweet post FCC cush jobs awaits.
I wouldn't mind seeing corruption be a bigger issue for Americans. They claim it is, but when it's time to vote they won't make it an issue. Not in any practical way.
What we really need is more guys like these who refuse corporate & PAC money. We should make refusing bribes a litmus test for all politicians. No refusal means no vote in the primary.
and had an older CPU. It's a cooling issue. I wouldn't normally blame a CPU manufacturer for that but it's a bloody Ultrabook, which is an Intel spec for thin notebooks that they crammed down the manufacturers throats so hard my company can't get anything but.
and not because it's technically impossible, but the nationally ruling party has already signaled they're going to block CA on their higher car emissions. I could see them moving against them on this too. After all, CA is so big that where they go the nation follows.
I have it drummed into my head that this is the greatest country on earth. It was big news when a dumb show about corrupt politicians had a phony TV politician asked about American Exceptionalism and go on a rant about how we're not in the top 5 for anything except prisons. And I've never heard a real politician make that point. Even Bernie has to shy away from it.
anymore? My bro doesn't, and he's in a fairly well paid job (just shy of $50k/yr, good money where he is). When I was a dumb kid working fast food nobody got those holidays except the other dumb kids (are parents wouldn't let us work). I'd be willing to bet less than half the population gets holiday time/pay anymore. I know retail employees don't.
to most Americans. They couldn't afford nice houses in nice neighborhoods with nice schools and clean air if they didn't spend 2 hours a day commuting to work. Public transit isn't an option because nobody wants to pay for it, because people love cars (you get a lot of happy memories associated with them from when you were a teenager and your parents paid for it) and because you feel like a poor person riding the bus.
This might change, but only because wages are plummeting and pretty soon most Americans won't be able to afford their own cars.
have been spending so much to win local elections. They've spent the last 30 years stacking the courts. Now it's paid off.
And I know it's not popular to call out one party because there's a bunch of pro-corporate Dems who helped stack those courts. But the Democrats at least have a party wing that refuses corporate & PAC money (they're called Justice Democrats, look 'em up). I know of no such animal for the other side. The Dems seem somewhat redeemable. e.g. the pro-consumer elements might take over at some point in a future I could conceive of. Barring a seismic shift like we got in the 60s after the civil rights movement I don't see that happening to the Republican party. At a certain point it's time to call a spade a spade.
I don't care if they guy did download the film, he's suffered enough. Hell, he should sue _them_.
I can't tell you the number of times I've seen hacks like that because queries were failing due to performance issues and you couldn't get the suits to pony up for more RAM or a faster CPU (or nowadays another per-CPU license, thanks Oracle!).
when you're too young to make decisions for yourself. This is how things like the puritanical work ethic survives repeated cycles of long term (20+years) technology unemployment. It's also why, as Richard Dawkins pointed out, your religion is generally decided by where your born.
is improved WiFi? Seriously, I know we're at the end of Moore's law and all but come on. My work laptop is dog slow with a clean load of Windows. Maybe do something about that first please?
Boycotts don't work because companies just merge until you have to do business with them or starve. There's an info graphic floating around the web that shows 10 companies own everything you buy, but even that ignores the fact that it's the same people sitting on the board of directors for those 10 companies.
There is no such thing as a sharing economy. That is a narrative pushed by Uber and the like to classify employees as contractors so they can strip employees of hard won protections. This is obvious because nobody drives Uber to share, they do it to make a living (such as it is).
Collective Bargaining means Unions. But Unions need large numbers of employees who are employed in a single location and likely a single industry and/or organization (and therefor can organize). The modern economy doesn't work like that. Automation means the manufacturing jobs aren't huge employers outside of third world countries where people are treated so poorly they're cheaper than machines. And that's just the beginning. An entire new class of automation is happening now (and being incorrectly called "AI" because a bit of machine learning is in play) that is going to make 30-40% of workers obsolete.
tl;dr. Your first two suggestions don't work, your last one has been broken down by technology and globalization. That leaves us with socialism as the only viable solution. I know folks don't like it (it feels too much like being told what to do, and about 20% of the population hates that, even though they're tacitly being told what to do by mega corps), but now isn't the time to get hung up on feelings...
I came here for advise from dogs pretending to be lawyers pretending to be geeks living in a basement. Once more /. lets me down...
laws a lot of times. I'm in agreement that existing law regarding telcos covers the internet. There's nothing magic about the internet, it's just another telecom utility. There's plenty of existing law if it's just enforced.
I find it funny that the same folks who complain about excess legal cruft gumming up our system seem to always be ready to pass yet another law when the current ones are plenty good enough.
to save NN. The expectation is they'll pass a phony baloney law with no teeth and won't even enforce the occasional gumming of the cable & telcos the law requires. Crap like this is why Congress has a 12% approval rating.
Of course that's over all. Somehow every congress critter seems to hang onto a 48% approval rating in their district which is just enough to stay in office. Aren't winner take all political systems wonderful?
and that it let them re-patriot billions of dollars of profits virtually tax free (all of which went into the pockets of the CEOs and top shareholders in the form or stock buy backs) I think they can let this one slide.
Seriously, this is all just a distraction from the plundering of our nations commons that's been going on since Reagan declared "Government isn't the solution, it's the problem".
on economic issues. So is Hollywood when you look into it. There's a slight bent to the left on social issues, mostly Abortion & Gun Control. Anything that touches the economy at large are media is hard right. This is why Bernie Sanders was buried by MSNBC during the primary. They got caught when the guy who runs The Young Turks Youtube show wouldn't play ball, for all the good it did.
and getting lead out of gasoline (and therefor air) generally regarded as the reason for the drop in crime rates. It's not surprising other contaminates are a problem.
Sad thing is the current administration is trying to roll back air quality rules (especially in CA, where they're held to a higher standard and often define the rest of the nation). Funny thing is the car companies hate it, since it takes 8-10 years to design & build cars and they've got no idea if this administration will last long enough to roll out cars on the lower emission scale. But in the meantime we've got a push for more coal fired plants...
source: I know a few convicted felons. You typically need references plus a good chunk of money for court fees (something hard to do when you've got a conviction on your record). That's why it's called voter suppression. You never make it completely impossible to vote. If you did that then the jig is up. You just make it really, really hard.
they're not realizing otherwise. They're getting scared of losing what little they have and turning conservative. Meanwhile the mega-corporations run their candidates on conservative rhetoric (all the while pushing radical policies like starting wars with nations that didn't attack us, forcing arbitration on us all and giving themselves massive subsidies while fighting against anything that would increase wages).
But even that's not really a problem. Polls show Americans support single payer healthcare. They support the "New New Deal" and ending the 8 wars we're fighting (again, against nations that have never once attacked us). But _voters_ OTOH... they're not so sure.
The point of mandatory voting isn't get get young folks to vote. It's to end voter suppression. I waited 3 hours in line to vote for Bernie in my primary. That was not an accident. In my state there were police stationed in riot gear outside polls in poor (and especially black) neighborhoods. And now we've got this Voter Id crap whree they just make it so you can't get an Id if you're not somebody who's "supposed" to vote.
Make voting mandatory and that goes away.
wanted to put an end to 'Net metering'. That's a fancy way of saying they pay you for the electricity your solar generates. Well, that's a pretty popular thing in my neck of the woods. So it didn't seem possible for them to do it. They needed a law, you see.
So they ran ads. The ads had a bunch of old folks sitting around a table talking about something scary. They didn't say what, just that it was scary as hell. The ad ended with an impassioned reminder to vote yes (or no, I can't remember) on proposition such and such. At no point in time did they discuss what the proposition was. It passed in a landslide.
Don't get me wrong. I'm still in favor of democracy. But something has to be done to counterbalance old folks with dementia being manipulated into voting for things they don't actually want because they can't understand. I'm in favor of mandatory voting. Force everyone to the polls with a few exceptions (e.g. if you're declared mentally unfit, and no, being convicted of a crime or even in jail shouldn't keep you from voting, that's the oldest voter suppression trick in the book).
2 to write and 1 to make the docs pretty. What's the problem? You do understand that pol science is hard, right? It's essentially statistics. Same with being an Economic cultural researcher. Again, math.
.com boom? The housing bubble? Regular people made money because there was just plain so much of it. But a lot of that money was real and was due to massive increases in productivity. Manufacturing's doubled in 50 years. Farm yields are through the roof. Did you know those farm yields require oil, and not just to run tractors? We use oil by products to replenish soil so we can grow without waiting for the land to recover.
And it's not even hard to imagine why they're saying all this. Capitalism as we practice it today makes people's lives better by growing faster than the ruling class can monopolize the wealth. Remember the
Their point is we can't keep that up. Climate Change won't let us. We can't "grow ourselves out of a recession" anymore. At some point we're going to need social solutions. That means reigning in what we let the ruling class have/do. It means that the scraps the working class has traditionally been left with, which have been mighty tasty scraps of late, are about to go back to what they used to be; scraps. We either fix that with socialism or we go back to feudalism with kings, queens and knights being the crap out of us peasants.