I know lots of folks perfectly content with a decent home, food, transportation and the occasional vacation. I know I am. Here's a crazy idea: Greed is not infinite unless you _encourage_ it to be. Hell, look at the Japanese. If anything there's a case where a bit more greed would be a good thing. They keep working themselves to death for little in return.
And speaking of the Japanese (and America too) overpopulation isn't really a problem. Both countries have birth rates below replacement. America is freaking out over it because we're turning brown and there's a lot of folks over here who have a problem with that. But the thing is, when people have something to do (work, hobbies, video games) they drop 1 or 2 kids and stop. It's really only the really poor that crank 'em out as fast as they can. Assuming we don't regress (and believe me, there's a lot of folks trying to make us do just that) we're gonna have to start encouraging people to have kids just to avoid going extinct. Ever read Asimov's robot novels? Remember those weirdos who avoided all human contact?
folks in science of being 'power hungry'. You do understand what it takes, in terms of both effort and intelligence, to be a statistician, right? Any one of these guys could make more money running numbers for some kind of financial racket like that 2008 CDS mess than they do warning the country about the impact of global warming.
Their point is that this notion that capitalism raises people's quality of life isn't going to last. The damage down to the climate is going to blow that away. At that point we do one of two things: implement socialism to improve lives or descend into kleptocracy & oligarchy. That's not because capitalism is fundamentally broken, it's because for capitalism to work there has to be lots of growing capital; and climate change is going to do away with large amounts of the stuff.
And go ask Denmark, Germany, Sweden and France how socialism is doing form them. Or maybe ask how Venezuela might be holding up if they didn't have the most powerful nation on earth imposing sanctions on them for no reason (well, not no reason, we did just use their loan defaults to snatch a ton of land and resources Citgo owned, but it's OK when we do it for reasons I'm sure you can elaborate on.).
that isn't so built up that a guy passing recognizes body armor when he sees it, knows how to compensate for it and is carrying the firepower to do so... That just doesn't seem like a safe place to live.
and Japan. Singapore too (though they're ridiculously draconian to do it). You do need a strong enough economy to keep crime to a minimum though... My country (America) probably doens't have that.
it was supposed to stop meth labs in the city limits, which is by and large has. True, we'd be better off legalizing all drugs, implementing single payer and then treating drug use as an illness by supplying the users, making them take their drug in a clinical setting and then immediately providing consulting. But who the hell is gonna pay for all that?
This is another one of those "rational irrational" decisions. I can't have a functioning healthcare system for the working class but I _can_ have gun control that keeps guns out of their hands. But then again it doesn't look like we can have that either. People _love_ guns. So we'll just have mass shootings every couple of days (seriously, there's one every few days now).
I read a news article once about an old man who had a pizza girl knock on his door (wrong house). He shot her dead. Said he felt threatened. By a pizza girl.
I also know several gun nuts who carry talk about how they'd love to be in an active shooter scenario so they could shoot back...
I mean, I know the plural of anecdote is not data and all, but I swear to God there's a lot of folks out there that just want to shoot somebody.
you're comparing a variety of 1st world nations with strong natural resources and few enemies to the likes of Yemen (currently under siege by Saudi Arabia with the help of America and occupying the same slot as America on it's list ), Somolia (a country that suffers constant droughts and has no natural resources) and Venezuela (which the US shut out of the world banking system and then used their inability to pay debts to seize property from, funny how it's OK when we do it).
Yeah, take a bunch of people who've been shit all over by circumstance and the most powerful nations on earth and hey, what do you know, they have trouble maintaining functional governments.
they exist to stop casual or spur of the moment shooters. Bars are a good place for gun free zones since drunk people do stupid things and, well, Hotels often have bars. But there's lot of places that prefer to be gun free since the odds of a mass shooter showing up and getting taken out is the odds of a fist fight escalating into a gun fight.
is it makes it real easy to kill a lot of people fast. Cars require your target to be somewhere you can get a car. Bombs require some skill (and yes, I know it's not a lot of skill, but if you're already mentally deranged it's a fairly high barrier).
This is also why guns are such a problem for suicide. You can blow your head off before the meds kick in and you realize you don't want to die.
it's always been this expensive. We used to heavily subsidize public Universities with federal funds. We stopped doing that in the late 90s (thanks Clinton). I was in school when it started and the school newspapers talked about it. They had the economics department project what the cost of college would be if the cuts continued and it's right about what it is now. Nobody listened to them because their voices were drowned out by right wing think tanks in favor of the cuts (or a variety of unpleasant reasons I'll leave up to your imagination).
So yeah, I won't blame capitalism necessarily, rather I'll blame cronyism. e.g. funding tax cuts for the rich on the backs of our children.
that it wasn't a bullet that killed JFK, it was the person who fired it. Which sounds reasonable, except that in the absence of said bullet he'd still be alive and that it was the accuracy of modern firearms that made the shot possible...
In the last 50 years America has doubled it's manufacturing output while cutting manufacturing jobs by 1/3. Our public policy has almost completely ignored that. The end of large scale manufacturing jobs as the primary employer is more than anything what killed Unions, and most economists agree that loss of bargaining power is why wages aren't going up even though unemployment is low.
This entire article strikes me as yet another attempt to fit the square peg that is corporate capitalism into the round whole that is society's well being. It's working backwards from it's conclusion.
you'll have a hard time convincing a judge. I suppose if you got a really good lawyer and class action, but they're teetering on the verge of collapse. Go ahead and sue, you won't get a dime or your movies. Heck, I don't think you could find a lawyer to take a case unless you paid them up front since they've got to know Movie Pass doesn't have money to pay out settlements. And you'd just be out the $50k. Plus you'd have to find a shady lawyer since better ones would tell you you're not gonna get paid.
the one thing I find the conspiracy theorists have in common seems to be a shared community. It doesn't matter how weird or nutty you are, if you believe then you're one of us and we'll put up with all your crazy shit. I see the same behavior in a lot of hobbies. Pipe clubs come to mind. I see the pattern a lot with Table top RPG players too. More controversially I see it with religions and gun lovers.
If anyone's wondering why so many folks believe this kind of clap-trap that's why. It lets people who are a little off (or more than a little off) come together and forget their differences.
so I don't expect them to learn from Trump. It doesn't help that Hilary mostly ignored them and when she did pay attention she called them Deplorable. She couldn't have picked a worse word. It's catchy but sounds like something educated elites say (because, well, it is). It's also the same thing that cost Romney the election (remember his 42% quip? Christ, even Romney knew better than to say that in public...).
With luck Bernie will win the primary, but right now the establishment seems intent on cramming right wingers like Biden or Kamala Harris down our throats. We could have had Franklin but bloody Harris used her connections to take him down over that photo.
and I don't think there are too many of these, but they do exist, are spiritualists. America has become a lot less religious, but oddly enough some folks miss it. So they turn to crap like homeopathy and Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop. Again, they're not dumb. They know what they're doing is silly. But they're doing it to fill a void. These ones are, in my experience, few and far enough between to be mostly harmless.
and in America you're discouraged from discussing wages. I have friends at work and we flaunt that (as we're legally entitled to). I make a lot more than some of them, and less than others. We all pay the same for health insurance, but my ability to meet copays is better than theirs (since I make more). And I'll say this, I have excellent insurance and I still pay $2400 before it kicks in and 20% after that. My Bro's, which is worse, doesn't kick in until $10k and it's 40% after that.
and losing elections. It's one thing when that happens with the presidency. Our electoral college was designed to do exactly that. But they've lost the House two or three times now but won more votes. I want to see stuff like this because if nothing else I want to see an end to our sham Democracy. Maybe if enough people recognize there's a problem we'll start seeing changes.
they're breaking long standing laws about sub-letting designed to control housing prices for residents. Those laws exist because wealthy people would buy up all the property during cyclic economic crashes and rent it back if they were allowed. There's currently a big problem with Chinese using foreign land to hide money from their corrupt government. They rent it out on services like airbnb. New Zealand just blocked them from buying land to prevent their countrymen from being extorted. But you don't really need the Chinese to buy up the land. Like I said, just wait for a few cyclic downturns when people are forced to sell homes for pennies on the dollar.
Once again a practice that was made illegal for a very good reason has become "legal" again because, hey, it's on the Internet.
or more tragic. Homeopaths believe "Like cures like", "Water has memory" and that the more you dilute something the more effective it is at curing. So they put poison in water and dilute it until the poison is gone. Then they sell that as "medicine".
Sometimes they screw up and don't dilute enough. When they do that kids get sick and die. It's usually the kids since adults can often survive (being older).
That said, most homeopaths aren't idiots, they're desperate. Especially in America. We don't guarantee healthcare. Lots of people can't afford it. So they turn to something to give them hope. It doesn't help that homeopathy is sold in packaging that looks like medicine and thanks to easily bought off politicians can make medical claims with a wink and a nod. There is the occasional person who buys homeopathy thinking they just bought real medicine because it's often sold right next to real medicine and in packaging that makes it look like real medicine.
But it's mostly desperate people without healthcare looking for hope. Most human being can't live without hope, so they'll take it where ever they can find it. They're easy prey.
I've listened to a lot of what comes out of the Trump Administration. Not Trump himself, his Administration. And it scares me. I'm most worried about how he's letting a challenge to the ACA's protection of pre-existing conditions go through. I've got friends and family who live and die by it. Nobody's talking about it. The lawsuit is quietly proceeding like nothing happened. Meanwhile his Supreme Court nominee will likely strike it down when it passes his desk. And on the off chance Bernie Sanders & the Dems get us Medicare for all ending the farce of our healthcare system once and for all that same nominee will likely kill it. In the process they might kill Medicare & Medicaid too...
The shouting isn't there because they're not being listened to. It's a distraction from what the ruling class is doing to the working class...
Slashdot Mirror
I know lots of folks perfectly content with a decent home, food, transportation and the occasional vacation. I know I am. Here's a crazy idea: Greed is not infinite unless you _encourage_ it to be. Hell, look at the Japanese. If anything there's a case where a bit more greed would be a good thing. They keep working themselves to death for little in return.
And speaking of the Japanese (and America too) overpopulation isn't really a problem. Both countries have birth rates below replacement. America is freaking out over it because we're turning brown and there's a lot of folks over here who have a problem with that. But the thing is, when people have something to do (work, hobbies, video games) they drop 1 or 2 kids and stop. It's really only the really poor that crank 'em out as fast as they can. Assuming we don't regress (and believe me, there's a lot of folks trying to make us do just that) we're gonna have to start encouraging people to have kids just to avoid going extinct. Ever read Asimov's robot novels? Remember those weirdos who avoided all human contact?
folks in science of being 'power hungry'. You do understand what it takes, in terms of both effort and intelligence, to be a statistician, right? Any one of these guys could make more money running numbers for some kind of financial racket like that 2008 CDS mess than they do warning the country about the impact of global warming.
Their point is that this notion that capitalism raises people's quality of life isn't going to last. The damage down to the climate is going to blow that away. At that point we do one of two things: implement socialism to improve lives or descend into kleptocracy & oligarchy. That's not because capitalism is fundamentally broken, it's because for capitalism to work there has to be lots of growing capital; and climate change is going to do away with large amounts of the stuff.
And go ask Denmark, Germany, Sweden and France how socialism is doing form them. Or maybe ask how Venezuela might be holding up if they didn't have the most powerful nation on earth imposing sanctions on them for no reason (well, not no reason, we did just use their loan defaults to snatch a ton of land and resources Citgo owned, but it's OK when we do it for reasons I'm sure you can elaborate on.).
ending the blockade. You know, the one by the Saudis being done with the weapons we sold them...
that isn't so built up that a guy passing recognizes body armor when he sees it, knows how to compensate for it and is carrying the firepower to do so... That just doesn't seem like a safe place to live.
and Japan. Singapore too (though they're ridiculously draconian to do it). You do need a strong enough economy to keep crime to a minimum though... My country (America) probably doens't have that.
it was supposed to stop meth labs in the city limits, which is by and large has. True, we'd be better off legalizing all drugs, implementing single payer and then treating drug use as an illness by supplying the users, making them take their drug in a clinical setting and then immediately providing consulting. But who the hell is gonna pay for all that?
This is another one of those "rational irrational" decisions. I can't have a functioning healthcare system for the working class but I _can_ have gun control that keeps guns out of their hands. But then again it doesn't look like we can have that either. People _love_ guns. So we'll just have mass shootings every couple of days (seriously, there's one every few days now).
I read a news article once about an old man who had a pizza girl knock on his door (wrong house). He shot her dead. Said he felt threatened. By a pizza girl.
I also know several gun nuts who carry talk about how they'd love to be in an active shooter scenario so they could shoot back...
I mean, I know the plural of anecdote is not data and all, but I swear to God there's a lot of folks out there that just want to shoot somebody.
you're comparing a variety of 1st world nations with strong natural resources and few enemies to the likes of Yemen (currently under siege by Saudi Arabia with the help of America and occupying the same slot as America on it's list ), Somolia (a country that suffers constant droughts and has no natural resources) and Venezuela (which the US shut out of the world banking system and then used their inability to pay debts to seize property from, funny how it's OK when we do it).
Yeah, take a bunch of people who've been shit all over by circumstance and the most powerful nations on earth and hey, what do you know, they have trouble maintaining functional governments.
the 2nd amendment was not nor was it ever a carte blanc to have as many guns in any way shape and form as you want.
instead of 30... Anyway it'll drop off quickly because this has become routine. 3 dead and 9 injured is barely even news anymore...
they exist to stop casual or spur of the moment shooters. Bars are a good place for gun free zones since drunk people do stupid things and, well, Hotels often have bars. But there's lot of places that prefer to be gun free since the odds of a mass shooter showing up and getting taken out is the odds of a fist fight escalating into a gun fight.
is it makes it real easy to kill a lot of people fast. Cars require your target to be somewhere you can get a car. Bombs require some skill (and yes, I know it's not a lot of skill, but if you're already mentally deranged it's a fairly high barrier).
This is also why guns are such a problem for suicide. You can blow your head off before the meds kick in and you realize you don't want to die.
it's always been this expensive. We used to heavily subsidize public Universities with federal funds. We stopped doing that in the late 90s (thanks Clinton). I was in school when it started and the school newspapers talked about it. They had the economics department project what the cost of college would be if the cuts continued and it's right about what it is now. Nobody listened to them because their voices were drowned out by right wing think tanks in favor of the cuts (or a variety of unpleasant reasons I'll leave up to your imagination).
So yeah, I won't blame capitalism necessarily, rather I'll blame cronyism. e.g. funding tax cuts for the rich on the backs of our children.
that it wasn't a bullet that killed JFK, it was the person who fired it. Which sounds reasonable, except that in the absence of said bullet he'd still be alive and that it was the accuracy of modern firearms that made the shot possible...
In the last 50 years America has doubled it's manufacturing output while cutting manufacturing jobs by 1/3. Our public policy has almost completely ignored that. The end of large scale manufacturing jobs as the primary employer is more than anything what killed Unions, and most economists agree that loss of bargaining power is why wages aren't going up even though unemployment is low.
This entire article strikes me as yet another attempt to fit the square peg that is corporate capitalism into the round whole that is society's well being. It's working backwards from it's conclusion.
you'll have a hard time convincing a judge. I suppose if you got a really good lawyer and class action, but they're teetering on the verge of collapse. Go ahead and sue, you won't get a dime or your movies. Heck, I don't think you could find a lawyer to take a case unless you paid them up front since they've got to know Movie Pass doesn't have money to pay out settlements. And you'd just be out the $50k. Plus you'd have to find a shady lawyer since better ones would tell you you're not gonna get paid.
the one thing I find the conspiracy theorists have in common seems to be a shared community. It doesn't matter how weird or nutty you are, if you believe then you're one of us and we'll put up with all your crazy shit. I see the same behavior in a lot of hobbies. Pipe clubs come to mind. I see the pattern a lot with Table top RPG players too. More controversially I see it with religions and gun lovers.
If anyone's wondering why so many folks believe this kind of clap-trap that's why. It lets people who are a little off (or more than a little off) come together and forget their differences.
so I don't expect them to learn from Trump. It doesn't help that Hilary mostly ignored them and when she did pay attention she called them Deplorable. She couldn't have picked a worse word. It's catchy but sounds like something educated elites say (because, well, it is). It's also the same thing that cost Romney the election (remember his 42% quip? Christ, even Romney knew better than to say that in public...).
With luck Bernie will win the primary, but right now the establishment seems intent on cramming right wingers like Biden or Kamala Harris down our throats. We could have had Franklin but bloody Harris used her connections to take him down over that photo.
and I don't think there are too many of these, but they do exist, are spiritualists. America has become a lot less religious, but oddly enough some folks miss it. So they turn to crap like homeopathy and Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop. Again, they're not dumb. They know what they're doing is silly. But they're doing it to fill a void. These ones are, in my experience, few and far enough between to be mostly harmless.
and in America you're discouraged from discussing wages. I have friends at work and we flaunt that (as we're legally entitled to). I make a lot more than some of them, and less than others. We all pay the same for health insurance, but my ability to meet copays is better than theirs (since I make more). And I'll say this, I have excellent insurance and I still pay $2400 before it kicks in and 20% after that. My Bro's, which is worse, doesn't kick in until $10k and it's 40% after that.
to secure cheap energy like the US is. Your bill isn't going down but your dependency is.
sounds like China's finally getting tired of it.
and losing elections. It's one thing when that happens with the presidency. Our electoral college was designed to do exactly that. But they've lost the House two or three times now but won more votes. I want to see stuff like this because if nothing else I want to see an end to our sham Democracy. Maybe if enough people recognize there's a problem we'll start seeing changes.
they're breaking long standing laws about sub-letting designed to control housing prices for residents. Those laws exist because wealthy people would buy up all the property during cyclic economic crashes and rent it back if they were allowed. There's currently a big problem with Chinese using foreign land to hide money from their corrupt government. They rent it out on services like airbnb. New Zealand just blocked them from buying land to prevent their countrymen from being extorted. But you don't really need the Chinese to buy up the land. Like I said, just wait for a few cyclic downturns when people are forced to sell homes for pennies on the dollar.
Once again a practice that was made illegal for a very good reason has become "legal" again because, hey, it's on the Internet.
or more tragic. Homeopaths believe "Like cures like", "Water has memory" and that the more you dilute something the more effective it is at curing. So they put poison in water and dilute it until the poison is gone. Then they sell that as "medicine".
Sometimes they screw up and don't dilute enough. When they do that kids get sick and die. It's usually the kids since adults can often survive (being older).
That said, most homeopaths aren't idiots, they're desperate. Especially in America. We don't guarantee healthcare. Lots of people can't afford it. So they turn to something to give them hope. It doesn't help that homeopathy is sold in packaging that looks like medicine and thanks to easily bought off politicians can make medical claims with a wink and a nod. There is the occasional person who buys homeopathy thinking they just bought real medicine because it's often sold right next to real medicine and in packaging that makes it look like real medicine.
But it's mostly desperate people without healthcare looking for hope. Most human being can't live without hope, so they'll take it where ever they can find it. They're easy prey.
I've listened to a lot of what comes out of the Trump Administration. Not Trump himself, his Administration. And it scares me. I'm most worried about how he's letting a challenge to the ACA's protection of pre-existing conditions go through. I've got friends and family who live and die by it. Nobody's talking about it. The lawsuit is quietly proceeding like nothing happened. Meanwhile his Supreme Court nominee will likely strike it down when it passes his desk. And on the off chance Bernie Sanders & the Dems get us Medicare for all ending the farce of our healthcare system once and for all that same nominee will likely kill it. In the process they might kill Medicare & Medicaid too...
The shouting isn't there because they're not being listened to. It's a distraction from what the ruling class is doing to the working class...