from lower income people. It's a defacto poll tax. There's been several studies on it. Anywhere it's been implemented suddenly there are DMV closures and extra fees for the Id. Also extra hoops to jump through for when women get married.
The amount of voter fraud isn't just statistically insignificant it's laughably so. No matter what anyone tells you nobody's busing in illegals to vote for Hilary (that sounds like trolling when I write it, but it was a real conspiracy theory that had to be addressed and debunked on national news).
Yes, there is somebody trying to steal elections. But they're doing it with voter suppression, not fraud. This is also why you will see armed police in body armor outside polling offices in poor, often black, neighborhoods. They're not there to keep the peace.
/.'s readership has aged. What's news for nerds and stuff that matters is different when you're 40 instead of 20. Also, there's just plain less tech out there, at least of the sort that makes good fodder for a site like this. There's been a lot of device convergence. e.g. instead of lots of cool gadgets we've all got phones and a laptop. We're also starting to hit physical limits of silicone so fewer big leaps in tech.
There is still cool stuff going on in tech of course, but it's all really, really high level. The average/.er isn't going to understand a 50 page paper on how particle physics effects CPU die size and how such and such wavelength of lazer applied in such and such situation may someday lead to shaving off half a micron. There's nothing wrong with that, most folks (myself included) won't get that. But it means the domain of problems that are fun to blather about on a forum is smaller.
I keep saying this, but somewhere between 60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. That doesn't leave any room to worry about climate change. You're worried about paying rent that month, buying food and keeping your car running so you can make it to work one more day.
If you want people to think and care long term you have to make sure their short term needs are taken care of. Otherwise they're vulnerable to being manipulated into doing terrible things that are perfectly rational when taken in the context of their completely messed up and irrational lives.
I would have thought this was settled 2 decades ago when Nintendo sued Galoob over the Game Genie and lost (with the classic line "If I buy a car does the manufacturer have a right to tell me I can't paint it blue?").
I'm aware the dynamics change with micro transactions & online play, but let's put it another way: Does Microsoft have a right to ban you from using Greasemonkey with office 365 because they might want to sell you a plugin that does what you used to with a Greasemonkey script?
with great big quotes. You don't want to be a spoil sport, do you? Be a team player and get chipped like everyone else.
I'm left thinking of Hijabs and how they're voluntary in a lot of countries, even though there's enormous societal pressure for women to wear them. I've been watching a lot of Genetic Skeptic on youtube, hence the thought train, but there are other examples. Like "indentured servitude" where you sell yourself into slavery or for a slightly less controversial aspect how about standing for the national anthem. There's just lots and lots of things that are technically voluntary but very much not.
in the same factories with more or less the same off the shelf parts (I think Apple's big enough to do their own CPUs but that's about it), right? This is like complaining your Dell laptop is a shameless rip off of an HP. It's not like the good 'ole days of the C64 and Atari 400.
and it's not that Venezuela's government are angels, but we kind of ignore all the sanctions the United States put on it. We're also ignoring that they were a dirt poor country until the oil bonanza hit and that they were really only a functional 1st world country for about 50 years. It's not surprising their institutions couldn't survive the double whammy that was their only commodity's price collapsing and Sanctions imposed by the most powerful country on plant earth...
Incidentally the United States has used Venezuela's collapsing economy to seize a ton of their oil assets. If you think that's a coincidence, especially given North America's history with South America then, well, I'm not sure I'd call what you have naivete. There needs to be a stronger word for it. Maybe the Germans have one, they're good at that sort of thing...
a ruling class has always been able to obtain a disproportionate amount of wealth relative to the value they add. Whether it's kings and queens or the heads of mega-Corporations.
what good does it to do raise your wages since if seems like prices will just go up to compensate. If the Union gets a 20% raise then the next day the cost of milk goes up 20%, right?
In practice that's not what happens. What's going on there is inflation, and inflation is only a zero sum game when productivity isn't going up. But productivity has gone up non stop for over 100 years. In the 70s wages stopped keeping pace with productivity gains.
What we have now is an oversupply of labor. Supply and demand is a two way street, but it's tough to get folks to acknowledge that because nobody like to think of themselves as a simple commodity. We're all precious, irreplaceable snowflakes. It doesn't help that there's a small group at the top (math majors, surgeons, top athletes) who are. There's a lot of folks who don't want to see those productivity gains distributed more equitably because it's a point of pride for them. At least that's the only explanation I've come up with why so many oppose things like single payer healthcare. Then again I've also noticed a lot of those single payer healthcare opponents qualify for Medicare and/or the VA.... Not that the powers that be haven't noticed and aren't working to eliminate those programs and give themselves the money. But again, I've never met a snowflake that thinks they can melt with the rest of us...
You tend to get higher quality. It also costs a lot more because they don't apply any of the discounts. Half the benefit is not having to pick through a bunch of crap produce, especially if you're not good at it (e.g. you're color blind). My bro hates shopping and before his income crashed (thanks, outsourcing & H1-Bs) he used to pay for delivery.
they'll get high risk loans, use those to buy high risk investments, do the whole thing under a corporation and pay themselves out in consultancy fees while they money's good. Meanwhile the whole thing is going to be teetering on the brink of collapse. Eventually a strong wing (e.g. a downturn in the economy) will knock it down.
Get enough of those and you've got an economic crash on your hands. Think 2008. Lower tiered investors couldn't get away with it because the banks would spot the bad investments. But these guys have connections built up over decades. Plus everybody involved knows the gov't will bail them out since if they don't we get another Great Depression. In other words, they're big enough to hold the entire economy hostage.
This is what happens when you let wealth inequality go unchecked. Money stops being money and becomes power and these folks can act with impunity and never suffer the consequences of their actions. Right now they've got good paying jobs to occupy them and that helps some. Dump a few hundred of them into the system without those jobs and it's going to get ugly.
the sort of people who pay that fee would also vote against it. They're also not terribly inconvenienced by gridlock. For a lot it's the only time to themselves they get before going home to the wife/hubby & kids. And they usually live outside the city where pollution isn't an issue.
we pay a _lot_ for specialists, but when it comes to PCPs by the time your done fighting it out with our insurance system you're pretty broke. My kid's PCP shut down their practice about a year ago because they just plain couldn't get paid. Not sure whatever happened to him either.
the the prospect of some of the high level jobs (the kind you get for graduating from Harvard). Like I said elsewhere the salesmen aren't going anywhere, but if you can eliminate those finance guys that could get scary. The last thing we need is a whole bunch recently unemployed guys with advanced degrees in finance mucking about in our economy. Those people aren't going to shrug their shoulders and say "Oh well, guess my degree is worthless now", they're going to go out there and make money any way they can, and they're likely to wreck the economy in the process....
beyond the High Freq Trading because stockbrokers are salesmen. They're not there to help you, they're there to move product. This is also why they fought (successfully) against regulations that required them to act in their clients best interests.
we've got a big problem with getting Primary Care Physicians. They don't earn a lot, especially if they've got their own practice. A big part of that it our crap insurance system that fights against paying them every step of the way, but given our political environment switching to a single payer system isn't going to happen any time soon. That's left a lot of them unable to pay their crazy high student loans. Which in turn means doctor shortages, especially in rural communities
That's where importing doctors comes in. They're trained overseas where education is usually paid for by tax dollars. That's made up for a lot of the supply issues. We could fix those issues with better pay but given our insurance system that's not an option. So if we take away those imports and we don't fix the pay problems we're going to have massive shortages.
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from lower income people. It's a defacto poll tax. There's been several studies on it. Anywhere it's been implemented suddenly there are DMV closures and extra fees for the Id. Also extra hoops to jump through for when women get married.
The amount of voter fraud isn't just statistically insignificant it's laughably so. No matter what anyone tells you nobody's busing in illegals to vote for Hilary (that sounds like trolling when I write it, but it was a real conspiracy theory that had to be addressed and debunked on national news).
Yes, there is somebody trying to steal elections. But they're doing it with voter suppression, not fraud. This is also why you will see armed police in body armor outside polling offices in poor, often black, neighborhoods. They're not there to keep the peace.
/.'s readership has aged. What's news for nerds and stuff that matters is different when you're 40 instead of 20. Also, there's just plain less tech out there, at least of the sort that makes good fodder for a site like this. There's been a lot of device convergence. e.g. instead of lots of cool gadgets we've all got phones and a laptop. We're also starting to hit physical limits of silicone so fewer big leaps in tech.
/.er isn't going to understand a 50 page paper on how particle physics effects CPU die size and how such and such wavelength of lazer applied in such and such situation may someday lead to shaving off half a micron. There's nothing wrong with that, most folks (myself included) won't get that. But it means the domain of problems that are fun to blather about on a forum is smaller.
There is still cool stuff going on in tech of course, but it's all really, really high level. The average
it's a Unix philosophy: lots of smaller tools working well together instead of one big tool that tries to do everything and just turns into a mess.
since the 90s. At a certain point we have to accept that it's on purpose...
that the "wrong" sort don't vote. Also, don't forget to station police in riot gear in front of all black^X high risk neighborhoods.
half the fun of a baseball game is bad calls from the Umpire. Next thing you know they'll wanna replace the beer and hotdogs.
I keep saying this, but somewhere between 60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. That doesn't leave any room to worry about climate change. You're worried about paying rent that month, buying food and keeping your car running so you can make it to work one more day.
If you want people to think and care long term you have to make sure their short term needs are taken care of. Otherwise they're vulnerable to being manipulated into doing terrible things that are perfectly rational when taken in the context of their completely messed up and irrational lives.
I would have thought this was settled 2 decades ago when Nintendo sued Galoob over the Game Genie and lost (with the classic line "If I buy a car does the manufacturer have a right to tell me I can't paint it blue?").
I'm aware the dynamics change with micro transactions & online play, but let's put it another way: Does Microsoft have a right to ban you from using Greasemonkey with office 365 because they might want to sell you a plugin that does what you used to with a Greasemonkey script?
an old meme from Ars Technica I think about a sort of "Trans Humanist" fellow who put a chip in and called him himself a cyborg.
with great big quotes. You don't want to be a spoil sport, do you? Be a team player and get chipped like everyone else.
I'm left thinking of Hijabs and how they're voluntary in a lot of countries, even though there's enormous societal pressure for women to wear them. I've been watching a lot of Genetic Skeptic on youtube, hence the thought train, but there are other examples. Like "indentured servitude" where you sell yourself into slavery or for a slightly less controversial aspect how about standing for the national anthem. There's just lots and lots of things that are technically voluntary but very much not.
I've read that if min wage kept pace with inflation it would be north of $20 right now...
the party in complete power of all branches of Government has called global warming a hoax. Is he from a different timeline than I am? I can go there?
in the same factories with more or less the same off the shelf parts (I think Apple's big enough to do their own CPUs but that's about it), right? This is like complaining your Dell laptop is a shameless rip off of an HP. It's not like the good 'ole days of the C64 and Atari 400.
and it's not that Venezuela's government are angels, but we kind of ignore all the sanctions the United States put on it. We're also ignoring that they were a dirt poor country until the oil bonanza hit and that they were really only a functional 1st world country for about 50 years. It's not surprising their institutions couldn't survive the double whammy that was their only commodity's price collapsing and Sanctions imposed by the most powerful country on plant earth...
Incidentally the United States has used Venezuela's collapsing economy to seize a ton of their oil assets. If you think that's a coincidence, especially given North America's history with South America then, well, I'm not sure I'd call what you have naivete. There needs to be a stronger word for it. Maybe the Germans have one, they're good at that sort of thing...
a ruling class has always been able to obtain a disproportionate amount of wealth relative to the value they add. Whether it's kings and queens or the heads of mega-Corporations.
what good does it to do raise your wages since if seems like prices will just go up to compensate. If the Union gets a 20% raise then the next day the cost of milk goes up 20%, right?
In practice that's not what happens. What's going on there is inflation, and inflation is only a zero sum game when productivity isn't going up. But productivity has gone up non stop for over 100 years. In the 70s wages stopped keeping pace with productivity gains.
What we have now is an oversupply of labor. Supply and demand is a two way street, but it's tough to get folks to acknowledge that because nobody like to think of themselves as a simple commodity. We're all precious, irreplaceable snowflakes. It doesn't help that there's a small group at the top (math majors, surgeons, top athletes) who are. There's a lot of folks who don't want to see those productivity gains distributed more equitably because it's a point of pride for them. At least that's the only explanation I've come up with why so many oppose things like single payer healthcare. Then again I've also noticed a lot of those single payer healthcare opponents qualify for Medicare and/or the VA.... Not that the powers that be haven't noticed and aren't working to eliminate those programs and give themselves the money. But again, I've never met a snowflake that thinks they can melt with the rest of us...
You tend to get higher quality. It also costs a lot more because they don't apply any of the discounts. Half the benefit is not having to pick through a bunch of crap produce, especially if you're not good at it (e.g. you're color blind). My bro hates shopping and before his income crashed (thanks, outsourcing & H1-Bs) he used to pay for delivery.
it's about the kinds of risks they'll be willing to take after their high paying jobs go away.
they'll get high risk loans, use those to buy high risk investments, do the whole thing under a corporation and pay themselves out in consultancy fees while they money's good. Meanwhile the whole thing is going to be teetering on the brink of collapse. Eventually a strong wing (e.g. a downturn in the economy) will knock it down.
Get enough of those and you've got an economic crash on your hands. Think 2008. Lower tiered investors couldn't get away with it because the banks would spot the bad investments. But these guys have connections built up over decades. Plus everybody involved knows the gov't will bail them out since if they don't we get another Great Depression. In other words, they're big enough to hold the entire economy hostage.
This is what happens when you let wealth inequality go unchecked. Money stops being money and becomes power and these folks can act with impunity and never suffer the consequences of their actions. Right now they've got good paying jobs to occupy them and that helps some. Dump a few hundred of them into the system without those jobs and it's going to get ugly.
with a nerdy kid named Urkele. He wanted to impress a girl by showing off his BMW so he bought one of these.
the sort of people who pay that fee would also vote against it. They're also not terribly inconvenienced by gridlock. For a lot it's the only time to themselves they get before going home to the wife/hubby & kids. And they usually live outside the city where pollution isn't an issue.
we pay a _lot_ for specialists, but when it comes to PCPs by the time your done fighting it out with our insurance system you're pretty broke. My kid's PCP shut down their practice about a year ago because they just plain couldn't get paid. Not sure whatever happened to him either.
the the prospect of some of the high level jobs (the kind you get for graduating from Harvard). Like I said elsewhere the salesmen aren't going anywhere, but if you can eliminate those finance guys that could get scary. The last thing we need is a whole bunch recently unemployed guys with advanced degrees in finance mucking about in our economy. Those people aren't going to shrug their shoulders and say "Oh well, guess my degree is worthless now", they're going to go out there and make money any way they can, and they're likely to wreck the economy in the process....
beyond the High Freq Trading because stockbrokers are salesmen. They're not there to help you, they're there to move product. This is also why they fought (successfully) against regulations that required them to act in their clients best interests.
we've got a big problem with getting Primary Care Physicians. They don't earn a lot, especially if they've got their own practice. A big part of that it our crap insurance system that fights against paying them every step of the way, but given our political environment switching to a single payer system isn't going to happen any time soon. That's left a lot of them unable to pay their crazy high student loans. Which in turn means doctor shortages, especially in rural communities
That's where importing doctors comes in. They're trained overseas where education is usually paid for by tax dollars. That's made up for a lot of the supply issues. We could fix those issues with better pay but given our insurance system that's not an option. So if we take away those imports and we don't fix the pay problems we're going to have massive shortages.