It was a rip-off in 2010. Maybe it's because I grew up with the idea that, “Ok, TV is free, but you have to watch these commercials” that I could never bring myself to pay for cable TV. Like that frog in the pot on the stove, they slowly added commercials, then more commercials, and (apparently) increased the rates people paid at the same time. Now, people finally seem to be noticing that the water is boiling.
Guy with $0 goes out and turns raw materials into wealth creating value out of nothing increasing the amount both people have.
Just curious, did this guy "go out" on public roads, protected by public police, legal system, and military? Did he have an education, perhaps from a public school? Did he survive to adulthood thanks in part to safety and health regulations?
Yeah, no one with zero dollars is turning anything into anything. You need tools and energy to acquire any raw material, let alone turn it into something, unless you’re an artist working with found-objects. Sounds like Ayn Rand’s fantasy.
You may not have noticed it, but we do not lack money on the supply side. We have an incredible amount of money waiting for something worthwhile to invest in. What we lack is money on the demand side that could create the demand for an endeavor to invest in.
That’s correct, and it’s what the Right seems not to understand. Demand is what drives the economy. You can give Mr. Rich Guy more money, but he’d be an idiot to open a widget factory if no one is buying widgets. You give poor people more money and they spend it. Mr. Rich Guy can get a loan, or get some investors together, if there’s a demand. He doesn’t need more pocket money.
There is not "more spending money". The only way a government can do this is to take money from A and give it to B.
Unless it’s the Federal government. But what Alaska is doing is taking money that would normally go into the state treasury and giving it directly to the people. While any kind of spending is good for the economy, since it always creates work for someone, giving it to the people to spend injects it into the economy much more evenly, and more effectively, than, say, spending on construction projects does. The money goes to more diverse places.
Also, the notion that a thousand bucks a year is going to cause people to stop working is just nuts. Thirty-thousand, maybe, but a couple/few grand isn’t enough to live on. What it does is give people a little more spending power, which is great for the economy. The problem we have in this country is that we have some people who just cannot abide seeing poor people get any kind of leg up. So they oppose any kind of program that would lift our least fortunate citizens out of poverty, and to their own detriment, since they don’t understand how that grows the economy.
Here's what Trump wrote on this Twitter: "The New York Times has a new Fake Story that now the Russians and Chinese (glad they finally added China) are listening to all of my calls on cellphones. Except that I rarely use a cellphone, & when I do it’s government authorized. I like Hard Lines. Just more made up Fake News!"
Which he sent from his iPhone. Use TweetDeck. It’ll tell you which phone he’s using.
If you know you're being spied on (I find it hard to believe that the Times would find out before the U.S. government) wouldn't that just motivate you to feed bad information through those channels?
Indeed, this is the strategy being used by the White House: Owing to Trump's level of sheer incompetence, most everything that comes out of his mouth is bad information.
It doesn’t have to be about government or politics to be useful information. Trump has little interest in those topics, anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump wants to use his own phone because he’s more worried about his own government spying on him, (although I’m sure laziness is a factor). If he’s using that phone to run his always shady business deals, that could be very compromising information.
This debate only exists in the minds of religious kooks. It is pretty obvious to everyone else that morality is just a formulation of our pack instincts, with a bit of logical extension to modern circumstances.
Right, it’s an evolutionary adaptation. All social animals have “rules” which help the group maintain cohesion. Ours are just a bit more elaborated.
Yeah, it's not like embedding 3rd-party advertising script code with FULL ACCESS to the main site's data has been a thing since forever.
Can we now get web browsers to block all 3rd-party scripts by default? Please?
Yes we can!
Well, I can. I’m still, after all these years, a bit shocked that not everyone uses even ad-blockers, let alone script blockers. A browser that automatically blocked all ads, beacons, scripts, etc, etc, would be nice, I suppose, but haven’t we dumbed-down the internet enough already? As it is, we have to put up with two-factor authentication because some people are too fuckin’ lazy to use password managers, and now they want us to hand over our phone numbers, too.
Personally, I think it’s smarter to be in charge of your own privacy, rather than trust that ten million different web sites will do it for you. I’m certainly not going to trust that these mega-corporations, whose sole business is selling ads, will do it for us. Install ad-blockers, Ghostery, and No Script, get a password manager and start using good, unique, passwords, and don’t use your real name online. Oh, and never use the credentials of one site to log into another. It’s not that hard.
The intent of the regulation is to keep stupid people from doing stupid things, another debate in itself.
Is a sad day when addiction is called "doing stupid things."
It’s even sadder that people can’t, or won’t, distinguish between compulsive behaviors and addiction. We’ve watered that word “addiction” down to near-meaninglessness.
This clearly isn’t gambling in the normal sense people think of. What this is, not letting people see what they’re buying, is a scam, a fraud, (of course, that defines gambling, too). They should have no trouble regulating that. Anyway, people should be allowed to gamble, in spite of the fact that a minority of people develop compulsive gambling problems. We don’t prevent adults from enjoying alcohol simply because a minority of people develop drinking problems. The same should go for gambling and drug taking.
"Everybody is doing what they want instead of following my vision that they didn't share... the `system' is failing!" Well, maybe not. Maybe it is you that don't share their vision?
I mean, I'm sure I personally prefer his vision, but why would "the system," ie everybody collectively, be following him? Should we also find all the engineers that built our cars and let them choose where we drive? It seems rather silly that an engineer building a tool would also tell us about policy and politics and business and all that.
He complains about content and advertising, why isn't he publishing better content? It is open, people just aren't publishing what he wanted. He can fix that himself if he's actually talking about anything that is lacking; but no, instead he wants to tell people what NOT to publish. It won't work, they won't care.
He’s lamenting the loss of a more democratic web, where all kinds of content was possible. You can’t compete with these huge commercial entities. Since the commercialization of the web, all these little one-person web sites have disappeared, and the ones that still exist have gotten harder to find due to the peculiarities of Google’s algorithms. Unless you have a million other sites linking to you, you’re pushed way down in the results. I don’t use Google, but it seems most people do, and instead of neutral results they’re getting what Google thinks they want. Even if that can be trusted, and they’re not getting what Google wants them to have, you’re still getting boxed in.
You want him to provide the content? That’s just it. One person can no longer compete on the web, and for a number of reasons, not least of which is the security environment. Anyone running a server knows this. It’s become a commercial wasteland, and like its brick & mortar counterpart, an endless strip of blinking lights and advertising. Good content has gotten much harder to host, and to find.
Encourage abortion for those that continue to poduce with no way of paying for them.
Uh, just to point out the obvious, a simpler and cheaper solution would be just to make sure that birth control is available to those who want it.
Right, and never mind this has nothing to do with the problem being discussed anyway. One thing about right-wingers that never ceases to amaze me is, they can’t stand to see some poor person get a little help from society, but have no problem giving millions to already wealthy people. They seem to think one comes out of their paycheck, but the other doesn’t.
The bottom quintile benefit from a myriad of government programs.
Lol! Like what? You pretty much have to be disabled, or a woman with children, to get any help at all. And the assistance you receive is a pittance, an amount no one can live on. And even then, you’re cut off pretty quickly, and expected to work. You ought to look up the requirements for "welfare" sometime. Welfare, as people still think of it, has been dead for twenty-five years now. Yet, I hear idiots complaining about how “illegals” are getting welfare, when citizens can’t even get it. Google “bill clinton welfare reform"
OR... Are you claiming that they snap up housing as investments, forcing prices up? Is that it? Because if it is, you just proved why you want a lot of rich people buying stuff that the poorer folks like you produce...
How about Venezuela? The rich and poor are starving down there you know..
The rich are starving nowhere.
Here’s another thing a lot of people seem unaware of - welfare has been dead in the US for twenty-five years now. While we hand out billions in corporate welfare, we cannot stand to see poor people being helped. For some reason, that’s the thing that drives people nuts. Meanwhile, American workers no longer have pensions to look forward to, and their wages have been stagnant for so long, no one has any savings. After a lifetime of work, they end up either living in poverty, or working until they drop. But, I guess it’s ok because, being impoverished in the richest country in the World, they’re better off than the schmucks in poor countries. Assuming that’s even true. I know it’s a rare country that gives workers less paid vacation time than the US. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do better on pensions, too.
Trump won because there are a lot of foolish Americans who bought up the line of shit Trump was selling.
Really, Trump was just able to take advantage of the atmosphere created by the right-wing media over many years. Trump was simply the first guy to put down the dog whistle and pick up a megaphone, thus taking the party away from the more squeamish Republicans. This is what Trump does - he makes money by slapping his name on other people’s work.
Because of the shameless right-wing media, we have a large portion of the electorate living in an alternate reality. Many years of Fox News and right-wing radio created it, and this is why they were primed for Trump’s ridiculous promises. The Russians love this, of course. Not only are Americans divided over nonsense issues the other half doesn’t even know about, (heard about the upcoming Anftifa coup?), they have a fool in the White House.
Eric, as you know, was the one who didn't recuse himself from Apple's board even when he learned about the iPhone. Either he was trying to steal the iPhone or if you really beleive he wasn't and Google was already planning their own, then you have to ask why he didn't recuse himself.
I’m sure it just a coincidence that Android looked almost exactly like iOS.
Donald Trump is no longer a private citizen. And the fact that he uses Twitter to make public policy pronouncements underscores this. Nor does Twitter treat his account like that of a private citizen. After all, they’re not going to ban him when he violates Twitter’s terms of service, such as the prohibition on using Twitter to make threats of violence, (such the one directed at North Korea).
At least you spelled “a” correctly. Allow me to give you a little tip: If you’re going to insult someone in print, you always want to have your spelling and grammar correct. Otherwise, you just end up looking stupid yourself. For instance, if I were to call you a sub-literate moron, but spelled something incorrectly, you can see how it’d take all the sting out of it. Of course, a sub-literate moron probably wouldn’t notice the difference.
This isn't "before" anybody's time. Broadcast TV has been available continuously for the guy's entire life.
Yeah, but who uses it? I wasn’t even sure broadcasting went on anymore, although I’ve never really been a TV watcher, (I don’t have cable, either).
But kids, here are some tips from the 1960s: Wrap tinfoil around the antennas to increase reception. You can also get some extra antenna cable and hang them out the window. Rabbit ears want a lot of manipulation! For best reception, you want an external antenna on the roof. If the channel knob comes off, or gets lost or broken, keep a small pair of pliers on top of the set. If you want something more permanent, attach a small pair of vice-grips. If the picture goes all fuzzy, smack the side of the set. Begin by smacking it softly, working your way up until it works. When smacking the set stops working altogether, you’ll want to open up the back and reset all the tubes, (pull ‘em out, and plug ‘em back in). Don’t forget to unplug the set first. Hope this helps!
Slashdot Mirror
Computers never make mistakes or have problems. Let’s go 100% autonomous!
(they’re not using Windows for any of this stuff, right?)
It was a rip-off in 2010. Maybe it's because I grew up with the idea that, “Ok, TV is free, but you have to watch these commercials” that I could never bring myself to pay for cable TV. Like that frog in the pot on the stove, they slowly added commercials, then more commercials, and (apparently) increased the rates people paid at the same time. Now, people finally seem to be noticing that the water is boiling.
Guy with $0 goes out and turns raw materials into wealth creating value out of nothing increasing the amount both people have.
Just curious, did this guy "go out" on public roads, protected by public police, legal system, and military? Did he have an education, perhaps from a public school? Did he survive to adulthood thanks in part to safety and health regulations?
Yeah, no one with zero dollars is turning anything into anything. You need tools and energy to acquire any raw material, let alone turn it into something, unless you’re an artist working with found-objects. Sounds like Ayn Rand’s fantasy.
You may not have noticed it, but we do not lack money on the supply side. We have an incredible amount of money waiting for something worthwhile to invest in. What we lack is money on the demand side that could create the demand for an endeavor to invest in.
That’s correct, and it’s what the Right seems not to understand. Demand is what drives the economy. You can give Mr. Rich Guy more money, but he’d be an idiot to open a widget factory if no one is buying widgets. You give poor people more money and they spend it. Mr. Rich Guy can get a loan, or get some investors together, if there’s a demand. He doesn’t need more pocket money.
There is not "more spending money". The only way a government can do this is to take money from A and give it to B.
Unless it’s the Federal government. But what Alaska is doing is taking money that would normally go into the state treasury and giving it directly to the people. While any kind of spending is good for the economy, since it always creates work for someone, giving it to the people to spend injects it into the economy much more evenly, and more effectively, than, say, spending on construction projects does. The money goes to more diverse places.
Also, the notion that a thousand bucks a year is going to cause people to stop working is just nuts. Thirty-thousand, maybe, but a couple/few grand isn’t enough to live on. What it does is give people a little more spending power, which is great for the economy. The problem we have in this country is that we have some people who just cannot abide seeing poor people get any kind of leg up. So they oppose any kind of program that would lift our least fortunate citizens out of poverty, and to their own detriment, since they don’t understand how that grows the economy.
Here's what Trump wrote on this Twitter:
"The New York Times has a new Fake Story that now the Russians and Chinese (glad they finally added China) are listening to all of my calls on cellphones. Except that I rarely use a cellphone, & when I do it’s government authorized. I like Hard Lines. Just more made up Fake News!"
Which he sent from his iPhone. Use TweetDeck. It’ll tell you which phone he’s using.
If you know you're being spied on (I find it hard to believe that the Times would find out before the U.S. government) wouldn't that just motivate you to feed bad information through those channels?
Indeed, this is the strategy being used by the White House: Owing to Trump's level of sheer incompetence, most everything that comes out of his mouth is bad information.
It doesn’t have to be about government or politics to be useful information. Trump has little interest in those topics, anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump wants to use his own phone because he’s more worried about his own government spying on him, (although I’m sure laziness is a factor). If he’s using that phone to run his always shady business deals, that could be very compromising information.
This debate only exists in the minds of religious kooks. It is pretty obvious to everyone else that morality is just a formulation of our pack instincts, with a bit of logical extension to modern circumstances.
Right, it’s an evolutionary adaptation. All social animals have “rules” which help the group maintain cohesion. Ours are just a bit more elaborated.
Yeah, it's not like embedding 3rd-party advertising script code with FULL ACCESS to the main site's data has been a thing since forever.
Can we now get web browsers to block all 3rd-party scripts by default? Please?
Yes we can!
Well, I can. I’m still, after all these years, a bit shocked that not everyone uses even ad-blockers, let alone script blockers. A browser that automatically blocked all ads, beacons, scripts, etc, etc, would be nice, I suppose, but haven’t we dumbed-down the internet enough already? As it is, we have to put up with two-factor authentication because some people are too fuckin’ lazy to use password managers, and now they want us to hand over our phone numbers, too.
Personally, I think it’s smarter to be in charge of your own privacy, rather than trust that ten million different web sites will do it for you. I’m certainly not going to trust that these mega-corporations, whose sole business is selling ads, will do it for us. Install ad-blockers, Ghostery, and No Script, get a password manager and start using good, unique, passwords, and don’t use your real name online. Oh, and never use the credentials of one site to log into another. It’s not that hard.
Let’s see how many burgers robots buy.
...it would be great...
Unless Anish Kapoor buys the rights and won’t let anyone else use it.
The intent of the regulation is to keep stupid people from doing stupid things, another debate in itself.
Is a sad day when addiction is called "doing stupid things."
It’s even sadder that people can’t, or won’t, distinguish between compulsive behaviors and addiction. We’ve watered that word “addiction” down to near-meaninglessness.
This clearly isn’t gambling in the normal sense people think of. What this is, not letting people see what they’re buying, is a scam, a fraud, (of course, that defines gambling, too). They should have no trouble regulating that. Anyway, people should be allowed to gamble, in spite of the fact that a minority of people develop compulsive gambling problems. We don’t prevent adults from enjoying alcohol simply because a minority of people develop drinking problems. The same should go for gambling and drug taking.
"Everybody is doing what they want instead of following my vision that they didn't share... the `system' is failing!" Well, maybe not. Maybe it is you that don't share their vision?
I mean, I'm sure I personally prefer his vision, but why would "the system," ie everybody collectively, be following him? Should we also find all the engineers that built our cars and let them choose where we drive? It seems rather silly that an engineer building a tool would also tell us about policy and politics and business and all that.
He complains about content and advertising, why isn't he publishing better content? It is open, people just aren't publishing what he wanted. He can fix that himself if he's actually talking about anything that is lacking; but no, instead he wants to tell people what NOT to publish. It won't work, they won't care.
He’s lamenting the loss of a more democratic web, where all kinds of content was possible. You can’t compete with these huge commercial entities. Since the commercialization of the web, all these little one-person web sites have disappeared, and the ones that still exist have gotten harder to find due to the peculiarities of Google’s algorithms. Unless you have a million other sites linking to you, you’re pushed way down in the results. I don’t use Google, but it seems most people do, and instead of neutral results they’re getting what Google thinks they want. Even if that can be trusted, and they’re not getting what Google wants them to have, you’re still getting boxed in.
You want him to provide the content? That’s just it. One person can no longer compete on the web, and for a number of reasons, not least of which is the security environment. Anyone running a server knows this. It’s become a commercial wasteland, and like its brick & mortar counterpart, an endless strip of blinking lights and advertising. Good content has gotten much harder to host, and to find.
Encourage abortion for those that continue to poduce with no way of paying for them.
Uh, just to point out the obvious, a simpler and cheaper solution would be just to make sure that birth control is available to those who want it.
Right, and never mind this has nothing to do with the problem being discussed anyway. One thing about right-wingers that never ceases to amaze me is, they can’t stand to see some poor person get a little help from society, but have no problem giving millions to already wealthy people. They seem to think one comes out of their paycheck, but the other doesn’t.
The bottom quintile benefit from a myriad of government programs.
Lol! Like what? You pretty much have to be disabled, or a woman with children, to get any help at all. And the assistance you receive is a pittance, an amount no one can live on. And even then, you’re cut off pretty quickly, and expected to work. You ought to look up the requirements for "welfare" sometime. Welfare, as people still think of it, has been dead for twenty-five years now. Yet, I hear idiots complaining about how “illegals” are getting welfare, when citizens can’t even get it. Google “bill clinton welfare reform"
OR... Are you claiming that they snap up housing as investments, forcing prices up? Is that it? Because if it is, you just proved why you want a lot of rich people buying stuff that the poorer folks like you produce...
Dude, how old were you in 2008?
How about Venezuela? The rich and poor are starving down there you know..
The rich are starving nowhere.
Here’s another thing a lot of people seem unaware of - welfare has been dead in the US for twenty-five years now. While we hand out billions in corporate welfare, we cannot stand to see poor people being helped. For some reason, that’s the thing that drives people nuts. Meanwhile, American workers no longer have pensions to look forward to, and their wages have been stagnant for so long, no one has any savings. After a lifetime of work, they end up either living in poverty, or working until they drop. But, I guess it’s ok because, being impoverished in the richest country in the World, they’re better off than the schmucks in poor countries. Assuming that’s even true. I know it’s a rare country that gives workers less paid vacation time than the US. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do better on pensions, too.
Trump won because there are a lot of foolish Americans who bought up the line of shit Trump was selling.
Really, Trump was just able to take advantage of the atmosphere created by the right-wing media over many years. Trump was simply the first guy to put down the dog whistle and pick up a megaphone, thus taking the party away from the more squeamish Republicans. This is what Trump does - he makes money by slapping his name on other people’s work.
Because of the shameless right-wing media, we have a large portion of the electorate living in an alternate reality. Many years of Fox News and right-wing radio created it, and this is why they were primed for Trump’s ridiculous promises. The Russians love this, of course. Not only are Americans divided over nonsense issues the other half doesn’t even know about, (heard about the upcoming Anftifa coup?), they have a fool in the White House.
Eric, as you know, was the one who didn't recuse himself from Apple's board even when he learned about the iPhone. Either he was trying to steal the iPhone or if you really beleive he wasn't and Google was already planning their own, then you have to ask why he didn't recuse himself.
I’m sure it just a coincidence that Android looked almost exactly like iOS.
ad-infested piles of dogshit
I like that phrase! I’m going to borrow that.
Of course he can. It's his personal account.
Donald Trump is no longer a private citizen. And the fact that he uses Twitter to make public policy pronouncements underscores this. Nor does Twitter treat his account like that of a private citizen. After all, they’re not going to ban him when he violates Twitter’s terms of service, such as the prohibition on using Twitter to make threats of violence, (such the one directed at North Korea).
Suppose Trump pardons the neo-nazi terrorist?
He's already claimed to have absolute pardoning powers...
Trump was, as usual, talking about himself.
Trump has made Constitutional lawyers, fact checkers, and news organizations richer.
May be, but he’s also made them irrelevant.
your a doosh
At least you spelled “a” correctly. Allow me to give you a little tip: If you’re going to insult someone in print, you always want to have your spelling and grammar correct. Otherwise, you just end up looking stupid yourself. For instance, if I were to call you a sub-literate moron, but spelled something incorrectly, you can see how it’d take all the sting out of it. Of course, a sub-literate moron probably wouldn’t notice the difference.
This isn't "before" anybody's time. Broadcast TV has been available continuously for the guy's entire life.
Yeah, but who uses it? I wasn’t even sure broadcasting went on anymore, although I’ve never really been a TV watcher, (I don’t have cable, either).
But kids, here are some tips from the 1960s: Wrap tinfoil around the antennas to increase reception. You can also get some extra antenna cable and hang them out the window. Rabbit ears want a lot of manipulation! For best reception, you want an external antenna on the roof. If the channel knob comes off, or gets lost or broken, keep a small pair of pliers on top of the set. If you want something more permanent, attach a small pair of vice-grips. If the picture goes all fuzzy, smack the side of the set. Begin by smacking it softly, working your way up until it works. When smacking the set stops working altogether, you’ll want to open up the back and reset all the tubes, (pull ‘em out, and plug ‘em back in). Don’t forget to unplug the set first. Hope this helps!