I'm not sure why this is so hard to believe. Have you been paying attention to what's going on with governments across the world for the past decade or so? It's not a rosy picture. In fact, it's downright horrific what they're doing.
But cut off ALL health care paid for in any way by other people, and ALL public assistance when they can no longer hold a job because they're such mental train wrecks.
And what do you expect these people to do then? Magically stop using drugs and go back to being productive individuals? More likely they will resort to crime and the reason for legalizing drugs in the first place will be pointless as you'll have people in jail not for victimless crimes, but now for potentially violent crimes against other people. B&E, assault, armed robbery, to get what they need to survive and get their next fix.
At the same time, the corrupt, conflict-of-interest-filled prisons-for-profit system needs to be dismantled. The government should pay the prison owners a fair value, and then seize the prisons for state ownership.
With both of these actions, you'll see incarcerations drop and many of these prisons can be closed or reused for other purposes, like maybe jailing some bankers and politicians!
Funny, every time I hear someone trot out the "racism" claim, again, and again, I realize that the word has become completely diluted, meaning nothing more than "I don't like what you have to say, but I can't argue against it with facts, so I'll just use a cheap label as a cop-out for my lack of debating skill, lest I let people know that my argument doesn't hold any water."
When it comes time for politicians in each country to decide whether to sign or not, then you'll find out which countries really are democratic and which ones have fallen to complete corporate capture.
This shit is referendum material right off the bat considering its implications. If you don't get that opportunity, it's a sinister foreboding of what's to come.
This bigger picture isn't about Uber specifically. It's about the system being set up to legally rip people off in favour of some large cab companies that made barrier to entry cost prohibitive in many areas. Their actions are inherently anti free market, and what's happening is people are trying to force a free market back into the system, and there's a lot of kicking and screaming by the old guard who are using unjust laws as their shield.
To add, about the most recent I can think of is Tim Sweeney and Cliff Bleszinski of Epic Games. Cliff got all kinds of opportunities to make appearances in game reviews, previews, etc. I can only guess that the giants like Activision and EA specifically don't want that type exposure for individuals because then they have to pay those guys higher. There's probably a directive 4 somewhere that states "no coder shall be allowed to become associated to AAA games by the gaming public".
I was thinking of this as well. I hate calling it "rock star", cause it ain't rock, but where are the current-day revered game programmers? Where are the Sid Meiers, the Richard Garriots, the John Carmacks, the Peter Molyneauxs? The industry has kept most of today's game coders nameless. Sure, they're in the credits, but they don't get face time. They're cogs in the machine.
Take Grand Theft Auto V, for example. Amazing fucking game. Who were some of the programmers? I dunno, but when I looked at the credits, I didn't recognize a single name. What about Battlefield 4? Far Cry 4? Skyrim? There are no names to associate to these extremely well-known games when it comes to coders.
Are the days of being recognized long over? Are game houses just too big to have any single individual display significant talent?
It's not about being handed shit on a silver platter, asshole. It's about a level playing field. Fuckers like Zuck lobby the government to tilt the playing field in their favour, and then call everyone else "whiners" when they start realizing they're getting screwed and speak out against it.
The people of the USA, Canada, and any other country that is pulling this shit need to stand up to their government and let it be known that the government only exists with the consent of the governed. That the government exists for the benefit of the people, not a handful of rich fucks who think they are entitled to more justice and political representation than another citizen of the country.
If the situation were such that there was a chance of a fair trial for someone like this in the US, the whole affair probably never would have happened in the first place.
Amazing how when presidents WANT to do something, they whip out the Executive Order pen. Yet when it comes to fulfilling any promise they made to get voted in, it's "muh hands are tied, it's the fault of the House, or the Senate, or... due process, whatever."
Not all systems can be designed that way, either due to technical reasons, or financial ones (you are sometimes required to pay full licensing fees on a standby node for the software you have, which can be very substantial)
That's assuming you can even buy quality any more. Try buying a jacket or sweater where the zipper isn't a total piece of failing crap. Sure the jacket's still in great shape, but you can't do it up because the zipper broke. You can replace a zipper, but unless you go to a value store to harvest a really old jacket for the good zipper, you're just going to get another lousy one.
Correct. In the usual dose of nanny-state irony, the knee-jerk demands for legislated zero-tolerance reactions to minor issues is far more damaging to the development of society than just leaving things alone.
The idiotic "think of the children" people are actually the ones harming the children. It's just that it happens over time, instead of immediately, so they're incapable of processing that. Just like government and companies who can't think long term anymore. It's like some kind of disease where the victim can't think anything but short-term.
Their sole purpose was to prevent a default until most of the debt was in public hands, were it can be contained, and that's obviously a matter of "privatize the profits, socialize the losses".
Knowingly lending to a bankrupt entity who has no way of paying it back is fraud, plain and simple. Those debts are fraudulent and the lenders don't deserve them back.
Greece is a sovereign country and decides for itself what it spends its resources on.
Not exactly. When the IMF and ECB gets involved in lending to countries, there's strings attached. Unless you tell them to go to hell, they start dictating policy. It's the Banker's Coup.
Apparently they've decided to leave the path on which the rest of the Eurozone was willing to help them.
"Help"? They weren't trying to help them. They were looting them to the bone. Just like the banks are trying to do to other countries, and what they did to the public in the USA's sub-prime mortgage debacle. Bribe the politicians to agree to whatever you want, then load 'em up on debt that nobody could possibly pay. Now you get to run their country. Sell off all of the country's assets to your corporate buddies at fire-sale prices, and force them to convert their State owned businesses into privately owned ones, such as Water Works and Electric Company. Leave 'em with their pockets turned out on Baltic ave. while you skate all the money back to Boardwalk.
Your line of reasoning has consequences I'd imagine you haven't thought of, because it can be extended to abuse in ANY system than can cause death. By your logic, the fact that somebody could rig someone else's brakes to cause a fatal car accident makes allowing people to drive cars a slippery slope. You can't have electricity in your house, because someone could rig a device to electrocute someone else.
If an abuse comes up, you deal with that abuse you don't use a small outlier as reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I see from your post below that your view toward this ruling is tainted by being a victim at one point. There is good reason not to allow victims to decide on law for everyone else.
People ask me about sports all the time and I just respond that I'm not interested in watching. The conversation typically goes like this:
"Why don't you like sports?" "It's not that I don't like sports, in fact I like playing some of them. It's just that I don't enjoy watching them." "Why? They're so exciting!" "Would you like to watch me play a video game?" "No." "Why?" "That's boring." "Now you know how I feel about watching someone I don't know play a game on a field. Intersperse that with hundreds of advertisements, comments about how much money these guys are being paid because they were lucky enough to be born with the physical qualities that make them good at this game, and therefore how much more important they are than say, a group of scientists who's names you will never know that working on a cure for Parkinson's or leukemia."
The commercial aspect and obscene amounts of money and resources poured into "professional" sports is actually a major turn-off to me and turns it from something I'm merely "not interested in" to something I actually resent. I would have enjoyed Hockey back in the 50's or 60's when it was just a bunch of regular Joe's with day-jobs who played the game for the love of it, not because they're some prima-donnas who're demanding they get an extra million or they won't play. Go watch the movie BASEketBall to see this.
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The Koch bros must be mighty pissed off right about now.
Does that mean I don't have to pay taxes for them either, then? Because that could be a good trade off.
A quick google search turned up this.
And by Glenn Greewald, no less.
I'm not sure why this is so hard to believe. Have you been paying attention to what's going on with governments across the world for the past decade or so? It's not a rosy picture. In fact, it's downright horrific what they're doing.
But cut off ALL health care paid for in any way by other people, and ALL public assistance when they can no longer hold a job because they're such mental train wrecks.
And what do you expect these people to do then? Magically stop using drugs and go back to being productive individuals? More likely they will resort to crime and the reason for legalizing drugs in the first place will be pointless as you'll have people in jail not for victimless crimes, but now for potentially violent crimes against other people. B&E, assault, armed robbery, to get what they need to survive and get their next fix.
At the same time, the corrupt, conflict-of-interest-filled prisons-for-profit system needs to be dismantled. The government should pay the prison owners a fair value, and then seize the prisons for state ownership.
With both of these actions, you'll see incarcerations drop and many of these prisons can be closed or reused for other purposes, like maybe jailing some bankers and politicians!
Funny, every time I hear someone trot out the "racism" claim, again, and again, I realize that the word has become completely diluted, meaning nothing more than "I don't like what you have to say, but I can't argue against it with facts, so I'll just use a cheap label as a cop-out for my lack of debating skill, lest I let people know that my argument doesn't hold any water."
One would think that trying to organize a "discussion panel" would imply they are interested in a conversation.
You'd think that, wouldn't you? But you'd be wrong.
Oh, don't worry, I'm sure Big Energy will just sue under some "free-trade" treaty agreement to get their way, regardless.
When it comes time for politicians in each country to decide whether to sign or not, then you'll find out which countries really are democratic and which ones have fallen to complete corporate capture.
This shit is referendum material right off the bat considering its implications. If you don't get that opportunity, it's a sinister foreboding of what's to come.
This bigger picture isn't about Uber specifically. It's about the system being set up to legally rip people off in favour of some large cab companies that made barrier to entry cost prohibitive in many areas. Their actions are inherently anti free market, and what's happening is people are trying to force a free market back into the system, and there's a lot of kicking and screaming by the old guard who are using unjust laws as their shield.
Won't SOMEBODY think of the CHILDREN!?!
To add, about the most recent I can think of is Tim Sweeney and Cliff Bleszinski of Epic Games. Cliff got all kinds of opportunities to make appearances in game reviews, previews, etc. I can only guess that the giants like Activision and EA specifically don't want that type exposure for individuals because then they have to pay those guys higher. There's probably a directive 4 somewhere that states "no coder shall be allowed to become associated to AAA games by the gaming public".
I was thinking of this as well. I hate calling it "rock star", cause it ain't rock, but where are the current-day revered game programmers? Where are the Sid Meiers, the Richard Garriots, the John Carmacks, the Peter Molyneauxs? The industry has kept most of today's game coders nameless. Sure, they're in the credits, but they don't get face time. They're cogs in the machine.
Take Grand Theft Auto V, for example. Amazing fucking game. Who were some of the programmers? I dunno, but when I looked at the credits, I didn't recognize a single name. What about Battlefield 4? Far Cry 4? Skyrim? There are no names to associate to these extremely well-known games when it comes to coders.
Are the days of being recognized long over? Are game houses just too big to have any single individual display significant talent?
It's not about being handed shit on a silver platter, asshole. It's about a level playing field. Fuckers like Zuck lobby the government to tilt the playing field in their favour, and then call everyone else "whiners" when they start realizing they're getting screwed and speak out against it.
The people of the USA, Canada, and any other country that is pulling this shit need to stand up to their government and let it be known that the government only exists with the consent of the governed. That the government exists for the benefit of the people, not a handful of rich fucks who think they are entitled to more justice and political representation than another citizen of the country.
If the situation were such that there was a chance of a fair trial for someone like this in the US, the whole affair probably never would have happened in the first place.
Amazing how when presidents WANT to do something, they whip out the Executive Order pen. Yet when it comes to fulfilling any promise they made to get voted in, it's "muh hands are tied, it's the fault of the House, or the Senate, or... due process, whatever."
Haven't you seen Maximum Overdrive? It's the human's job to refuel their mechanical master's fuel tanks.
You might have to qualify that statement with "DX9 or lower" games, since Wine can't run any game that requires DX10+ yet.
Not all systems can be designed that way, either due to technical reasons, or financial ones (you are sometimes required to pay full licensing fees on a standby node for the software you have, which can be very substantial)
That's assuming you can even buy quality any more. Try buying a jacket or sweater where the zipper isn't a total piece of failing crap. Sure the jacket's still in great shape, but you can't do it up because the zipper broke. You can replace a zipper, but unless you go to a value store to harvest a really old jacket for the good zipper, you're just going to get another lousy one.
Correct. In the usual dose of nanny-state irony, the knee-jerk demands for legislated zero-tolerance reactions to minor issues is far more damaging to the development of society than just leaving things alone.
The idiotic "think of the children" people are actually the ones harming the children. It's just that it happens over time, instead of immediately, so they're incapable of processing that. Just like government and companies who can't think long term anymore. It's like some kind of disease where the victim can't think anything but short-term.
Their sole purpose was to prevent a default until most of the debt was in public hands, were it can be contained, and that's obviously a matter of "privatize the profits, socialize the losses".
Knowingly lending to a bankrupt entity who has no way of paying it back is fraud, plain and simple. Those debts are fraudulent and the lenders don't deserve them back.
Greece is a sovereign country and decides for itself what it spends its resources on.
Not exactly. When the IMF and ECB gets involved in lending to countries, there's strings attached. Unless you tell them to go to hell, they start dictating policy. It's the Banker's Coup.
Apparently they've decided to leave the path on which the rest of the Eurozone was willing to help them.
"Help"? They weren't trying to help them. They were looting them to the bone. Just like the banks are trying to do to other countries, and what they did to the public in the USA's sub-prime mortgage debacle. Bribe the politicians to agree to whatever you want, then load 'em up on debt that nobody could possibly pay. Now you get to run their country. Sell off all of the country's assets to your corporate buddies at fire-sale prices, and force them to convert their State owned businesses into privately owned ones, such as Water Works and Electric Company. Leave 'em with their pockets turned out on Baltic ave. while you skate all the money back to Boardwalk.
Your line of reasoning has consequences I'd imagine you haven't thought of, because it can be extended to abuse in ANY system than can cause death. By your logic, the fact that somebody could rig someone else's brakes to cause a fatal car accident makes allowing people to drive cars a slippery slope. You can't have electricity in your house, because someone could rig a device to electrocute someone else.
If an abuse comes up, you deal with that abuse you don't use a small outlier as reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I see from your post below that your view toward this ruling is tainted by being a victim at one point. There is good reason not to allow victims to decide on law for everyone else.
People ask me about sports all the time and I just respond that I'm not interested in watching. The conversation typically goes like this:
"Why don't you like sports?"
"It's not that I don't like sports, in fact I like playing some of them. It's just that I don't enjoy watching them."
"Why? They're so exciting!"
"Would you like to watch me play a video game?"
"No."
"Why?"
"That's boring."
"Now you know how I feel about watching someone I don't know play a game on a field. Intersperse that with hundreds of advertisements, comments about how much money these guys are being paid because they were lucky enough to be born with the physical qualities that make them good at this game, and therefore how much more important they are than say, a group of scientists who's names you will never know that working on a cure for Parkinson's or leukemia."
The commercial aspect and obscene amounts of money and resources poured into "professional" sports is actually a major turn-off to me and turns it from something I'm merely "not interested in" to something I actually resent. I would have enjoyed Hockey back in the 50's or 60's when it was just a bunch of regular Joe's with day-jobs who played the game for the love of it, not because they're some prima-donnas who're demanding they get an extra million or they won't play. Go watch the movie BASEketBall to see this.
I never thought any PM in Canada could top mulroney for the title of "worst". I'm still reeling from the outcome, but Harper proved me wrong.