For some of the stuff I do on Facebook, the Windows laptop is the easiest to do. It's got a large display and a decent keyboard. About the only thing that's easier to do from my phone is upload pictures and videos.
Hi! I speak, write, and comprehend English very well, with an accent that's easily understandable in the US. I have no problem being physically present at my job. I'm a US citizen, and can handle anything under ITAR or similar regs. I understand US culture and communicate in a way that minimizes misunderstandings. I learn the context of what I'm doing, and take personal responsibility for getting stuff done. I've got a track record in US companies. I'm a lot more valuable for a US employer than someone with my programming knowledge and abilities who lives in India.
Thing is, there's a lot of stuff that can't be done well across the Pacific. Living in the same time zone (or close), being able to converse easily, and having common cultural expectations makes workers a lot more valuable.
IIRC, the bailout of savings-and-loans in the 1980s was at least largely though bankruptcy proceedings, which meant that the owners and shareholders lost big when the board and executives decided to take stupid risks in the hope of making large amounts of money. Just giving investment banks money, like in 2007 and later, was something of a disaster long-term, even if it did ward off a lot of short-term pain.
Given modern banking, the amount of actual currency is much less than the amount of money in the economy. It's always possible to extend the money supply.
Gold does have some useful qualities for currency. It's fairly rare, doesn't corrode in any way, it's pretty, it's easy to work, and it isn't really that valuable in itself. However, if people lose faith that they can buy stuff for gold, it's worthless as money, just like paper money would be.
We don't need a permanent resident visa to start with. We can start with time-limited visas that allow the recipient to live and work in the US. The key is not to tie any sort of visa to any specific employer or other entity.
The H-1B isn't just a way to import cheap labor. It's a way to import semi-slave labor. If an employee has the choice between putting up with whatever crap the employer pulls or going home, the employee can be cheated and underpaid. Bring in a competent guy from India on a visa that's not tied to a particular employer, and that guy can stand up for his legal rights and look for jobs where he'll be paid better and treated more fairly. Suddenly the H-1B isn't cheap labor, since he can go somewhere he can be paid better.
The replaced workers may have standing, but they'd likely lose some good termination benefits by suing. (If I'm ever asked again to sign something promising not to sue when being laid off, I'm consulting a lawyer first.)
The Republicans have made the government run on less money, but haven't been successful at making it tighten its belt.
OK. Do you believe we need some form of government? Do you believe it needs to get money somehow to operate? Do you think it should get money from citizens in ways that are more or less fair? In that case, apparently you're a true communist.
Part of what happened would be reduced corporate profits, not increased cost to consumers. The downside of that is that it makes it harder to get a successful business going.
If I talk about a white guy whose parents put him through college, you can guess some things about him. You don't know his favorite TV show, or what sort of work he's attracted to. You do know that he's got a bachelor's degree without student debt, and comes from a well-off family. He's almost certainly going to do better in life than the black buy I mentioned. It isn't a certainty; the black guy could be brilliant and found a startup and make nine or ten figures out of it, or the white guy could be schizophrenic or suffer from some other disease, but it's the way to bet.
I'm a white cisgender upper-middle-class straight guy of English and Swedish descent, and I haven't deliberately studied problems less privileged people are having, so I can't got into details without mansplaining. From my point of view, people generally treat me as they should, and everyone should be treated the same. In fact, lots of people aren't, because they differ from me in sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or something like that. (There's also an awful lot of random variation going on.) My "privilege" is that I don't get as many unfair and unjust hassles as other people.
Everyone responsible for legal slavery in this country has been dead for a long time now. (There's still human trafficking going on, unfortunately, but I'm not involved in that.) Not that many people actively participate in oppressing other races or sexes or whatever, but not that many seriously try to help. I mostly throw some money where I think it will help the less fortunate. There's an awful lot of social inertia involved, and the worst off tend not to get covered by the media. (I have friends who deal with people on the South Dakota Indian reservations, and hear things I don't find from other news sources.)
So, we need programs to help people who need it. Not necessarily programs to help people in generally needy classes, but it's really hard to tell what help individuals need, and it's a lot easier to go by statistics. (There was a widely-used test that the Department of Labor administered, and race-normed. They'd found that blacks who scored X on the test were about as successful, statistically, as whites who scored Y, where Y was significantly greater than X. Sure, it was an inadequate test, and it was unfair in many cases, but it was useful, and more useful when race-normed.) Back in the 1960s, there were programs and quotas that specifically repressed individuals of certain classes (and the BIA is arguably one to this day), and it was reasonable to compensate for that by class. There's been a lot of stuff tried and continued with that didn't work well.
And, if we want to stay in touch with reality, we have to observe what goes on in practice, and try to deal with things as they are.
Lots of resources in space, sure. How much will it cost to get them? To put a small asteroid into Earth orbit, we'd need to send a mission to it that could cut enough orbital velocity to get it to intercept Earth's orbit and then slow it enough for gravitational capture. That sounds awfully expensive to me.
Another big requirement: you have to want to be President bad enough to campaign for it. This involves probably years of unpaid hard work, sometimes associating with people you despise, compromising your principles, sometimes just begging, and having all sorts of vituperation hurled at you.
The way the parties are designed, this usually ends up the most politically extreme or bat-wing crazy 29%.
Hence the Democratic Party superdelegates, who are supposed to be a brake on extremism. Democrats don't want 1972 to happen again, when a not particularly electable guy got the nomination just by winning enough primaries and caucuses, and got trounced. (Of course, the Nixon presidency had something to do with that.)
Of course, Clinton has more regular delegates than Sanders, so the superdelegates really doesn't seem to matter in this election.
Our employer health insurance has remained essentially the same, at two different workplaces. The costs have gone up, but that's because Congress wouldn't pass a bill that would reduce insurance company profit.
I've had quite a few minor problems this year, and it's been nice to go to the doctor without significant expense.
Here where I live, the state exchange is functional, and you can get good plans for reasonable prices. There are lots more people with decent health insurance than there used to be. The ACA is working just fine here.
Of course, I wouldn't expect it to work nearly as well in states where the governments did their best to undermine it. That was predictable. That's a typical Republican tactic: do your best to screw up government programs and blame them for not working as they should.
It may be that refrigerator manufacturers have more profit margin, but that doesn't affect consumer prices. It's part of the complaint about increasing productivity going to the 0.1%, if anything.
We bought some new appliances in 1999, when we moved to our current house. We had to replace the washer and dryer this year, and got better than we had earlier. The dishwasher isn't running as well as it did, and the range has needed some minor repair (and needs some again). The refrigerator is working just fine without repair for seventeen years.
It may well be that you can find people selling junk refrigerators off the back of a truck for more money than you'd spend at a reputable store (it's possible to scam many customers out of more money if you imply they're doing something illegal to save money), but nobody I know has the kind of trouble you describe with their appliances.
Government has some reason to help the poor, but business really doesn't. They don't have money, and the fact that they're poor mean they're more available, replaceable, and exploitable as labor. They don't have the capital to set themselves up in some sort of business, even for the entrepeneural ones.
So, assume that you're a poor man with a wife and two kids, barely scraping by. You have no money to take courses to improve your lot, or time for that matter, since you're working two part-time jobs and have travel time. In the absence of government intervention, how are you going to get your share of improving productivity?
If you're a business owner, in the absence of government regulation, what incentive do you have to spend a dime on pollution abatement? These are practical questions. While you say you don't want pollution, grinding poverty, or social Darwinism, I don't see how your ideology leads you to ways to avoid them.
Certainly, if you can label what you like "socialism" and point to North Korea (totalitarian), China (totalitarian), Greece (devastated by EU bankers), and Venezuela (screwed up) as the inevitable endgame, I can label what you like "anarcho-libertarianism" and point to Somalia. I'd rather stick to more productive arguments, myself.
Trade secrets do have some advantages over patents, such as not having an expiration date. If Coca-Cola had been patented, people could make exact duplicates now, but they keep their recipes secret.
However, I'd think patents would be much better for medical purposes, since I'd think it would be difficult to certify procedures that are trade secrets.
Hint: shareholders are the last to get paid, preferred shares before common shares, and this has been the law for a long time. The shareholders are the owners of the business, and they get whatever's left* once all the debts are paid off. Money owed to employees is debt, and has to be paid before anything is left for shareholders.
*Chapter VII bankruptcy happens when the company owes more than the worth of its assets, and isn't expected to recover, so unless there's unusual circumstances the debtors won't get paid in full and there will be nothing for the shareholders.
It's people tricked into doing it themselves. We know that people have been upgraded by Microsoft to Windows 10 against their wishes, although Microsoft often got something that MS could call permission by underhanded means.
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For some of the stuff I do on Facebook, the Windows laptop is the easiest to do. It's got a large display and a decent keyboard. About the only thing that's easier to do from my phone is upload pictures and videos.
It's a lot easier to stand on principles when you don't have a spouse, two kids, and a house.
Hi! I speak, write, and comprehend English very well, with an accent that's easily understandable in the US. I have no problem being physically present at my job. I'm a US citizen, and can handle anything under ITAR or similar regs. I understand US culture and communicate in a way that minimizes misunderstandings. I learn the context of what I'm doing, and take personal responsibility for getting stuff done. I've got a track record in US companies. I'm a lot more valuable for a US employer than someone with my programming knowledge and abilities who lives in India.
Thing is, there's a lot of stuff that can't be done well across the Pacific. Living in the same time zone (or close), being able to converse easily, and having common cultural expectations makes workers a lot more valuable.
IIRC, the bailout of savings-and-loans in the 1980s was at least largely though bankruptcy proceedings, which meant that the owners and shareholders lost big when the board and executives decided to take stupid risks in the hope of making large amounts of money. Just giving investment banks money, like in 2007 and later, was something of a disaster long-term, even if it did ward off a lot of short-term pain.
Given modern banking, the amount of actual currency is much less than the amount of money in the economy. It's always possible to extend the money supply.
Gold does have some useful qualities for currency. It's fairly rare, doesn't corrode in any way, it's pretty, it's easy to work, and it isn't really that valuable in itself. However, if people lose faith that they can buy stuff for gold, it's worthless as money, just like paper money would be.
We don't need a permanent resident visa to start with. We can start with time-limited visas that allow the recipient to live and work in the US. The key is not to tie any sort of visa to any specific employer or other entity.
The H-1B isn't just a way to import cheap labor. It's a way to import semi-slave labor. If an employee has the choice between putting up with whatever crap the employer pulls or going home, the employee can be cheated and underpaid. Bring in a competent guy from India on a visa that's not tied to a particular employer, and that guy can stand up for his legal rights and look for jobs where he'll be paid better and treated more fairly. Suddenly the H-1B isn't cheap labor, since he can go somewhere he can be paid better.
The replaced workers may have standing, but they'd likely lose some good termination benefits by suing. (If I'm ever asked again to sign something promising not to sue when being laid off, I'm consulting a lawyer first.)
The Republicans have made the government run on less money, but haven't been successful at making it tighten its belt.
OK. Do you believe we need some form of government? Do you believe it needs to get money somehow to operate? Do you think it should get money from citizens in ways that are more or less fair? In that case, apparently you're a true communist.
Excuse me, the Greek economy is pretty successful at what their German financial masters want it to do.
Part of what happened would be reduced corporate profits, not increased cost to consumers. The downside of that is that it makes it harder to get a successful business going.
If I talk about a white guy whose parents put him through college, you can guess some things about him. You don't know his favorite TV show, or what sort of work he's attracted to. You do know that he's got a bachelor's degree without student debt, and comes from a well-off family. He's almost certainly going to do better in life than the black buy I mentioned. It isn't a certainty; the black guy could be brilliant and found a startup and make nine or ten figures out of it, or the white guy could be schizophrenic or suffer from some other disease, but it's the way to bet.
I'm a white cisgender upper-middle-class straight guy of English and Swedish descent, and I haven't deliberately studied problems less privileged people are having, so I can't got into details without mansplaining. From my point of view, people generally treat me as they should, and everyone should be treated the same. In fact, lots of people aren't, because they differ from me in sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or something like that. (There's also an awful lot of random variation going on.) My "privilege" is that I don't get as many unfair and unjust hassles as other people.
Everyone responsible for legal slavery in this country has been dead for a long time now. (There's still human trafficking going on, unfortunately, but I'm not involved in that.) Not that many people actively participate in oppressing other races or sexes or whatever, but not that many seriously try to help. I mostly throw some money where I think it will help the less fortunate. There's an awful lot of social inertia involved, and the worst off tend not to get covered by the media. (I have friends who deal with people on the South Dakota Indian reservations, and hear things I don't find from other news sources.)
So, we need programs to help people who need it. Not necessarily programs to help people in generally needy classes, but it's really hard to tell what help individuals need, and it's a lot easier to go by statistics. (There was a widely-used test that the Department of Labor administered, and race-normed. They'd found that blacks who scored X on the test were about as successful, statistically, as whites who scored Y, where Y was significantly greater than X. Sure, it was an inadequate test, and it was unfair in many cases, but it was useful, and more useful when race-normed.) Back in the 1960s, there were programs and quotas that specifically repressed individuals of certain classes (and the BIA is arguably one to this day), and it was reasonable to compensate for that by class. There's been a lot of stuff tried and continued with that didn't work well.
And, if we want to stay in touch with reality, we have to observe what goes on in practice, and try to deal with things as they are.
Lots of resources in space, sure. How much will it cost to get them? To put a small asteroid into Earth orbit, we'd need to send a mission to it that could cut enough orbital velocity to get it to intercept Earth's orbit and then slow it enough for gravitational capture. That sounds awfully expensive to me.
Sticking to the principles of evidence and reasoning you show, she's also working to subvert the planet in advance of the Martian invasion.
Another big requirement: you have to want to be President bad enough to campaign for it. This involves probably years of unpaid hard work, sometimes associating with people you despise, compromising your principles, sometimes just begging, and having all sorts of vituperation hurled at you.
Hence the Democratic Party superdelegates, who are supposed to be a brake on extremism. Democrats don't want 1972 to happen again, when a not particularly electable guy got the nomination just by winning enough primaries and caucuses, and got trounced. (Of course, the Nixon presidency had something to do with that.)
Of course, Clinton has more regular delegates than Sanders, so the superdelegates really doesn't seem to matter in this election.
Our employer health insurance has remained essentially the same, at two different workplaces. The costs have gone up, but that's because Congress wouldn't pass a bill that would reduce insurance company profit.
I've had quite a few minor problems this year, and it's been nice to go to the doctor without significant expense.
We have duelling anecdotes.
Here where I live, the state exchange is functional, and you can get good plans for reasonable prices. There are lots more people with decent health insurance than there used to be. The ACA is working just fine here.
Of course, I wouldn't expect it to work nearly as well in states where the governments did their best to undermine it. That was predictable. That's a typical Republican tactic: do your best to screw up government programs and blame them for not working as they should.
It may be that refrigerator manufacturers have more profit margin, but that doesn't affect consumer prices. It's part of the complaint about increasing productivity going to the 0.1%, if anything.
We bought some new appliances in 1999, when we moved to our current house. We had to replace the washer and dryer this year, and got better than we had earlier. The dishwasher isn't running as well as it did, and the range has needed some minor repair (and needs some again). The refrigerator is working just fine without repair for seventeen years.
It may well be that you can find people selling junk refrigerators off the back of a truck for more money than you'd spend at a reputable store (it's possible to scam many customers out of more money if you imply they're doing something illegal to save money), but nobody I know has the kind of trouble you describe with their appliances.
Government has some reason to help the poor, but business really doesn't. They don't have money, and the fact that they're poor mean they're more available, replaceable, and exploitable as labor. They don't have the capital to set themselves up in some sort of business, even for the entrepeneural ones.
So, assume that you're a poor man with a wife and two kids, barely scraping by. You have no money to take courses to improve your lot, or time for that matter, since you're working two part-time jobs and have travel time. In the absence of government intervention, how are you going to get your share of improving productivity?
If you're a business owner, in the absence of government regulation, what incentive do you have to spend a dime on pollution abatement? These are practical questions. While you say you don't want pollution, grinding poverty, or social Darwinism, I don't see how your ideology leads you to ways to avoid them.
Certainly, if you can label what you like "socialism" and point to North Korea (totalitarian), China (totalitarian), Greece (devastated by EU bankers), and Venezuela (screwed up) as the inevitable endgame, I can label what you like "anarcho-libertarianism" and point to Somalia. I'd rather stick to more productive arguments, myself.
Trade secrets do have some advantages over patents, such as not having an expiration date. If Coca-Cola had been patented, people could make exact duplicates now, but they keep their recipes secret.
However, I'd think patents would be much better for medical purposes, since I'd think it would be difficult to certify procedures that are trade secrets.
Hint: shareholders are the last to get paid, preferred shares before common shares, and this has been the law for a long time. The shareholders are the owners of the business, and they get whatever's left* once all the debts are paid off. Money owed to employees is debt, and has to be paid before anything is left for shareholders.
*Chapter VII bankruptcy happens when the company owes more than the worth of its assets, and isn't expected to recover, so unless there's unusual circumstances the debtors won't get paid in full and there will be nothing for the shareholders.
We don't have true equality just because competent women can become CEOs. We're more equal when female scam artists can become CEOs.
It's people tricked into doing it themselves. We know that people have been upgraded by Microsoft to Windows 10 against their wishes, although Microsoft often got something that MS could call permission by underhanded means.