Apple has billions of $ invested; it's not sitting in a bank. They have become a Mutual Fund which pays dividends on their stock. They could probably transition into a full blown fund and stop making anything.
Only a fool expects a corporation to police the other corporations they have to do business with. Government is supposed to police things; that was it's job before you all abdicated your responsibility and let corporations merge with it (see definition of fascism... then ask yourself what is the threshold where that term applies?)
How is it not YOUR fault that ATnT is doing this?? You are still a paying customer of theirs... Aren't you supposed to police them with your purchases? Aren't you supposed to monitor everything that all the companies you do business with and then punish them by boycotting them? What is the threshold for you taking responsibility for where your $ goes? (and how much free time do you have to do that?) Whatever your answer, the amount you tolerate/compromise is the exact amount of oppression/exploitation you are allowing.
"The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress" -Frederick Douglas
The UN is huge and has a changing staff. To characterize the whole body and all it's members on it's past actions -- which were supported by a subset and implemented by a small minority is as foolish as racism itself.
THINK about it.
We easily will hit 10 billion without drastic changes; climate change won't be quick enough to impact it in the slightest. The UN last projection was not horribly complex, they took all the projected factors and applied them to the current population years ago and if every child born followed all the KNOWN trends they would produce offspring very close to projected rates yielding 10 billion. This was known years ago and it's set in the stone of the path in which we are headed. We can diverge from this path with great effort; the later we do the more effort will be required. It's so simple if you just THINK.
TFA is imagining shifts in the path, it is far removed from logical projection from known facts. They might guess correctly, but then I might guess the lotto numbers this week too; both deserve an equal level of consideration (very little.) Guessing when we maximize to the point where humans/locusts/etc peak shouldn't be a big deal; we are supposed to THINK and should be able to avoid peak population... unless we are no better than all the other animals (except in the damage to the planet; at that we truly are exceptional.)
On an aggregate we've come a long way. Not news... The more detailed the harder it is. You can improve a skill overall but make imperceptible improvements at components of it or even go backwards at them.
The models are are more detailed now and they get results faster so they can do better now than in the past; as well as constantly update with new data but they do not yet model all the local impacts or report it to specific locations. 100% accurate will always be wrong for people physically located between boundaries (or if people move around) depending on the resolution of the regions.
The old weather man prof they had on PBS was talking about changes over time. They thought there was some heat island with the Cities but only now do they have detailed trend data on it being as high as 10F warmer (but 8F more common.) They are not yet modeling the impact of the twin cities, landscape, big fires, or reporting based on your planned GPS route for the next 5 days. That is coming...
The most intolerant group WINS in the end with enough numbers and a half decent strategy. Everybody else is less motivated and as long as you don't upset them (give sufficient motivation) they will bend in tolerance to the group. Maybe not actual tolerance as much as not being bothered to pick a fight with a more motivated group.
This is how social behavior works; even with animals on a simple scale. THINK about it.
Wikipedia being run by humans is bound to show such things. Some fanatics will out do all the truth seeking fanatics; it's a constant war and battles go either way depending on when you look. 1 dedicated fanatic can be worth dozens of 'good people.'
If you wish to play policy wonk in this natural balancing act, expect to lose because you are not as motivated or numerous as they are plus you are severely limited in what you can do since all policy games are generalized/remote; motivated humans are evolved to find solutions.
Example: Christians. tolerate others; but have lots of kids who MUST be raised christian; not tolerant on that. That is how they went from weak to powerful. How far they go is decided by how much opposition they stir up; when the numbers got high they could get away with more, then after really extreme times the backlash opposition wasn't worth their costs.
Those with the worst nightmares get the most power/influence in disaster planning.
Weaponized Psychology: App addictions to distract, control, and misinform the masses -- and customize techniques towards having a personal psychologist messing you up. We've only a hint of the start of this.
Cult-like control freaks AS AN APP. Isolation from friends/family/community replaced with hollow additions... Faster and more capable than a talented cult leader. Tech is already incidentally isolating people ironically in the communications tech age...
Continues to advance to the point where democracy is impossible in practice.
Slavery but you love your tiny freedoms! I get to choose the color of my shackles!
- PC policing with immediate fines like in "Demolition Man"
- A Super Bug that spreads faster (antibiotics fail.)
- Lacking net neutrality, those nightmares begin to grow.
- ISPs join a privatized legal system to punish/fine for ToS violations involving other industries. (such as loss of internet if you don't pay for hearing a song.)
- GMO designed disease; mad scientist or gov leak or mutation.
- Self-driving cars are exempt from liability... or like cars became after smearing pedestrians etc. jay walking... but now it's you driving that is 2nd class.
- Government quality automated attack using the existing massive data breaches.
- Such as identity theft millions at once (USA)
- Bank money routing
- power grid goes down
- Stock Exchange Hacked (by machine, not the few human scams at the edge of happening.)
- Government requires backdoors into tech... openly legalized by many governments; making it even more of a mess
- Cash is no longer forced to be allowed by law for all for payment of all debts.
- Social Rating scale like in Black Mirror... minor forms exist already but it's not there yet.
- Right to Repair backfires and it becomes illegal to repair
- Solar power taxes protectionism for old power companies
- AI systems that are "stable" have ghosts set off by simple triggers. Like a sticker on a stop sign causes them to drive off the road.
- Dick Cheny's mind is successfully simulated on a computer. It's crazy flawed but half US voters can't tell.
When I tried Prime many of the shows were only listed and required paying more $$$ to view them. It didn't appear to have that many shows included in the subscription or at least anything looking worth watching was not included.
NAFTA 2 didn't help you any except get a stupid name for it.
All the experts chosen to advise all the politicians get nearly all of them to agree to an unregulated global "free" market that creates all these problems. It's difficult to monitor the planet to figure out to slap on a tariff and how much it should be because in the race to the bottom the winners are due to unsafe, slave labor with illegal manufacturing conditions.
The debate always gets into a fight about how we should have no rules just like every shit hole that undercuts the USA. You LOSE if you kill regulations and taxes because they will always win as long as you do anything better. Shipping costs can be subsidized as China has been doing... (and we aid them by paying them to haul our trash back to China.)
Always blaming regulations like Pavlov ringing his bell...
Nuclear physics is hard stuff, it's not mass produced, not standardized, most stuff is a custom build. They keep wanting to try out new stuff for that future tech that is 5 years away for the last 50 years... maybe it could be if it didn't take 10 years to build a dangerous expensive experiment to see if it's actually viable. 100 experiments later maybe it will be but that's probably 50 more years off.
TONS of welfare from the public to insure and support the industry is required which totally gives the public the right for oversight; aside from the threat to public (security, main purpose of government...)
Private industry doesn't do much of anything significantly new. They mostly want profit and maybe political power. They don't even want to train their workers anymore or hire Americans... or pay living wages. The only public good they do is for the sake of tax write offs, P.R. and possibly some things to let management get some feelings of immortality (either by monuments stamped with their name or impactful projects with their name... and it MUST happen while they are alive to enjoy it.)
Universities and national labs produce nearly all the long term costly advances. No private industry is going to fund dead-end research for decades with no end in sight to eventually discover one of those dead ends leads to a discovery still 5 years away. They only fund things for the tax benefits or to buy patent rights for discoveries largely funded by the public (like their buying of stadium names, or naming of roads, etc.) PLUS there are all the tiny discoveries that are totally not worth investing in which become fundamental for countless other work. Not much profit in creating calculus... (no, they don't think that far ahead and few in management could even realize it's value.)
It's about control and ego. A tiny bit from his father who was a great person and ran the tax shelter before Gates took it over. Other people are rubbing off too.
Rich people building an orphanage, where most the children are not orphans at all; some even visit their parents or send the parents money from their new adopted home. That is the kind of help that many do and it seems many of gate's projects are similarly off target... a better toilet, remember that one? it was an expensive joke.
It's not a problem to NOT borrow use of somebody's phone. Some of us are old enough to have lived during a time when everybody didn't have a phone or internet.
The world functioned so well it was able to invent all the stuff you use today so you can "innovate" your silly stuff on top of that along with the help from us old timers.
He loses none of his rights if he uses your cell because you already gave up your rights. There is no hypocrisy here. He can do just fine without it and he can deal unlike everybody else.
This guy is more consistent than MOST people which is what gets him labeled as extreme all the time. We get people attacking him for being extremely consistent and idealistic beyond what they consider reasonable-- labeling him unreasonable-- and also attacking him for not being so extreme he can't even borrow use of a phone on rare occasion.... keep in mind that a PUBLIC SHARED PHONE is dead because of everybody else... the more you share your phone the less revealing it is about you, like a public phone was.
Greedy bastards who had to be dragged into streaming with somebody else doing all the work and risk. Now they all want to have their own rip off using whatever employees they snipe from Netflix while trying to demand Netflix rape their customers on their behalf. Forcing Netflix to become one of them as the content was taken from them now they have the same pressures, shareholders etc. as they lose good staff.
Maybe if there was a non-profit in charge of the gateway to their content... one which wasn't totally beholden to the corps they support... like the MPAA but not 100% corporate whores who are stuck in a past before the transistor; with the goal of keeping customers happy so they don't copy content.
More like the w3c where they define the standards for the tech of the web. Or a government dept which defines the lower level standards involved (like the US dept. of commerce does it for the internet protocols... in this case it would seem to be the FCC; but government wasn't as broken then as it is today and continue will be until the collapse.)
Having a front end like AOL or Facebook doesn't work out long term; but open protocols for integration between parties like the internet has been doing. Video distribution at a higher level so shows pop up in every app and stats let them know who gets paid for viewing kind of like internet ads. Hard in the sense it's more political than technical.
Religion has done just fine with it's tax exempt status. Religion doesn't even deserve to be treated any better than a non-profit but it gets exploited in the wrong direction with business cults.
Giving a blanket tax exemption for news biz is kind of like what the country did before Lincoln. They did upset the gov to the point that huge subsidy was removed but it didn't get the press to give in to the government during the civil war to keep the money.
It is only a $5 billion pet project; hardly worth costing the country more than $5 billion in another manufactured crisis.
Remember the last manufactured crisis to create a hostage situation? Literally kidnapping children and holding them hostage; so how anybody couldn't see that this completely predictable if they were paying attention to his threats to his own party over his wall a year ago-- who didn't give it to him either.
The shutdown began before the Democrats got into office; he had a compromise he rejected multiple times and continues to do so while the SENATE CAN IGNORE TRUMP and pass something if Mitch would allow them to vote. (FYI, Mitch's wife works for Trump; aside from him probably being a stooge, Trump has a hold over him.)
In the "real world" the disinformation is not controlled by a massive entity. Crazy uncles, friends, TV, radio, print, signs, speeches, etc. All different but harmfully consolidated over the last few generations. The tech boom only made it worse, not better. For the 10% progress you got 90% regression.
President Lincoln ended the government subsidies to the free press because they were not supporting him like he wanted them to. A huge % of the GDP was put into paying the free press (I forget but it was more than a few %) keep in mind that a lot of this was having the postal service deliver all newspapers for free. It did create problems which have gone on so long that nobody knows just how much damage it caused... nor do we care because it's degraded so much from that fall.
Craigslist hurt them greatly; however, the truth is MANY papers remained profitable despite that-- most the BS you hear is from owners complaining the profit margins were at historical lows but were NOT in the red. Yes, layoffs also helped and the quality of reporting has gone down; more pooling of resources in to press services has been done. It wouldn't have been as bad if they were allowed to have tiny profit margins; if their owners were thinking public service... or they were allowed to be TAX EXEMPT. A special kind of non-profit status like churches have had; or simply a non-profit with an easy transition path incentive since owners want profits and influence... they will run it into the ground before they spin it off for the public good. That wouldn't solve the whole problem; it would have slowed it.
Short attention spans and CRAP news online killed journalism. People live in filtered bubbles and they like that. Now we have a generation of snow flakes who are touchy about everything and kill themselves over an insulting tweet. So sheltered it would be a joke if it weren't widespread. People say stuff about the "living in mom's basement" complainers but we have a generation of virtually sheltered people who are similar.
WRONG. This is why America is doomed... over confident ignorant people like the parent OR gullible people falling for Russian trolls; possibly, the parent poster...
The constitution is something you should take a few minutes and look at; it's not that hard and you don't need to hand all the power over to lawyers to grasp it or how open ended much of it is. The parent is completely wrong.
Trump is also wrong when he keeps saying the economy is too good to impeach him; in fact, it's idiotic to keep saying that. Either he is an idiot or he thinks Americans are.
This stuff gets you in the news and gets people thinking of you as being visionary and it it doesn't take much effort to do it once you've got people's ear... you try to keep that impression going. The image helps business. Edison did it like crazy and Tesla probably not even on purpose.
Sad to see Musk's view on being smart is such that having a smart phone makes you smarter. It's quite functional; that is, his definition is functional. Having tools makes you more capable and perform/function better. You are not smarter at math because you have a calculator... but that is the kind of reasoning he is doing with this view on smarts.
A brain hook up would then appear to make you smarter as your interface with existing software tools would presumably be faster and easier; so you would function faster--- not likely any measurably better or more capable than before; but simply faster. So you get more done and from his perspective, you are smarter.
People WILL adopt the fad and get addicted just like the smart phone. It need not be any more capable or easier to use. Simply having to not carry a big glass sheet around all the time and worry about losing it would get a bunch of people to do it. Make an app that just gives your brain the dopamine and you've killed off freemium gaming, most drugs, pointless hobbies/activities, most shopping... but that would get it banned... better make that an "unknown" feature of rooting the device...
We already will have 10 billion people within about 20 years. THEY ARE ALREADY BORN, years ago! They will grow up and have kids at predictably lower rates = 10 billion. The best hope is to keep the kids already born from having more kids. Really, we should be fixing all boys at birth for free without permission. It can be undone, but not by mistake. Leveling off at 10B is a poor goal. Naturally, this goes against all current forms of capitalism which depends upon endless growth and religions who are still in "an arms race" in birthing newly indoctrinated members... and their attempts to keep members from thinking too much while being educated in STEM...
We shouldn't waste time on these Nuclear BS distractions which attack and always underestimate and distort the others. Solar scaled more than expected and far exceeded skeptical nuclear propaganda ALREADY and it is still growing. Nuclear takes a decade to build; is centralized, cost prohibitive, needs heavy subsidies forever, and is so dangerous wars are threatened as each 3rd world nation gets into the business. I'd rather they build on a fault line than with a weak government.
Next generation nuclear is 5 years off... it'll solve all that... when it gets solved in 5 years... as we've been promised for 30+ years! No credibility to make plans around it.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple has billions of $ invested; it's not sitting in a bank. They have become a Mutual Fund which pays dividends on their stock. They could probably transition into a full blown fund and stop making anything.
It won't be a tall glacier anymore.
If your doctor (applied science) advises you to risk your life at great extent because it should extend your life... are you going to?
Only a fool expects a corporation to police the other corporations they have to do business with. Government is supposed to police things; that was it's job before you all abdicated your responsibility and let corporations merge with it (see definition of fascism... then ask yourself what is the threshold where that term applies?)
How is it not YOUR fault that ATnT is doing this?? You are still a paying customer of theirs... Aren't you supposed to police them with your purchases? Aren't you supposed to monitor everything that all the companies you do business with and then punish them by boycotting them? What is the threshold for you taking responsibility for where your $ goes? (and how much free time do you have to do that?) Whatever your answer, the amount you tolerate/compromise is the exact amount of oppression/exploitation you are allowing.
"The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress"
-Frederick Douglas
The UN is huge and has a changing staff. To characterize the whole body and all it's members on it's past actions -- which were supported by a subset and implemented by a small minority is as foolish as racism itself.
THINK about it.
We easily will hit 10 billion without drastic changes; climate change won't be quick enough to impact it in the slightest. The UN last projection was not horribly complex, they took all the projected factors and applied them to the current population years ago and if every child born followed all the KNOWN trends they would produce offspring very close to projected rates yielding 10 billion. This was known years ago and it's set in the stone of the path in which we are headed. We can diverge from this path with great effort; the later we do the more effort will be required. It's so simple if you just THINK.
TFA is imagining shifts in the path, it is far removed from logical projection from known facts. They might guess correctly, but then I might guess the lotto numbers this week too; both deserve an equal level of consideration (very little.) Guessing when we maximize to the point where humans/locusts/etc peak shouldn't be a big deal; we are supposed to THINK and should be able to avoid peak population... unless we are no better than all the other animals (except in the damage to the planet; at that we truly are exceptional.)
On an aggregate we've come a long way. Not news... The more detailed the harder it is. You can improve a skill overall but make imperceptible improvements at components of it or even go backwards at them.
The models are are more detailed now and they get results faster so they can do better now than in the past; as well as constantly update with new data but they do not yet model all the local impacts or report it to specific locations. 100% accurate will always be wrong for people physically located between boundaries (or if people move around) depending on the resolution of the regions.
The old weather man prof they had on PBS was talking about changes over time. They thought there was some heat island with the Cities but only now do they have detailed trend data on it being as high as 10F warmer (but 8F more common.) They are not yet modeling the impact of the twin cities, landscape, big fires, or reporting based on your planned GPS route for the next 5 days. That is coming...
The most intolerant group WINS in the end with enough numbers and a half decent strategy. Everybody else is less motivated and as long as you don't upset them (give sufficient motivation) they will bend in tolerance to the group. Maybe not actual tolerance as much as not being bothered to pick a fight with a more motivated group.
This is how social behavior works; even with animals on a simple scale. THINK about it.
Wikipedia being run by humans is bound to show such things. Some fanatics will out do all the truth seeking fanatics; it's a constant war and battles go either way depending on when you look. 1 dedicated fanatic can be worth dozens of 'good people.'
If you wish to play policy wonk in this natural balancing act, expect to lose because you are not as motivated or numerous as they are plus you are severely limited in what you can do since all policy games are generalized/remote; motivated humans are evolved to find solutions.
Example: Christians. tolerate others; but have lots of kids who MUST be raised christian; not tolerant on that. That is how they went from weak to powerful. How far they go is decided by how much opposition they stir up; when the numbers got high they could get away with more, then after really extreme times the backlash opposition wasn't worth their costs.
Those with the worst nightmares get the most power/influence in disaster planning.
Weaponized Psychology:
App addictions to distract, control, and misinform the masses -- and customize techniques towards having a personal psychologist messing you up. We've only a hint of the start of this.
Cult-like control freaks AS AN APP. Isolation from friends/family/community replaced with hollow additions... Faster and more capable than a talented cult leader. Tech is already incidentally isolating people ironically in the communications tech age...
Continues to advance to the point where democracy is impossible in practice.
Slavery but you love your tiny freedoms! I get to choose the color of my shackles!
- PC policing with immediate fines like in "Demolition Man"
- A Super Bug that spreads faster (antibiotics fail.)
- Lacking net neutrality, those nightmares begin to grow.
- ISPs join a privatized legal system to punish/fine for ToS violations involving other industries. (such as loss of internet if you don't pay for hearing a song.)
- Quantum Computing actually works. Encryption dies.
- GMO designed disease; mad scientist or gov leak or mutation.
- Self-driving cars are exempt from liability... or like cars became after smearing pedestrians etc. jay walking... but now it's you driving that is 2nd class.
- Government quality automated attack using the existing massive data breaches.
- Such as identity theft millions at once (USA)
- Bank money routing
- power grid goes down
- Stock Exchange Hacked (by machine, not the few human scams at the edge of happening.)
- Government requires backdoors into tech... openly legalized by many governments; making it even more of a mess
- Cash is no longer forced to be allowed by law for all for payment of all debts.
- Social Rating scale like in Black Mirror... minor forms exist already but it's not there yet.
- Right to Repair backfires and it becomes illegal to repair
- Solar power taxes protectionism for old power companies
- AI systems that are "stable" have ghosts set off by simple triggers. Like a sticker on a stop sign causes them to drive off the road.
- Dick Cheny's mind is successfully simulated on a computer. It's crazy flawed but half US voters can't tell.
When I tried Prime many of the shows were only listed and required paying more $$$ to view them. It didn't appear to have that many shows included in the subscription or at least anything looking worth watching was not included.
NAFTA 2 didn't help you any except get a stupid name for it.
All the experts chosen to advise all the politicians get nearly all of them to agree to an unregulated global "free" market that creates all these problems. It's difficult to monitor the planet to figure out to slap on a tariff and how much it should be because in the race to the bottom the winners are due to unsafe, slave labor with illegal manufacturing conditions.
The debate always gets into a fight about how we should have no rules just like every shit hole that undercuts the USA. You LOSE if you kill regulations and taxes because they will always win as long as you do anything better. Shipping costs can be subsidized as China has been doing... (and we aid them by paying them to haul our trash back to China.)
The i0Phone is the best model Apple iPhone. It's the best kind of smart phone too!
Spoken simply as:
i zero phone
The name also sounds perfect to people who view you as a Luddite anyway.
Always blaming regulations like Pavlov ringing his bell...
Nuclear physics is hard stuff, it's not mass produced, not standardized, most stuff is a custom build. They keep wanting to try out new stuff for that future tech that is 5 years away for the last 50 years... maybe it could be if it didn't take 10 years to build a dangerous expensive experiment to see if it's actually viable. 100 experiments later maybe it will be but that's probably 50 more years off.
TONS of welfare from the public to insure and support the industry is required which totally gives the public the right for oversight; aside from the threat to public (security, main purpose of government...)
Private industry doesn't do much of anything significantly new. They mostly want profit and maybe political power. They don't even want to train their workers anymore or hire Americans... or pay living wages. The only public good they do is for the sake of tax write offs, P.R. and possibly some things to let management get some feelings of immortality (either by monuments stamped with their name or impactful projects with their name... and it MUST happen while they are alive to enjoy it.)
Universities and national labs produce nearly all the long term costly advances. No private industry is going to fund dead-end research for decades with no end in sight to eventually discover one of those dead ends leads to a discovery still 5 years away. They only fund things for the tax benefits or to buy patent rights for discoveries largely funded by the public (like their buying of stadium names, or naming of roads, etc.) PLUS there are all the tiny discoveries that are totally not worth investing in which become fundamental for countless other work. Not much profit in creating calculus... (no, they don't think that far ahead and few in management could even realize it's value.)
It's about control and ego. A tiny bit from his father who was a great person and ran the tax shelter before Gates took it over. Other people are rubbing off too.
Rich people building an orphanage, where most the children are not orphans at all; some even visit their parents or send the parents money from their new adopted home. That is the kind of help that many do and it seems many of gate's projects are similarly off target... a better toilet, remember that one? it was an expensive joke.
It's not a problem to NOT borrow use of somebody's phone. Some of us are old enough to have lived during a time when everybody didn't have a phone or internet.
The world functioned so well it was able to invent all the stuff you use today so you can "innovate" your silly stuff on top of that along with the help from us old timers.
He loses none of his rights if he uses your cell because you already gave up your rights. There is no hypocrisy here. He can do just fine without it and he can deal unlike everybody else.
This guy is more consistent than MOST people which is what gets him labeled as extreme all the time. We get people attacking him for being extremely consistent and idealistic beyond what they consider reasonable-- labeling him unreasonable-- and also attacking him for not being so extreme he can't even borrow use of a phone on rare occasion.... keep in mind that a PUBLIC SHARED PHONE is dead because of everybody else... the more you share your phone the less revealing it is about you, like a public phone was.
Greedy bastards who had to be dragged into streaming with somebody else doing all the work and risk. Now they all want to have their own rip off using whatever employees they snipe from Netflix while trying to demand Netflix rape their customers on their behalf. Forcing Netflix to become one of them as the content was taken from them now they have the same pressures, shareholders etc. as they lose good staff.
Maybe if there was a non-profit in charge of the gateway to their content... one which wasn't totally beholden to the corps they support... like the MPAA but not 100% corporate whores who are stuck in a past before the transistor; with the goal of keeping customers happy so they don't copy content.
More like the w3c where they define the standards for the tech of the web. Or a government dept which defines the lower level standards involved (like the US dept. of commerce does it for the internet protocols... in this case it would seem to be the FCC; but government wasn't as broken then as it is today and continue will be until the collapse.)
Having a front end like AOL or Facebook doesn't work out long term; but open protocols for integration between parties like the internet has been doing. Video distribution at a higher level so shows pop up in every app and stats let them know who gets paid for viewing kind of like internet ads. Hard in the sense it's more political than technical.
Religion has done just fine with it's tax exempt status. Religion doesn't even deserve to be treated any better than a non-profit but it gets exploited in the wrong direction with business cults.
Giving a blanket tax exemption for news biz is kind of like what the country did before Lincoln. They did upset the gov to the point that huge subsidy was removed but it didn't get the press to give in to the government during the civil war to keep the money.
somebody gets it.
It is only a $5 billion pet project; hardly worth costing the country more than $5 billion in another manufactured crisis.
Remember the last manufactured crisis to create a hostage situation? Literally kidnapping children and holding them hostage; so how anybody couldn't see that this completely predictable if they were paying attention to his threats to his own party over his wall a year ago-- who didn't give it to him either.
The shutdown began before the Democrats got into office; he had a compromise he rejected multiple times and continues to do so while the SENATE CAN IGNORE TRUMP and pass something if Mitch would allow them to vote. (FYI, Mitch's wife works for Trump; aside from him probably being a stooge, Trump has a hold over him.)
In the "real world" the disinformation is not controlled by a massive entity. Crazy uncles, friends, TV, radio, print, signs, speeches, etc. All different but harmfully consolidated over the last few generations. The tech boom only made it worse, not better. For the 10% progress you got 90% regression.
President Lincoln ended the government subsidies to the free press because they were not supporting him like he wanted them to. A huge % of the GDP was put into paying the free press (I forget but it was more than a few %) keep in mind that a lot of this was having the postal service deliver all newspapers for free. It did create problems which have gone on so long that nobody knows just how much damage it caused... nor do we care because it's degraded so much from that fall.
Craigslist hurt them greatly; however, the truth is MANY papers remained profitable despite that-- most the BS you hear is from owners complaining the profit margins were at historical lows but were NOT in the red. Yes, layoffs also helped and the quality of reporting has gone down; more pooling of resources in to press services has been done. It wouldn't have been as bad if they were allowed to have tiny profit margins; if their owners were thinking public service... or they were allowed to be TAX EXEMPT. A special kind of non-profit status like churches have had; or simply a non-profit with an easy transition path incentive since owners want profits and influence... they will run it into the ground before they spin it off for the public good. That wouldn't solve the whole problem; it would have slowed it.
Short attention spans and CRAP news online killed journalism. People live in filtered bubbles and they like that. Now we have a generation of snow flakes who are touchy about everything and kill themselves over an insulting tweet. So sheltered it would be a joke if it weren't widespread. People say stuff about the "living in mom's basement" complainers but we have a generation of virtually sheltered people who are similar.
WRONG. This is why America is doomed... over confident ignorant people like the parent OR gullible people falling for Russian trolls; possibly, the parent poster...
The constitution is something you should take a few minutes and look at; it's not that hard and you don't need to hand all the power over to lawyers to grasp it or how open ended much of it is. The parent is completely wrong.
Trump is also wrong when he keeps saying the economy is too good to impeach him; in fact, it's idiotic to keep saying that. Either he is an idiot or he thinks Americans are.
This stuff gets you in the news and gets people thinking of you as being visionary and it it doesn't take much effort to do it once you've got people's ear... you try to keep that impression going. The image helps business. Edison did it like crazy and Tesla probably not even on purpose.
Sad to see Musk's view on being smart is such that having a smart phone makes you smarter. It's quite functional; that is, his definition is functional. Having tools makes you more capable and perform/function better. You are not smarter at math because you have a calculator... but that is the kind of reasoning he is doing with this view on smarts.
A brain hook up would then appear to make you smarter as your interface with existing software tools would presumably be faster and easier; so you would function faster--- not likely any measurably better or more capable than before; but simply faster. So you get more done and from his perspective, you are smarter.
People WILL adopt the fad and get addicted just like the smart phone. It need not be any more capable or easier to use. Simply having to not carry a big glass sheet around all the time and worry about losing it would get a bunch of people to do it. Make an app that just gives your brain the dopamine and you've killed off freemium gaming, most drugs, pointless hobbies/activities, most shopping... but that would get it banned... better make that an "unknown" feature of rooting the device...
We already will have 10 billion people within about 20 years. THEY ARE ALREADY BORN, years ago! They will grow up and have kids at predictably lower rates = 10 billion. The best hope is to keep the kids already born from having more kids. Really, we should be fixing all boys at birth for free without permission. It can be undone, but not by mistake.
Leveling off at 10B is a poor goal. Naturally, this goes against all current forms of capitalism which depends upon endless growth and religions who are still in "an arms race" in birthing newly indoctrinated members... and their attempts to keep members from thinking too much while being educated in STEM...
We shouldn't waste time on these Nuclear BS distractions which attack and always underestimate and distort the others. Solar scaled more than expected and far exceeded skeptical nuclear propaganda ALREADY and it is still growing. Nuclear takes a decade to build; is centralized, cost prohibitive, needs heavy subsidies forever, and is so dangerous wars are threatened as each 3rd world nation gets into the business. I'd rather they build on a fault line than with a weak government.
Next generation nuclear is 5 years off... it'll solve all that... when it gets solved in 5 years ... as we've been promised for 30+ years! No credibility to make plans around it.
What goes on in Vegas stays in Facebook,Google,Amazon.
What goes on in Vegas stays with Facebook partners.
What goes on in Vegas you snap-chatted will be resurrected in 10 years.
What goes on in Vegas stays in your cell provider's location DB; which is for sale.
What goes on in Vegas stays in Facebook,Google,Amazon,Apple profiles.
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