And that's not touching on the fact that the TARP bailout made sure the banks were on solid ground while the people the banks had screwed were rendered homeless. TARP was a bad program from the get-go, and it was designed specifically to maintain the powerful's wealth on the backs of the powerless.
That argument would have more merit if we had only helped "people" (corporations) like that once. But that's not the case. We did it over and over again. We continue to do it. We continue to give them, and their uber-rich leaders, massive tax breaks, massive givebacks, and we even pass laws requiring the purchase of their products (see: ethanol).
And I note you deftly omitted his reference to waging wars, which we do constantly and to great expense.
If we can afford to bomb brown people and run welfare programs for billionaires, we can afford to feed our own poor people. We simply choose not to, and that paints a pretty clear picture of what kind of people we are.
They made their money as members of a society which provided the infrastructure necessary for them to make money. Our taxes contributed to that society, so yes, we, as in we-the-people - the government, - are absolutely entitled to some of that wealth.
See, the difference between "conservatives" and "liberals" is really that liberals are willing to see their tax dollars go toward programs that benefit people, but do not benefit themselves personally, whereas conservatives are willing to see their tax dollars go toward programs that benefit them and everyone else can fuck right off.
I get no benefit from funding homeless shelters. I'm not homeless. No one I know is homeless. I'm solidly upper-middle-class and so if there is a homeless uprising, they're gonna be going for heads much higher than mine. The part of my tax bill that funds programs for the homeless does absolutely nothing for me whatsoever, and yet I don't bitch about paying it because it's something that people need, and I'm happy to help provide it.
Meanwhile, Ben Carson wants to bar homeless people from getting into a shelter if they've been drinking or using drugs which based on alcohol/narcotics use rates among the homeless is another way of saying that the Trump administration wants street people to stay out in the cold because by God we're not gonna pay one penny of a heating bill to keep those drunk druggies warm.
The world does not owe me a living, but when I help fund the things the world wants to do, it damn well does owe me some payback, and we can start by not bitching when people who benefit the most from the world that all of us have set up are asked to pay their fair share to keep that world going.
It takes millions of years for plant remians to be buried to a sufficient under-sea depth to even be capable of producing oil. It then takes hundreds of thousands of years for the oil to actually form.
In short, if there was a pre-human industrial civilization 2 million years ago, why didn't they use up all the oil? It's fairly unlikely they *started* their mass-energy production with nuclear or solar. If they were here, then the oil should have been grossly depleted long before we got to it.
Republican leadership doesn't believe it. Their voters believe it, but then many of them also believe Clinton ran a child sex ring from the basement of a pizza joint that doesn't have a basement.
The leadership knows exactly what's going on, and exactly what their policies will do, and exactly who their policies will hurt and who they will help. But they also know that even the dim bulbs who vote for them won't like being told that they will be poor for the rest of their lives while their representatives' rich puppeteers will continue to get richer, and so they lie about what their policies will do and who they will hurt.
It really is time we move away from "Republicans want good things for the public, they're just totally wrong in how to bring them about" and recognize that Republicans are very smart, and want to destroy the country as we know it.
The best part about Principle Boy is that he doesn't seem to understand that Reddit is by his own logic anti-free speech, because it does, in fact, censor what you can say on Reddit. There are all sorts of things you're not allowed to say on Reddit. Racist assholery just happens to not be one of them, which I think is instructive in discerning the motivations of Reddit's owners.
That's not accurate. News meteorologists absolutely do use NWS. In the first place, it provides a check of their own work. In the second, NWS is the organization issuing storm watches (via their subsidiary Storm Prediction Center) and warnings, so when your local TV station comes across with a tornado warning, that's coming from NWS. News meteorologists don't have the authority to issue their own warnings. While they can tell you "a tornado is coming," they can't activate the emergency systems (sirens, phone alerts, EAS, etc) that are used in NWS-issued alerts.
So if you want to keep getting advanced notice that a tornado is about to hit your town so that you can get to shelter and not die, you'd better hope the NWS remains viable.
It should also probably be mentioned that if you like flying places with a reasonable chance that you won't end up in the middle of a bad thunderstorm which could cause the plane to crash, that's the NWS' doing too, as aviation meteorology is handled by them.
Decreasing flux density means they aren't watching those, either. Anything more than a few light years away probably isn't noticing anything coming from us.... And vice versa, so we can relax - there probably *are* aliens out there, but unless they're building a galactic cantenna and aiming it at us, we're not going to hear them.
Broadcasting is vastly more efficient than cable. You set up one structure in the middle of the area you want to talk to and everyone in that area immediately gets whatever you send out. No digging trenches through people's yards, no stringing miles of cable, no having to go out all the time and fix the cable because some nutmeat in a backhoe broke it, no having to go to each person's house individually every time someone moves or changes providers, etc. You just turn on the transmitter and start talking.
Cable is popular because you can charge the viewers directly. Broadcasting has to charge the viewers indirectly, through time wasted watching advertisements and then hope the companies placing the ads will agree it's worth their money to continue to do so.
Not to defend the nonsensical rhetoric, because you're right, no one's gonna drown (though many will lose property), what makes people turn from considering any case for warming is stupidity.
Global warming is real. The science is solid. The book is closed. Not "believing" in global warming is like not believing that the Earth is round. Sure, some people still refuse to believe, but it's not because they got their feefees hurt by mean people on the internet, it's because they're dumb.
Trump does not know what IT does - he seems to think his 10-year-old is a qualified cybersecurity expert - he does not know what an H1-B is, and he thinks a Visa is that piece of black stainless steel in his wallet that he uses when he can't get out of paying for something.
I've lost count of how many times I've been told that I'd better get on Facebook and Twitter and Linkedin or if I ever need to get another job I'll be out in the cold because companies want to see my social media profile, and no, I don't work in marketing or PR. I've always found it stupid advice - why the hell would my future employer give a good goddamn what I drank last night at dinner or what cute thing my cat did over the weekend?
I don't. It's his site. If he doesn't want people talking about homosexuality on it, that's his prerogative. Look, I have a website. It's for a car club. I don't have an LGBT rights subforum on it not because I don't support LGBT rights, but because it's a car forum and we are there to talk about cars. We don't talk about LGBT issues, or for that matter politics, or economics, or camping, or trains, or knitting either. If the members want to discuss homosexuality or any of those other topics there are plenty of other sites available to them in which to do so.
People think that because the US government is constitutionally forbidden to interfere with our freedom of speech, that everyone living in the country is equally obligated. That is not true. When you're on my internet site, you are in my house, and you will follow my rules. I'm under no obligation to let you do or say anything you want. The same goes for any other privately-held website on the planet.
I take issue with the idea that Reddit must forever remain exactly what it was when it started. Things change. Audiences change. Advertisers change. Businesses that don't change to match external changes are doomed to failure. So even if Reddit started out as a bastion of free speech, there is nothing legally or morally compelling them to remain so.
And I suspect the "free speech no matter what" thing has been overblown. In reading some of the CEO's posts, he's simply not good at writing, or thinking through exactly what he's saying. Starting up a chat site saying "We're for free speech no matter what!" sounds great, until you realize the racists, bigots, child pornographers, etc etc are going to take you seriously and start talking about what they want to talk about. Then you start thinking "gee, maybe 100% unfettered free speech isn't such a great idea, because I didn't really want this to become a child raping KKK fest."
Or, in other words, Reddit may indeed have been created as a free speech platform, but as with any other right/privilege, retaining that free speech ability on Reddit required the users to act responsibly with it. And they didn't. And not only did they create their own little hate havens, but they started spreading that crap all over the rest of the site. I've even seen an uptick in racist comments in a localized city subreddit, and when I trace the username back, it turns out the little shit's a member of coontown and is actively trying to infect the rest of the site with his racist garbage.
A prosecutor isn't going to give a damn that you're a champion of free speech when he's bringing you up on charges of hosting naked kiddie pics. An advertiser isn't going to give a damn about your free speech ideals when you're asking them to plaster their name all over a site that has people talking about lynching black people.
The way I see it, Reddit can either be stupid and let these fringe idiot groups have a safe haven on the internet, get no ad revenue, and eventually go out of business, or it can be smart and get rid of the minority of users who are making the site look bad and therefore unattractive to advertisers, and in so doing can have a shot at staying in business.
At any rate, no creator of any site anywhere on the internet is obligated to let anyone say anything. If you really want free speech on an internet site, then you need to create that site yourself. Don't rely on other people to do it for you and then whine when they don't create the site that you think they should have.
Market *rate* rent means what apartments of a given size/style/amenity level are going for in your market. If you charge higher than market rate then you are adding a premium cost to your apartment above what the market is currently charging. If enough people bite, then you have upped the market rent by charging higher than market rate.
What OP probably meant to convey is that, just like where I live, there's a rental crunch and apartment developers are targeting high-income earners who can afford to pay 3-4 grand for an apartment, and leaving the 90% of people who can't afford it out in the cold. Literally.
The cheapest apartment I was able to find where I live is $800 per month. For that you get a tiny one bedroom with a poorly-working window air conditioner and a coin operated communal laundry in a rickety old building that hasn't been maintained properly since at least the 90's, full of drug dealers and gang members.
Mid level apartments are going for what my mortgage on a pretty decently nice house costs. For what they want for most of the new apartments they're building, you could be making mortgage payments on a half million dollar house easily. This is an untenable situation, and it wouldn't shock me if it leads to a second economic crash as waves of people suddenly can't afford the grossly inflated rents being charged.
That's a bit hyperbolic. If you catch a little kid swiping a toy from a store, and you scare the hell out of him by making him think the angry cop is going to haul him off to jail where he can't be with his mommy and daddy, you aren't using fear and intimidation to subjugate the public, you're using fear and intimidation to hopefully stop the kid from thinking that stealing is fun and profitable, and therefore hopefully keep him from becoming a more serious criminal down the road and ending up in jail.
I would argue that breaking and entering and then just looking around and maybe leaving funny souvenirs behind, whether they're breaking into a physical house or a computer, is not something that should be encouraged.
In a real-world analogue, the kid found the teacher's house key and instead of returning it to him or throwing it in the trash, used it to let himself in to the teacher's house and rearrange the furniture. That's not okay either.
The overreaction was stupid, and I agree with an earlier poster who asked why schools call the cops for shit like this so much, but the kid should not have gotten off without consequences - just, those consequences should have been dished out by the school instead of the criminal prosecution system.
Not everyone goes to a foreign country for vacation. Some go for extended work trips. If I'm spending 6 months somewhere for work, I might buy a game or two.
This is just another example of why the license system for media content does not work and is 100% anti-consumer.
When I buy a book, I'm not buying a license to read the book, and the publisher is not allowed to break into my house and steal the book if I bought the book in a foreign country. I fail to understand why anyone would think such things are OK just because you are buying electronic media.
At any rate, I'd love to see a court case come of this; when I buy a license for media, I expect that license to be valid in perpetuity unless otherwise stated up front at the time of sale. And if the company decides somewhere down the road that it's not valid, and steals the license back from me, they should get sued.
I would suggest that a non-scientist claiming that science proves anything is operating well outside his area of expertise. A scientist correcting the non-scientist on what science does or does not prove is entirely rational.
This would explain why the Dominos app now lets you order via voice. On your phone.
It doesn't just call up the local Dominos for you. It actually has you talking to a Nuance system.
So people are downloading an app on their phones that lets them voice order in order to avoid voice ordering..
And at least one news outlet, USA Today, points out that Dominos is the first pizza joint to offer a voice ordering app, without pointing out that we don't need an app to voice-order pizza and yet somehow we have been ordering pizza by voice routinely since the early '60's.
The previous generations had the disadvantage of everyone knowing who they were when they acted like jackasses.
It's already "not normal" to be an over-the-top rude asshole to people, which is why the internet troll is on the internet and not in the conference room. The whole point of seeking anonymity for these trolls is so they can be trolls without facing any real world consequences. And you can pass all the laws you want, but if you can't figure out who the troll is, how are you going to enforce them against him?
Because this anonymity inherent to the internet serves as protection for the troll that was never enjoyed by boors of the past, I find it unlikely that the troll is anywhere close to being on the road to extinction.
Scarcity will always be a thing. Even if we figure out how to provide the basic necessities of life to everyone, there will still be scarcity. There will always ever be only one Mona Lisa, and if it changes hands, the hands that get it will be expected to pay for it in some way. It might not be money as we think of it today, but it will be some sort of exchange of something valuable.
Really, I think professing that any one economic system, whether it's socialism, communism, or capitalism, is going to be the sole solution is short sighted.
There are times when (regulated) capitalism is a better system - if we were a purely socialist economy, then we'd all be driving Trabants. As it is, we have a bevy of cars to choose from to fit whatever our personal transportation goal is. There are other times when socialism is a better system - if we were a purely capitalistic economy, then we'd have nowhere to drive those cars because very few people can afford to build roads, and those that can would charge exorbitant prices to drive on them.
What we really need to do is to get over the 5-year-old "everything is either pure good or pure bad" mentality, stop decrying whatever economic system your friends tell you is bad, and start looking for a balanced, intelligent approach to the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, except they repaid the bailout money with money they got from the government.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/S...
Financial shell games don't count.
And that's not touching on the fact that the TARP bailout made sure the banks were on solid ground while the people the banks had screwed were rendered homeless. TARP was a bad program from the get-go, and it was designed specifically to maintain the powerful's wealth on the backs of the powerless.
That argument would have more merit if we had only helped "people" (corporations) like that once. But that's not the case. We did it over and over again. We continue to do it. We continue to give them, and their uber-rich leaders, massive tax breaks, massive givebacks, and we even pass laws requiring the purchase of their products (see: ethanol).
And I note you deftly omitted his reference to waging wars, which we do constantly and to great expense.
If we can afford to bomb brown people and run welfare programs for billionaires, we can afford to feed our own poor people. We simply choose not to, and that paints a pretty clear picture of what kind of people we are.
They made their money as members of a society which provided the infrastructure necessary for them to make money. Our taxes contributed to that society, so yes, we, as in we-the-people - the government, - are absolutely entitled to some of that wealth.
See, the difference between "conservatives" and "liberals" is really that liberals are willing to see their tax dollars go toward programs that benefit people, but do not benefit themselves personally, whereas conservatives are willing to see their tax dollars go toward programs that benefit them and everyone else can fuck right off.
I get no benefit from funding homeless shelters. I'm not homeless. No one I know is homeless. I'm solidly upper-middle-class and so if there is a homeless uprising, they're gonna be going for heads much higher than mine. The part of my tax bill that funds programs for the homeless does absolutely nothing for me whatsoever, and yet I don't bitch about paying it because it's something that people need, and I'm happy to help provide it.
Meanwhile, Ben Carson wants to bar homeless people from getting into a shelter if they've been drinking or using drugs which based on alcohol/narcotics use rates among the homeless is another way of saying that the Trump administration wants street people to stay out in the cold because by God we're not gonna pay one penny of a heating bill to keep those drunk druggies warm.
The world does not owe me a living, but when I help fund the things the world wants to do, it damn well does owe me some payback, and we can start by not bitching when people who benefit the most from the world that all of us have set up are asked to pay their fair share to keep that world going.
It takes millions of years for plant remians to be buried to a sufficient under-sea depth to even be capable of producing oil. It then takes hundreds of thousands of years for the oil to actually form.
In short, if there was a pre-human industrial civilization 2 million years ago, why didn't they use up all the oil? It's fairly unlikely they *started* their mass-energy production with nuclear or solar. If they were here, then the oil should have been grossly depleted long before we got to it.
Republican leadership doesn't believe it. Their voters believe it, but then many of them also believe Clinton ran a child sex ring from the basement of a pizza joint that doesn't have a basement.
The leadership knows exactly what's going on, and exactly what their policies will do, and exactly who their policies will hurt and who they will help. But they also know that even the dim bulbs who vote for them won't like being told that they will be poor for the rest of their lives while their representatives' rich puppeteers will continue to get richer, and so they lie about what their policies will do and who they will hurt.
It really is time we move away from "Republicans want good things for the public, they're just totally wrong in how to bring them about" and recognize that Republicans are very smart, and want to destroy the country as we know it.
The best part about Principle Boy is that he doesn't seem to understand that Reddit is by his own logic anti-free speech, because it does, in fact, censor what you can say on Reddit. There are all sorts of things you're not allowed to say on Reddit. Racist assholery just happens to not be one of them, which I think is instructive in discerning the motivations of Reddit's owners.
Neither do most news organizations.
That's not accurate. News meteorologists absolutely do use NWS. In the first place, it provides a check of their own work. In the second, NWS is the organization issuing storm watches (via their subsidiary Storm Prediction Center) and warnings, so when your local TV station comes across with a tornado warning, that's coming from NWS. News meteorologists don't have the authority to issue their own warnings. While they can tell you "a tornado is coming," they can't activate the emergency systems (sirens, phone alerts, EAS, etc) that are used in NWS-issued alerts.
So if you want to keep getting advanced notice that a tornado is about to hit your town so that you can get to shelter and not die, you'd better hope the NWS remains viable.
It should also probably be mentioned that if you like flying places with a reasonable chance that you won't end up in the middle of a bad thunderstorm which could cause the plane to crash, that's the NWS' doing too, as aviation meteorology is handled by them.
You should'a seen his response to A Modest Proposal.
Decreasing flux density means they aren't watching those, either. Anything more than a few light years away probably isn't noticing anything coming from us. ... And vice versa, so we can relax - there probably *are* aliens out there, but unless they're building a galactic cantenna and aiming it at us, we're not going to hear them.
Broadcasting is vastly more efficient than cable. You set up one structure in the middle of the area you want to talk to and everyone in that area immediately gets whatever you send out. No digging trenches through people's yards, no stringing miles of cable, no having to go out all the time and fix the cable because some nutmeat in a backhoe broke it, no having to go to each person's house individually every time someone moves or changes providers, etc. You just turn on the transmitter and start talking.
Cable is popular because you can charge the viewers directly. Broadcasting has to charge the viewers indirectly, through time wasted watching advertisements and then hope the companies placing the ads will agree it's worth their money to continue to do so.
Not to defend the nonsensical rhetoric, because you're right, no one's gonna drown (though many will lose property), what makes people turn from considering any case for warming is stupidity.
Global warming is real. The science is solid. The book is closed. Not "believing" in global warming is like not believing that the Earth is round. Sure, some people still refuse to believe, but it's not because they got their feefees hurt by mean people on the internet, it's because they're dumb.
Trump does not know what IT does - he seems to think his 10-year-old is a qualified cybersecurity expert - he does not know what an H1-B is, and he thinks a Visa is that piece of black stainless steel in his wallet that he uses when he can't get out of paying for something.
So, no, he most likely won't.
I've lost count of how many times I've been told that I'd better get on Facebook and Twitter and Linkedin or if I ever need to get another job I'll be out in the cold because companies want to see my social media profile, and no, I don't work in marketing or PR. I've always found it stupid advice - why the hell would my future employer give a good goddamn what I drank last night at dinner or what cute thing my cat did over the weekend?
No. In 3-letter-agency circles, finding ways around the constitution is seen as a positive trait.
I don't. It's his site. If he doesn't want people talking about homosexuality on it, that's his prerogative. Look, I have a website. It's for a car club. I don't have an LGBT rights subforum on it not because I don't support LGBT rights, but because it's a car forum and we are there to talk about cars. We don't talk about LGBT issues, or for that matter politics, or economics, or camping, or trains, or knitting either. If the members want to discuss homosexuality or any of those other topics there are plenty of other sites available to them in which to do so.
People think that because the US government is constitutionally forbidden to interfere with our freedom of speech, that everyone living in the country is equally obligated. That is not true. When you're on my internet site, you are in my house, and you will follow my rules. I'm under no obligation to let you do or say anything you want. The same goes for any other privately-held website on the planet.
I take issue with the idea that Reddit must forever remain exactly what it was when it started. Things change. Audiences change. Advertisers change. Businesses that don't change to match external changes are doomed to failure. So even if Reddit started out as a bastion of free speech, there is nothing legally or morally compelling them to remain so.
And I suspect the "free speech no matter what" thing has been overblown. In reading some of the CEO's posts, he's simply not good at writing, or thinking through exactly what he's saying. Starting up a chat site saying "We're for free speech no matter what!" sounds great, until you realize the racists, bigots, child pornographers, etc etc are going to take you seriously and start talking about what they want to talk about. Then you start thinking "gee, maybe 100% unfettered free speech isn't such a great idea, because I didn't really want this to become a child raping KKK fest."
Or, in other words, Reddit may indeed have been created as a free speech platform, but as with any other right/privilege, retaining that free speech ability on Reddit required the users to act responsibly with it. And they didn't. And not only did they create their own little hate havens, but they started spreading that crap all over the rest of the site. I've even seen an uptick in racist comments in a localized city subreddit, and when I trace the username back, it turns out the little shit's a member of coontown and is actively trying to infect the rest of the site with his racist garbage.
A prosecutor isn't going to give a damn that you're a champion of free speech when he's bringing you up on charges of hosting naked kiddie pics. An advertiser isn't going to give a damn about your free speech ideals when you're asking them to plaster their name all over a site that has people talking about lynching black people.
The way I see it, Reddit can either be stupid and let these fringe idiot groups have a safe haven on the internet, get no ad revenue, and eventually go out of business, or it can be smart and get rid of the minority of users who are making the site look bad and therefore unattractive to advertisers, and in so doing can have a shot at staying in business.
At any rate, no creator of any site anywhere on the internet is obligated to let anyone say anything. If you really want free speech on an internet site, then you need to create that site yourself. Don't rely on other people to do it for you and then whine when they don't create the site that you think they should have.
Market *rate* rent means what apartments of a given size/style/amenity level are going for in your market. If you charge higher than market rate then you are adding a premium cost to your apartment above what the market is currently charging. If enough people bite, then you have upped the market rent by charging higher than market rate.
What OP probably meant to convey is that, just like where I live, there's a rental crunch and apartment developers are targeting high-income earners who can afford to pay 3-4 grand for an apartment, and leaving the 90% of people who can't afford it out in the cold. Literally.
The cheapest apartment I was able to find where I live is $800 per month. For that you get a tiny one bedroom with a poorly-working window air conditioner and a coin operated communal laundry in a rickety old building that hasn't been maintained properly since at least the 90's, full of drug dealers and gang members.
Mid level apartments are going for what my mortgage on a pretty decently nice house costs. For what they want for most of the new apartments they're building, you could be making mortgage payments on a half million dollar house easily. This is an untenable situation, and it wouldn't shock me if it leads to a second economic crash as waves of people suddenly can't afford the grossly inflated rents being charged.
That's a bit hyperbolic. If you catch a little kid swiping a toy from a store, and you scare the hell out of him by making him think the angry cop is going to haul him off to jail where he can't be with his mommy and daddy, you aren't using fear and intimidation to subjugate the public, you're using fear and intimidation to hopefully stop the kid from thinking that stealing is fun and profitable, and therefore hopefully keep him from becoming a more serious criminal down the road and ending up in jail.
I would argue that breaking and entering and then just looking around and maybe leaving funny souvenirs behind, whether they're breaking into a physical house or a computer, is not something that should be encouraged.
In a real-world analogue, the kid found the teacher's house key and instead of returning it to him or throwing it in the trash, used it to let himself in to the teacher's house and rearrange the furniture. That's not okay either.
The overreaction was stupid, and I agree with an earlier poster who asked why schools call the cops for shit like this so much, but the kid should not have gotten off without consequences - just, those consequences should have been dished out by the school instead of the criminal prosecution system.
Seriously, what are they doing in the cockpit that needs privacy?
Bitching about the bosses at work, like most of us do with coworkers when we think the boss won't hear us.
Not everyone goes to a foreign country for vacation. Some go for extended work trips. If I'm spending 6 months somewhere for work, I might buy a game or two.
This is just another example of why the license system for media content does not work and is 100% anti-consumer.
When I buy a book, I'm not buying a license to read the book, and the publisher is not allowed to break into my house and steal the book if I bought the book in a foreign country. I fail to understand why anyone would think such things are OK just because you are buying electronic media.
At any rate, I'd love to see a court case come of this; when I buy a license for media, I expect that license to be valid in perpetuity unless otherwise stated up front at the time of sale. And if the company decides somewhere down the road that it's not valid, and steals the license back from me, they should get sued.
I would suggest that a non-scientist claiming that science proves anything is operating well outside his area of expertise. A scientist correcting the non-scientist on what science does or does not prove is entirely rational.
This would explain why the Dominos app now lets you order via voice. On your phone.
It doesn't just call up the local Dominos for you. It actually has you talking to a Nuance system.
So people are downloading an app on their phones that lets them voice order in order to avoid voice ordering..
And at least one news outlet, USA Today, points out that Dominos is the first pizza joint to offer a voice ordering app, without pointing out that we don't need an app to voice-order pizza and yet somehow we have been ordering pizza by voice routinely since the early '60's.
The previous generations had the disadvantage of everyone knowing who they were when they acted like jackasses.
It's already "not normal" to be an over-the-top rude asshole to people, which is why the internet troll is on the internet and not in the conference room. The whole point of seeking anonymity for these trolls is so they can be trolls without facing any real world consequences. And you can pass all the laws you want, but if you can't figure out who the troll is, how are you going to enforce them against him?
Because this anonymity inherent to the internet serves as protection for the troll that was never enjoyed by boors of the past, I find it unlikely that the troll is anywhere close to being on the road to extinction.
a machine went "BING!"
Just in case the administrator stopped by.
Scarcity will always be a thing. Even if we figure out how to provide the basic necessities of life to everyone, there will still be scarcity. There will always ever be only one Mona Lisa, and if it changes hands, the hands that get it will be expected to pay for it in some way. It might not be money as we think of it today, but it will be some sort of exchange of something valuable.
Really, I think professing that any one economic system, whether it's socialism, communism, or capitalism, is going to be the sole solution is short sighted.
There are times when (regulated) capitalism is a better system - if we were a purely socialist economy, then we'd all be driving Trabants. As it is, we have a bevy of cars to choose from to fit whatever our personal transportation goal is. There are other times when socialism is a better system - if we were a purely capitalistic economy, then we'd have nowhere to drive those cars because very few people can afford to build roads, and those that can would charge exorbitant prices to drive on them.
What we really need to do is to get over the 5-year-old "everything is either pure good or pure bad" mentality, stop decrying whatever economic system your friends tell you is bad, and start looking for a balanced, intelligent approach to the economy.