My company uses Cloudinary to host user submitted images for some of our websites. It's easy to work with and provides options to process images in many different ways if you need to crop or apply other effects. We've found them to be very reliable and their support libraries really easy to work with. I'd definitely recommend them.
Kim Dotcom is not comparable to a starving family Calcutta. The crack about his weight was not very mature, I'll give you that, but Kim Dotcom is hardly starving. Last I was aware, he was still living in a large mansion, and where I come from, if you don't have money, you don't live in a home like that. What I am saying, is what I did say, I'm only watching this for the entertainment value. My reasons are that I can't bring myself to care what Kim Dotcom does, because I am prejudiced with regards to him, I feel he's an attention whore. But that's just me. My attention wrt this situation is the (apparent) overwhelming use of force in raiding this man's home. I don't see a whole lot of difference between mega download or whatever he was running, and other file locker services, but I have never used any of them, so my knowledge is admittedly limited.
I think the use of U.S. law enforcement resources to enforce copyright(s) is beyond what I would consider appropriate.
Are you happy now? You made me say *something*.
Quite! ^_^ And the difference is he had all of his financial assets frozen at the time of the raid by the U.S. government. Yes he HAD money, but that money was confiscated from him and cannot be used to fund his defence. That's why this is so important. Kim Dotcom, the magnificent bastard that he is, is our best hope for bringing a court case up that could establish sane copyright law.
It's not pretty, I wish he didn't have to do any of this. Yet, I see the necessity of it. How else is someone who just lost their entire set of assets and spare cash going to defend himself against the **AAs in court? The man needs funds to be able to get a crack team of lawyers. Yes, he absolutely is in it for himself, but in this case if he wins, we win. Because he might be able to finally set judicial precedent about what can and cannot be done in the name of "protecting copyrights." That, my friend, is a big f**king deal and why I'd say it's okay to root for him.
Make no mistake, he's a tool, but right now he is a more than useful one for us. We shouldn't be hoping he fails because that will only make things worse for everyone else.
You are right, and I will try to better next time, Dad.
[Tidus Dad]Son, let me tell you a story: Once upon a time an there was a fat, evil man, who scammed money from people. The fat, evil man had little success doing this; Deciding it only made sense to change careers the fat man decided to instead try and scam money from corporations. Suddenly, the fat man wasn't quite just plain evil anymore. Because now, whenever the fat man did good at his job a basket of stray kittens was spared the guillotine. Upon realizing this (hopefully) the fat man decided he'd rather be a jolly fat man and save kittens as well as his own hide. And so; the fat man assembled a crack team of lawyers and the evil corporations were defeated in court: The End.[/Tidus Dad];p
I would say there's a shitload more than a degree of nuance if you want to compare Kim Dotcom with starving families in Calcutta. Perhaps you mean to speak of the starving family as "groups whose collective food intake is less than Kim Dotcom" or "things than Kim Dotcom could eat in one sitting".
I'm only watching this freak show for the entertainment value, myself.
You "would" but you didn't. So what exactly ARE you saying? I even explained how this benefits us and all you've got is a cheap shot at his weight? Come on; I expected better.;p
Eh, the situation isn't exactly as clear-cut as it appears though. Is he acting like a patent troll? Yes. But could he pay for his own legal defense? No.
He's as much a patent troll as someone who steals a loaf of bread to feed their starving child in the Calcutta slums is a thief. There's a degree off nuance to the whole thing. Although his past actions do make it clear he's doing this to get rich and doesn't care about the politics...if we all benefit from this fight (by having less draconian copyright laws) then why not root for him, for now at least?
How long until we finally have Intel and other CPU vendors create a unified memory model now that we have a GPU on die? I mean if anything I'd think the point would be to have your on-die GPU integrate with a discrete card so that both low and high-end setups gain something from this. PS4 will have a unified memory model; how long until the rest of us do on our desktops?
The role of an emergency room as a health care center is there because they are required by law to not refuse treatment and that many people somehow figure out how to avoid paying for medical costs. It is skewing the way that people seek health care assistance when
You make this sound like it's a BAD thing. Are you saying we should not attempt to prevent people from dying entirely because it's expensive? Do we need an actuary to calculate how much more expensive healthcare will be if we reverted to a "Let their bodies line the streets" style healthcare approach? Because something tells me that when we have a vast and impoverished underclass that predominantly handles our food and already has largely no legally mandated sick leave that we would end up paying far, far more for healthcare even if we only consider the life and health of the affluent as mattering.
The real "solution" is to simply let doctors be entrepreneurs and for them to charge reasonable professional rates for services rendered in an open competitive marketplace where the patients are the customers. All of the messes in the health care industry are precisely because this doesn't happen and the government trying to meddle into that client-practioner relationship.
You mean the Swiss Model? Yes, that MIGHT work, but it'd require far far more government regulation than I think anyone here could stomach. Currently the Swiss have the only viable alternative to single payer that still makes sure everyone gets coverage and they do it by meticulously watching the insurance companies as well as the hospitals.
Thank goodness engineers aren't paid by insurance companies and government agencies to build homes and businesses.... at least in most cases. Even more so, that such activity is seem as "essential to life" and deemed something that should be nationalized with all engineers encouraged to become government employees.
Um, not all nationalization is a bad thing either; or do you not believe in Public goods?
There are a great many things that while they serve the entire nation, like roads, police and fire departments, are simply impossible to sufficiently fund through a model of voluntary contributions. At least not in a society where income and wealth inequality rivals some Banana Republics. We use taxes to fund these things because making them available to all the people too poor to pay use fees ends up netting our society vast cumulative benefits.
These things need to be nationalized, because otherwise they would cease to exist in any useful way and we'd end up seeing our economy slowly revert back to the Gilded Age. So while you're definitely free to argue whether or not something should be a public good, please don't be so disingenuous as to imply that these things are unilaterally good or bad. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between.
Wages have been flat or declining for a decade though, which has discouraged our 'best and brightest' from entering the field. If we didn't artificially lower the value of developers and IT, it would be a much more attractive field for Americans.
Actually it's closer to thirty years now. Since about the Mid Carter administration real wages for all but the top 1% have either stagnated or gone lower. While the top 1% of the economy has increased its real income by about 247%. Tech work represents one of the few remaining high-paying fields that don't depend on your having a thousand wealthy social connections and doesn't force you to go into possibly inescapable debt to finance your education. If the software you write is good enough (and there are plenty of opportunities for you to learn to write good software on your own time) you don't need college, and that right there represents an existential threat to company bottom lines.
It's an avenue of productive work technically available to anyone that doesn't have the disposable nature of either menial labor or middle management in that anyone can be taught to do it well enough. Bad software means security risks, which could mean data breaches, lawsuits, etc. You simply can't afford to run your business on shoddily made software for any number of reasons, which means you have to invest in top grade talent and retain top grade talent. The only people who we currently treat like THAT are EXECUTIVES...The H1B program actually makes sense when you look at it that way; and that's why fighting H1Bs is important.
It highlights the glaring hypocrisy of our current society's economic system. We treat CEOs and executives like kings who must be paid deference each year through ever-rising salaries, fantastic not-linked-to-real-performance performance bonuses, etc. Yet for any other worker? Even if they ARE just as irreplaceably valuable to the company bottom line, we'd still rather deal with the problems of poor software than DARE to disrupt the ecosystem where only CEO pay and CEO bonuses are sacred, and all other workers must suffer to ensure the "Gods of finance" are placated.
Subjective, sure. To the point of being meaningless, I don't think so.
That's the point, because it's subjective there's no guarantee people are going to share what you value, which means that while you can certainly persuade people to do things which hold subjective value to others, ethically I think coercion of any type is out of the question for anything that does not give objective value to the society.
That's true even in today's society, and unless "post scarcity" also implies "cure for all diseases" I think the value of different activities isn't quite arbitrary.
This assumes everyone who is technically eligible would wants to become a Doctor, or that there were room for everyone to be doctors or other high-value service professionals. Obviously there are still going to be important service jobs even in a post scarcity society so long as we ourselves lack the capacity to understand and create intelligent agents with cognitive capabilities similar to our own. But in such a situation are we realistically going to say the entire population MUST hold a job that provides objective value? Isn't there such a thing as TOO MUCH redundancy?
If we require people to hold jobs that provide others with only subjective value how do we make that sort of a system equitable and accessible to all? If we're just rating people's ability to satisfy the meaningless but pleasing desires, how do we truly rate, measure or rank that? Because if we're going to coerce compliance from the greater society we owe it to them to guarantee that their compliance in this system will make each and every individual equally happier as fairly as possible. Right now I don't think humans know enough about themselves to truly do something like that.
No, it doesn't. The value of slashdotting, even its value for myself alone, varies based on mood, how ill I'm feeling, weather, other things going on in my life. And that's not including value to other people...
Maybe it does for you, okay, bad example. My point was the value you get from slashdotting (outside of the occasional insightful/informative/funny posts which have slight chance of altering your perception by introducing new information into your mind) is still equally subjective. Yes, factors in your life influence your specific enjoyment from it. However the point is that no amount of these factors changes the fundamentally that the satisfaction you get is based on the unique configuration of your person and isn't actually tied to you doing anything substantially productive, at least no more or less productive than just spending an hour or so a day checking the news anywhere else.
And the point is that it's these myriad of factors which created psychologically the mechanism that gives you pleasure from reading slashdot or whatever other tech news sites you go to. This means that if you had not grown up as you, you wouldn't possibly like slashdot at all. This MATTERS when it comes to job assignments. This is what I meant about subjectivity, are we going to force people to post on slashdot because you and I enjoy it? Even if THEY hate it? How would we compensate those people to ensure the pain of their having to come post on slashdot was somehow reimbursed through their own equally subjective ways? How do you maintain that kind of an exchange?
Now, you can say that making games and making art has value to more people than just you and while this is tempting to use as a scale to measure desires against one another I am entirely unconvinced it is a fair way. If we are at the point where the bulk of the population cannot do productive work: Doctoring (and related medical professions), Lawyering (and related legal professions), Spying, Soldiering, Diplomacy, Research, and Engineering. and that this leaves them with a handicap where, for whatever reason, since we have to ensure they ALL GO DO SOME WORK EACH DAY we must put them to work doing things to enrich the happiness of
It really depends on who you talk to about education. At first I was sufficiently confused by the subject since the funding can sometimes be so hard to see past. There are a lot of studies however that have been done to figure out what creates the gap in education. And, while yes, school funding does play a level the single most important thing in predicting a child's educational success is their home life. If their parents come from good socioeconomic backgrounds, there's no abuse, and the parents are involved, the child will probably do pretty well. But if not? Well, the numbers for all those poor school districts bear that out.
But it's an interesting answer to what had seemed like a chicken-egg problem. Poor (usually minority) students do a lot worse in school, especially poorly funded schools that might not have the best teachers, because their home life is calamitous enough (food insecurity is a real hell of a problem.) they just don't have the time, energy or perhaps even the willpower (how would they have Internal motivation if no one teaches them why education is valuable? My own parents loved to get off on their own authority with "Because I said so!" style proclamations and I know that if they hadn't been so hard involved on doggedly keeping me in school I might never have even graduated myself because of everything else going on at the time. But for people on the lower end of the scale with less involved parents it's easy to see why a lot of kids don't value school...even moreso with all of the college grads flooding unemployment rolls.) necessary to change any of those things for long enough to make it up a rung or two.
But those are the exact problems a certain segment of society least wants fixed. At this point there's little question that a majority of our ills are being caused by the effects of our incredibly high economic inequality coupled with low social mobility. The pie is divided incredibly unevenly and many people are priced out of reach of the things they need. While yes in many cases there are help, the help varies region by region and many people aren't even taught how to properly apply for it, have to content with hostile environment when applying for benefits, and can often get caught in various coverage gaps if they do accept help that might prevent them from advancing further up the ladder either (such as with public housing.)
The reality is, the only solution long term is to fund a series of smart investments in public works (like an infrastructure bank) through a series of progressive tax reforms. If we did that then it's possible that we could resolve this issue given enough time (our present situation took 30 years to get this bad.) and political will. Of course, we never ever will, too much money invested in us doing otherwise and too many people who would rather we become the next Somalia than allow Uncle Sam to put $1.00 into the hands of a single poor person (they didn't earn that! They don't deserve it! To hell with the economy!)
Unfortunately "Something valuable" is meaninglessly subjective in most cases. Unless there's a crisis facing the present civilization then "something valuable" in a post scarcity society is synonymous with: "Something some arbitrary number of people arbitrarily consider not a waste of time." If your physical needs are all met and society only really has general "needs" for are either high-end knowledge workers, or potentially extremely dangerous physical service work, like soldiering/security; then you have only a minuscule chance of ever doing what might be considered "valuable, productive work" (producing public goods or performing essential services that keep society running.)
You spending all day reading/posting to slashdot contributes exactly as much as someone who spends their days making art, video games, designs cars, etc. At that point since all you'd be contributing would be aesthetics/luxuries, your work, while it might still be personally enriching, would still be practically useless towards advancing anyone towards achieving any practical goals. Only those who wanted to spend decades schooling themselves and doing the hard business of science would be societies "Producers." Well, unless we hadn't fully automated maintenance work, if we hadn't the maintenance workers would certainly be one of the only other "productive" (advancing goals of the greater society/civilization/species) class outside of soldiers, scientists, spies, and diplomats (though the last two are only separate jobs some of the time!;p.)
I use the term "liar" descriptively: either you make statements that you know are wrong, or that misrepresent assumptions as facts.
And yet, when I even went so far as to specifically ASK for the full description...you did not provide it, and your attempt to rephrase the question again betrays this. So I shall restate myself: What was the lie? What was the premise, why was the premise false or misleading, and what evidence do you have that I was being intellectually dishonest or otherwise purposefully misrepresenting facts in the statement you claim I made which was a lie?
Either you can answer these questions and "describe" my lie, or you cannot, and you were just throwing mud at random to see what stuck. But please, enlighten me!;)
You haven't backed up shit. Your "citations" are worthless political fluff pieces.
The statement I have made is that people can budget and live on less than $1000. If that requires a citation, you really aren't fit to survive in the real world.
And you obviously haven't even read any of them. As can be evidenced by the fact your post is devoid of any and all complimentary/supplementary details describing any of the specifics of what it was you read. You're just being intellectually lazy and trying to cover it up by making a blanket "Tehse sources r 4ll b4d! b3cUz!" accusations; After all if you were serious then you would've explained in full WHY each and every source I used was wrong or otherwise did not support what I was saying. Just like how earlier when you said I was lying, and I asked you what the lie was, why it was false, etc. and you ran away form that statement with your brain between your legs, pretending I didn't write it. Because, you knew you couldn't back that shit up.
You don't just get to slap random labels (like Liar!) down thar buddy, they don't work that way. Adjectives are meant to describe something that already exists, you don't just call something a name and suddenly change what it is. It has to already be what you call it (and you need to be able to explain in detail why it is) for that to work.;p
And this is why I'm just laughing at you. You're not even a smart troll. Every single thing you've said is superficial nonsense that betrays either you're retarded and don't have the brains to comprehend what I write; or you're an intellectual coward who thinks they can practice selective reading while I'm around and have me take them at their word. Game. Set. Match.;D
You're a jerk for repeatedly putting words into my mouth. And aside from your rudeness, you have no facts to back up your statements, but plenty of arrogance.
Says the guy who can't bother to make on Citation when I back up what I say with sources. You never even tried to seriously dispute them. No, it was you who insulted me first by refusing to abide by the burden of proof in a debate. You were the one who claimed all of these things were possible and yet you have refused to offer any proof. I'm only making it plainly obvious to everyone else what the actual sentiment contained behind your words is.;p
That's the typical reaction from progressives: anyone who posts numbers seem to defy math gets asked to post evidence otherwise they get accused of being rich and playing tricks with their money like Mitt Romney. No, I'm not privileged; and I absolutely refuse under any circumstances to prove even one bit that I am indeed not. But you're apparently so privileged and pampered that you think that spending $1000/month amounts to poverty, and worse, you had THE NERVE to ask me to post my expenses and income to prove it! I don't have to prove anything you insolent little shit! I AM RIGHT ENTIRELY BECAUSE I SAY I AM!
Well gee thar buddy, if that's the way you want to play it, go right ahead.;p But you know like Mitt Romney, you could've cleared this one up really quickly, especially since you don't have such a good track record with how you've been dodging things I've been saying. Like how the Tax Calculator was supposedly off on payroll taxes...but no, please proceed.
Everybody gets a free high school education, and if you have even a minimal aptitude, you can attend college. In addition, the Internet provides a vast library and a huge number of online courses. How is anybody denied the ability to get a good education?
Just because everyone gets to go to school does not mean everyone learns there. Both the quality of the school AND the quality of the home life of millions of Americans living at or near the poverty line can create calamitous conditions which make it very difficult for children to stay involved and want to learn. Poverty is often a generational trap with one generation after another spreading dysfunctional behavior that without intervention of some kind will just continue on and on.
Almost anybody with low income has SNAP and a variety of additional state programs available to them.
SNAP is not always available to single individuals and the benefit is rarely enough to feed a family. The minimum benefit is around $200 a month, and not everyone has been personally taught or equipped with how to make that money last the most. Here's another example of the same principle at work with college.
When you grow up in those circumstances no one often tells you at all or makes all of the information available in the manner you might need to make sure you can even do things like get aid paperwork in on time. These situations breed people who are uniquely unaware of how to obtain the proper help even when it's available to them.
No, it is you who has failed to show that there is a problem at all; I don't care if six out of seven billion people on this earth were about to simultaneously commit suicide because they hated their existence. If I don't believe in it, it doesn't exist! What? You expected me to agree with your namby pamby feelings, and your "world peace" and your tree hugging and your goddamn Tax Calculator that is wrong because it makes my arguments inconvenient?! What kind of moron are you?
And even if that problem were to exist in some alternate reality based on empirical fact, you still haven't convinced me that this "problem" you postulate exists can be fixed by throwing more money and government regulation at it. We have been doing that for decades, and the problems have (according to progressives themselves) been getting worse. More and more Americans are dependent on the Federal Government.
Which is of course Asinine because you're treating all regulation and all expenses as equal when they are inherently not. Simple Econ 101 tells us that different investments have different money multiplier effects on the economy. You generate more wealth when you invest smartly, and in many cases the biggest investments are poverty programs like Food Stamps ($1.83 generated for every $
I spend less than $1000/month, crushing poverty according to people like you. The rest I save.
And so what? Your ability to spend less than $1,000 a month now may have been predicated on some entirely exotic arrangements you were able to make with other people out of sheer luck/privilege. You need to do more than say "I did it myself! why is everyone else so darned lazy?!" I make a lot of money right now because I was lucky enough to develop skills in high demand and figure out a way to market myself. I was lucky, not everyone's in the same boat as me. For all I know you only spend $1,000 a month because your Rich parents bought you a condo and pay for any of your emergencies. You again have failed to do your work here in trying to explain how your situation represents a series of choices that are universally available to everyone. Claiming something is true is not the same thing as proving it is, in fact, true.
I gave you market average returns; anybody can realize those returns. It requires neither "starting capital" nor "top funds" nor any experience. It does require foregoing some consumption every month and having a basic understanding of personal finance.
And how are those investments going to get made? You were perhaps not understanding my larger point regarding education. Those who live in poverty simply do not get a good education, food insecurity makes learning harder, uninvolved and/or stressed out (possibly even abusive) parents also works against this as does the fact that our current model of funding education entrenches privilege by allowing the wealthy to cloister their children. Their development and access to opportunity is cut short from the start.
I'm not going to respond to the rest of your drivel. You really need to get yourself a basic financial education. But you demonstrated again what the problem is we're having in this country: many people have become so helpless that they would starve if someone didn't show them where their mouth is. People need to worry about retirement, health care, housing, savings, etc. themselves; there simply is no workable alternative. If you tell people "oh, don't worry about ending up on the street, government programs will take care of you no matter what", more and more people will fall into poverty and experience ill health.
No, you really just need to understand my larger point. It is simply impossible to give people a basic education on anything if they're regularly worried about being shot, possibly by their own parents, and can't guarantee they'll even get a next meal (let alone have any idea how they're going to get it.) The type of psychological despair that is unique to the impoverished stunts their development and in every study we've born out this link between poverty and education outcomes.
It's not that people are lazy; it's that they're too busy trying to solve problems the rest of society doesn't ever deal with. This is why they seem to be so un-motivated or uninvolved, because they're living in a very different, far more insecure world and experiments on learned helplessness prove that this is what can happen to people if they grow up living under those sorts of conditions.
The same way someone making 10-20% less supports their family.
Send their children to America to work on a farm to exploit the currency exchange rate so that they can finally make enough money in Mexico to eat? Something tells me this strategy isn't going to work again...
First you need to give some examples of people who can survive admirably on low wages with dignity. You can't just insinuate that people are able to live like that well without even the slightest shred of proof that is, in fact, the case. Not after I just posted links showing the crushing poverty many face. That's like saying "I'm going to pretend your evidence does not exist, because I simply don't like it!"
What does auto insurance have to do with health care and retirement benefits? Uninsured driver insurance is something you can choose to buy if you choose to drive. But saving $40000 is fairly easy: invest about $250/month, and after 10 years, you'll have about that much money.
No, I mean if you get into a serious accident and have to spend two days in the hospital that the hospital bill alone if you have no health insurance will be $40,000. Yes, normally you have liability in the case of cars but people perform hit and runs every day so that means not everyone has their bills paid for but everyone who gets hit has to go to the hospital if they get injured. That right there is a classic example of how a single bill can destroy someone's earnings.
Secondly, $250 a month is not do-able for everyone. I even went so far to lay the math out to explain it, but apparently you do not like to give credit to anything which disagrees with your position regardless of its potential veracity.
Although your numbers are ludicrously wrong, so terribly, horribly unimaginably wrong that I MUST REFUSE TO OFFER EVEN THE SLIGHTEST CREDIBLE EVIDENCE THAT THEY ARE, IN FACT, WRONG...let's try and stick with that example anyway. Average annualized return on stocks is about 9.5%. Let's use 8% to account for inflation. Investing $125/month for 45 years, he would have about $580000 at retirement age in current dollars, investing just $40/month (social security only), he'd have about $185000. Given current life expectancies, that means even a minimum wage worker only breaks about even on social security compared to the situation where he invested it himself.
LOL, your critical mistake is assuming these people have sufficient starting capital to make investments. Not all investments are created equal and you yourself should know that access to top funds with high returns is only available to the major players who have a considerable pot to invest. Not only that we have to deal with the consequences of low socioeconomic status, which often result in poor education outcomes and little interest that would even lead someone down the path of making proper investments let alone guarantee they would be able to pick smart long term investments to make for 45 years.
Remember that whole 2008 crash? Yeah, a lot of those middle-class investors like you're trying to encourage here lost their entire life savings because Goldman Sachs was able to pawn off all of its toxic assets onto pension funds and other investment vehicles predominantly used by America's non-mega-wealthy classes. Your advice does not in any way guarantee the outcome you assert and omits a great many determining factors which would work to prevent this outcome from being universally achievable.
Where do you think the money comes from? The tooth fairy?
Currently? We print it, and despite the unrelenting shrieks of the Austrians we have not had any runaway inflation even with three rounds of QE AND ongoing QE. "Money" in abstract is a tool for commerce, it represents liquid value for trade and it's an entirely abstract concept. Gold is not money, Silver is not money, Platinum is not money. All of those things are precious metals that while highly "Valu
Going to actually TRY to back that up with more than your own opinion or do we get to hear about how you, too, are "The Voice of God" who merely hath speak to fashion thine words into truth?;p
Nonsense. If you save 10-20% of your income every month
Assuming you CAN save 10-20% per month. Tell me, how are wal-mart workers trying to support a family on minimum wage going to do that? They can only starve themselves so far before it cuts into their productivity after all. Not everyone has something to cut, hell even people who make more can get saddled with massive medical or student loan debts. Student loans, by the way, are non-dischargeable, which means you get the carry that lovely saddle to your grave no matter what happens.
you quickly have more than enough of a safety net to cover just about every emergency, medical or otherwise
Really? I can save $40,000 to cover an emergency hospitalization because a drunk driver just performed a hit and run on me? And I can do that making minimum wage?
and everybody can save 10-20%.
Really? Even these folks here? (I can start quoting stories if you really aren't going to bother trying to understand my point here.)
If you are one step away from financial disaster, you only have yourself to blame.
Furthermore saving 10-20% would be even easier if government wouldn't force you to waste your money on costly and overpriced insurance programs: unemployment insurance, health insurance, disability insurance, etc.
LMAO! Here's an example (From a tax calculator) of what your average 40 hour minimum wage job paycheck is going to look like after withholding. Bi-weekly Gross Pay $660.00 Federal Withholding $46.64 Social Security $40.92 Medicare $9.57 California $3.72 SDI $6.60 Net Pay $552.55
Now if you add up all the payroll taxes and multiply by 26 to get your yearly payroll tax cost? That's $1,581.06. That might be enough to cover regular preventative checkups if you're healthy and some prescriptions if you get sick. That's not enough to cover the cost of a serious disease or even a single 24 hour hospital state. Remember, not all insurance lets you get away with a quick co-pay, in many cases you have a deductible that has to be met first and that can be even higher than the number I gave above. Mine on my current plan for instance is $1750.
Now, if you were working SEVERAL jobs and managing 80 hours per week at three places total (which is what your typical minimum wage worker is doing) then yes, you MIGHT be able to afford healthcare IF YOU ARE SINGLE. Try doing that with a family to support. Rent for a two bedroom will easily run you at least $1200 anywhere reasonably populated, add on top of that food for several people, gas, essential toiletries, cleaning supplies, etc and that number gets stretched thin very quickly. Yes if you work three jobs you can probably still manage to survive, but you are effectively one disaster away from financial catastrophe.
Those programs are a gigantic rip-off; people are forced to pay into them not because they are "cost effective,"
More cost-effective compared to what? Letting poor people slowly starve to death on the streets until their rotting corpses choke our gutters? Oh certainly not! It's much cheaper to let the masses deal with the huge variety
F@*!K The last sentence got trimmed. That was a link to a site that offers good historical analysis of the verbiage in the 2nd Amendment by looking at the writings of the Founders to explain what those words meant at the time. This is critical to understanding how the words have evolved since then, and how the problems we face have changed.
[citation needed] Everything I've seen says that more and more people are owning guns.
So glad you asked! The Guardian probably has the best full summary and charts but I can give you the same data a few ways. Sadly there's no report of guns per household but you can see the trends. Overall gun ownership is on the decline or stagnant while gun purchases are going up. Seems to suggest this quite strongly, yes?
Again, you don't understand the second amendment. It's not for "me", it's for the nation. Congrats on failing civics.
Holy selective reading Batman! I think we're facing our arch-nemesis again....The Straw-Man! The point is that you've can't even manage an actual intellectual defense the purpose of the 2nd amendment. You remind me of how at the opening of Starship Troopers Casper Van Dien's character just banally quotes the textbook about the difference between a citizen and a civilian (when asked by the professor) without understanding what those words mean. Later near the end of the movie after most of his friends have died he realizes the true nature of the sacrifice those words entail and he gives a proper answer as if he were there.
You come off just like that: You can quote your civics textbooks but I doubt you'd know true Public Virtue if it bit you in the ass. You're just trying to defend your own pre-existing opinions by very poorly attempting to claim they're constitutionally justified. When challenged you'll spew any quote or sound bytes that at least superficially seems to support your point without ever trying to understanding what those words truly mean. As Inigo Montoya would say: You keep using these words...I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
[citation needed] In fact, that's not what the second amendment is for at all, and if you had studied the issue you would know that instead of being wrong about literally everything.
Here we go again. What the hell am I citing here? I'm not QUOTING SOMEONE I am explaining what appears to be an evident principle regarding the evolution of our constitutional principles with regard to the present situation. If you want to claim my assessment is wrong you are perfectly free to. But that requires you to explain IN FULL WHY I AM WRONG. Which means highlighting the specific error I made, explaining why it is an error, and THEN giving your own answer with an explanation of why it is more correct. My point in the previous post was that even IF IT WAS originally meant to stop a Rogue government, even IF it was meant to offer us this protection. It does not and will no longer suffice for billions of obvious reasons, the most important ones I gave directly in my last post. Of course seeing as you've decided to edit out all of the paragraphs I spent EXPLAINING EXACTLY WHY THIS IS SO it sure does SEEM crazy.
Good work thar buddy, sadly I notice these things!;p
You can't just cut all of the wheat out of my field (context out of my posts) so you can snipe at all the scarecrows (create a series of easy to target straw men to knock down.) I'd say it's you who's obviously out of your element. IF YOU HAD OBVIOUSLY STUDIED THIS then YOU WOULD EASILY BE ABLE TO CORRECT ME. You, however, have not done this. You've said I'm wrong without ever explaining why. You're speaking in short sound bytes rather than talking in paragraphs and falling back on the convenient defense of asking for evidence whenever I make an assertion in hopes that I wouldn't have done my research and you could defeat me without having to ever actually prove anything yourself.
I am explaining that according to my understanding of the 2nd Amendment and constitutional principles; they were all adopted to serve practical purposes. These purposes however do not remain static, they're created to solve problems at the time but
"Liberals" (in the modern US sense of progressives / left wing) are enormously fearful and risk averse: they want governmental protection against unemployment, against medical expenses, against global warming, against guns, and lots of other things. Granted, the nature of these fears are seemingly more rational and plausible than those of conservatives (who seem to fear anything from the wrath of God to being tempted into homosexuality by gay marriage), but they are still driven by fear.
The only group who isn't driven by fear is libertarians, people who actually have trust in their ability to make a living somehow and survive in an uncertain and changing world, independent of God or government help. Libertarians are often linked with "conservatives", but they are more accurately described as classical liberals.
You're muddling the functional definition of fear in the present context. "Fear" is being used as a less-inflammatory substitute for "Phobia" and it's meant to express that these concerns of theirs are entirely without basis in observable reality. That's what one means when they say one is "Fear based." Meanwhile, yes, Liberals want a safety net, but it's harder to say that these fears are entirely irrational. In fact nowadays everyone's getting very good at messaging to show how easy it can be for just about anyone to fall through the cracks; all it takes these days is often a medical emergency.
It's all about separating out who's trying to responsibly govern and make Government responsive to the present needs (not to be confused with wants/desires, though there is some overlap) of the public.
Dealing with fear is a big problem. I find myself fighting with it a lot today still. I went through similar problems as yourself. I had a mental illness that wasn't discovered until much later but the bullying was horrible. 2, 4, 6 kids at once and then they'd exploit the school's zero tolerance policy by running to a teacher right afterwards to lie in concert about what just happened. It was ME trying to attack them they'd say, and with six against one who's the teacher going to believe?
Also had really religious parents who thought the answer to all of this for the longest time was "More Jesus!" Suffice to say the entire thing drove me crazier than I already was and today I still have scars from that experience. But my politics evolved over time because I was able to separate a number of concepts out regarding morality and public policy to help distinguish between sensible personal decisions and sensible public decisions. Because while I, like you, don't ever want to be bullied again, I also realize that I alone am not sole arbiter of truth or justice in the world. This is a government by and for us all which means that to truly serve us all in many ways government must strive to be value-less and empower its citizens as best as possible to find meaning/value/happiness in their lives on their own terms.
On point #2 you're viewing the government in an unrealistic way. You're viewing logical possibilities without attempting to calculate their realistic probability and you're missing a lot of other options because they don't fit with your prevailing narrative. Just because the government CAN do something does not mean IT WILL. You're taking a huge amount of unrealistic hypotheticals and using them to justify what sounds like outright paranoia. Dude, seriously that isn't healthy and you probably need to see a therapist about this. No Joke, I had no small end of help needed in my own situation to see past these things. You might think you're being pragmatic but the problem is that when you have a lot of those bad formative experiences it can create a negative bias where you'll color events far more likely to happen then they really are.
This is why trusting SCIENCE is so important. You can use the sciences to route around defective cognitive biases like this and answer serious questions about whether or not this is actually a pressing concern.
#3: Again, more hypotheticals. What laws are you objecting to? Why are you objecting to them? When you express your concerns so devoid of any real-world context it makes an honest answer to your fears impossible. If your fears have no basis in real situations then how can I possibly allay them? Also, if they have no basis in real-world situations, what authority do you have to believe these fears deserve any serious respect?
You want a government that will protect "Your rights." But without going any further to enunciate what you believe are "Your Rights" (as you are obviously using the word in an irregular fashion that warrants redefinition) all you're doing is boxing yourself in. Maybe you're a really sensible guy, but we don't know that from how you just wrote your post. You pushed a bunch of vague implausible fears as your justification for a paranoid belief we should restrict the Democratic Voting Rights of others.
Let me tell you a thing or two about bullies. Once they can't use their fists anymore, they're a lot easier to beat. You've just got to work your head a bit more.;)
What is wrong with your brain? Do you not understand how to rebut with substance? You do not just say "Hurr! Durr! I be OFFENDEDED @ u! u R wr0ng! Bcuz I sai so! I am right! I am right! I am right because I say so!"
You had me until you blamed me, the victim. I have plenty of confidence in myself. The only confidence I have in my nation is that it will misbehave. This nation was founded upon genocide and we continue to treat the scattered remnants like subhumans. Illegal acts are par for the course for our government, on a daily basis. Police commit crimes at at least the same rate as the general population.
A victim of what? A Victim of Whom? How in the hell do we know you're not just an angry spoiled child whining that his toys got taken away if you don't FILL IN THE BLANKS HERE! Tell your story before you go telling someone else they're blaming the victim here. You need to ESTABLISH FIRST WITH THE FACTS THAT YOU WERE INDEED A VICTIM before claiming such status.
Everything is wrong with what you said here.
Enlighten us as to what this "everything" is.
Why would I?
Gun ownership stats show that over time fewer and fewer people are owning guns but sales are going up. It seems a small minority of gun owners is stockpiling weapons and that's just the data. It's not meant to reflect on YOU specifically but a general trend among gun owners.
So why did you use the inlammatory word "Boogeyman"? Oh right, simply to discredit your imaginary opponent, because you know you have no valid argument with which to do so.
Because the idea of taking out a rogue government is beyond the realm of fantasy nonsense. The people who feel the need to stockpile arms are usually doing it out of paranoid fear of a government going rogue. Thing is, in any realistic situation where the government goes Rogue we are not going to see Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo. An F-22 will drop a J-DAM on any city found harboring insurgents, Sherman/Sheridan's Scortched Earth strategy will be updated to devastating effect and the insurgents will quickly find themselves responsible for wiping entire sections of civilization off of the map as we try to end the conflict swiftly.
The Media apparatus that was able to smear an entirely Non-Violent Occupy protest series would have A FIELD DAY with an armed and violent insurgency that has tinges of sexism, racism and homophobia in its ranks. They will have the entire country hating you faster than you can say "Zucotti Park", only this time they'll be fully successful at isolating you from general population support in all but the deepest strongholds of paranoia.
Let's face it, WACO, TX proved a hard truth. No matter how many guns you have, even if you have fully automatic weapons and Rocket launchers to take out helicopters...if the government wants you dead they have more than enough manpower and heavy armarments to kill you. THIS is why the idea of boogeymen and fantasy nonsense has to constantly be bandied about. We must kill dead this unrealistic idea of resisting a fully armed federal military with violent force. All you would be doing is sending your friends and relatives to die an ultimately pointless death that will not only not change things the way they want but may in fact make them ACTIVELY WORSE if they were even to try. It is beyond foolish.
What? [citation needed]
Not quite sure on that one myself but I think it's a reflection of the fact that if we're serious about taking down a rogue government we have to immediately legalize full auto rifles as well as explosives and rocket/grenade munitions so the general population might have a fighting change (for about two days) against the military.
You don't understand the second amendment, and should cease commenting on this issue until you do. It's not there just for self-defense or for hunting. It's there for defen
Slashdot Mirror
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Kim Dotcom is not comparable to a starving family Calcutta. The crack about his weight was not very mature, I'll give you that, but Kim Dotcom is hardly starving. Last I was aware, he was still living in a large mansion, and where I come from, if you don't have money, you don't live in a home like that. What I am saying, is what I did say, I'm only watching this for the entertainment value. My reasons are that I can't bring myself to care what Kim Dotcom does, because I am prejudiced with regards to him, I feel he's an attention whore. But that's just me. My attention wrt this situation is the (apparent) overwhelming use of force in raiding this man's home. I don't see a whole lot of difference between mega download or whatever he was running, and other file locker services, but I have never used any of them, so my knowledge is admittedly limited.
I think the use of U.S. law enforcement resources to enforce copyright(s) is beyond what I would consider appropriate.
Are you happy now? You made me say *something*.
Quite! ^_^ And the difference is he had all of his financial assets frozen at the time of the raid by the U.S. government. Yes he HAD money, but that money was confiscated from him and cannot be used to fund his defence. That's why this is so important. Kim Dotcom, the magnificent bastard that he is, is our best hope for bringing a court case up that could establish sane copyright law.
It's not pretty, I wish he didn't have to do any of this. Yet, I see the necessity of it. How else is someone who just lost their entire set of assets and spare cash going to defend himself against the **AAs in court? The man needs funds to be able to get a crack team of lawyers. Yes, he absolutely is in it for himself, but in this case if he wins, we win. Because he might be able to finally set judicial precedent about what can and cannot be done in the name of "protecting copyrights." That, my friend, is a big f**king deal and why I'd say it's okay to root for him.
Make no mistake, he's a tool, but right now he is a more than useful one for us. We shouldn't be hoping he fails because that will only make things worse for everyone else.
You are right, and I will try to better next time, Dad.
[Tidus Dad]Son, let me tell you a story: Once upon a time an there was a fat, evil man, who scammed money from people. The fat, evil man had little success doing this; Deciding it only made sense to change careers the fat man decided to instead try and scam money from corporations. Suddenly, the fat man wasn't quite just plain evil anymore. Because now, whenever the fat man did good at his job a basket of stray kittens was spared the guillotine. Upon realizing this (hopefully) the fat man decided he'd rather be a jolly fat man and save kittens as well as his own hide. And so; the fat man assembled a crack team of lawyers and the evil corporations were defeated in court: The End.[/Tidus Dad] ;p
I would say there's a shitload more than a degree of nuance if you want to compare Kim Dotcom with starving families in Calcutta. Perhaps you mean to speak of the starving family as "groups whose collective food intake is less than Kim Dotcom" or "things than Kim Dotcom could eat in one sitting".
I'm only watching this freak show for the entertainment value, myself.
You "would" but you didn't. So what exactly ARE you saying? I even explained how this benefits us and all you've got is a cheap shot at his weight? Come on; I expected better. ;p
Eh, the situation isn't exactly as clear-cut as it appears though. Is he acting like a patent troll? Yes. But could he pay for his own legal defense? No.
He's as much a patent troll as someone who steals a loaf of bread to feed their starving child in the Calcutta slums is a thief. There's a degree off nuance to the whole thing. Although his past actions do make it clear he's doing this to get rich and doesn't care about the politics...if we all benefit from this fight (by having less draconian copyright laws) then why not root for him, for now at least?
It's not really the water you die of so much though but rather the lack of sodium in relation to the water.
How long until we finally have Intel and other CPU vendors create a unified memory model now that we have a GPU on die? I mean if anything I'd think the point would be to have your on-die GPU integrate with a discrete card so that both low and high-end setups gain something from this. PS4 will have a unified memory model; how long until the rest of us do on our desktops?
Google CEO: If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
If only this applied to bankers too, I wouldn't mind. :-/
The role of an emergency room as a health care center is there because they are required by law to not refuse treatment and that many people somehow figure out how to avoid paying for medical costs. It is skewing the way that people seek health care assistance when
You make this sound like it's a BAD thing. Are you saying we should not attempt to prevent people from dying entirely because it's expensive? Do we need an actuary to calculate how much more expensive healthcare will be if we reverted to a "Let their bodies line the streets" style healthcare approach? Because something tells me that when we have a vast and impoverished underclass that predominantly handles our food and already has largely no legally mandated sick leave that we would end up paying far, far more for healthcare even if we only consider the life and health of the affluent as mattering.
The real "solution" is to simply let doctors be entrepreneurs and for them to charge reasonable professional rates for services rendered in an open competitive marketplace where the patients are the customers. All of the messes in the health care industry are precisely because this doesn't happen and the government trying to meddle into that client-practioner relationship.
You mean the Swiss Model? Yes, that MIGHT work, but it'd require far far more government regulation than I think anyone here could stomach. Currently the Swiss have the only viable alternative to single payer that still makes sure everyone gets coverage and they do it by meticulously watching the insurance companies as well as the hospitals.
Thank goodness engineers aren't paid by insurance companies and government agencies to build homes and businesses.... at least in most cases. Even more so, that such activity is seem as "essential to life" and deemed something that should be nationalized with all engineers encouraged to become government employees.
Um, not all nationalization is a bad thing either; or do you not believe in Public goods?
There are a great many things that while they serve the entire nation, like roads, police and fire departments, are simply impossible to sufficiently fund through a model of voluntary contributions. At least not in a society where income and wealth inequality rivals some Banana Republics. We use taxes to fund these things because making them available to all the people too poor to pay use fees ends up netting our society vast cumulative benefits.
These things need to be nationalized, because otherwise they would cease to exist in any useful way and we'd end up seeing our economy slowly revert back to the Gilded Age. So while you're definitely free to argue whether or not something should be a public good, please don't be so disingenuous as to imply that these things are unilaterally good or bad. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between.
Wages have been flat or declining for a decade though, which has discouraged our 'best and brightest' from entering the field. If we didn't artificially lower the value of developers and IT, it would be a much more attractive field for Americans.
Actually it's closer to thirty years now. Since about the Mid Carter administration real wages for all but the top 1% have either stagnated or gone lower. While the top 1% of the economy has increased its real income by about 247%. Tech work represents one of the few remaining high-paying fields that don't depend on your having a thousand wealthy social connections and doesn't force you to go into possibly inescapable debt to finance your education. If the software you write is good enough (and there are plenty of opportunities for you to learn to write good software on your own time) you don't need college, and that right there represents an existential threat to company bottom lines.
It's an avenue of productive work technically available to anyone that doesn't have the disposable nature of either menial labor or middle management in that anyone can be taught to do it well enough. Bad software means security risks, which could mean data breaches, lawsuits, etc. You simply can't afford to run your business on shoddily made software for any number of reasons, which means you have to invest in top grade talent and retain top grade talent. The only people who we currently treat like THAT are EXECUTIVES...The H1B program actually makes sense when you look at it that way; and that's why fighting H1Bs is important.
It highlights the glaring hypocrisy of our current society's economic system. We treat CEOs and executives like kings who must be paid deference each year through ever-rising salaries, fantastic not-linked-to-real-performance performance bonuses, etc. Yet for any other worker? Even if they ARE just as irreplaceably valuable to the company bottom line, we'd still rather deal with the problems of poor software than DARE to disrupt the ecosystem where only CEO pay and CEO bonuses are sacred, and all other workers must suffer to ensure the "Gods of finance" are placated.
Subjective, sure. To the point of being meaningless, I don't think so.
That's the point, because it's subjective there's no guarantee people are going to share what you value, which means that while you can certainly persuade people to do things which hold subjective value to others, ethically I think coercion of any type is out of the question for anything that does not give objective value to the society.
That's true even in today's society, and unless "post scarcity" also implies "cure for all diseases" I think the value of different activities isn't quite arbitrary.
This assumes everyone who is technically eligible would wants to become a Doctor, or that there were room for everyone to be doctors or other high-value service professionals. Obviously there are still going to be important service jobs even in a post scarcity society so long as we ourselves lack the capacity to understand and create intelligent agents with cognitive capabilities similar to our own. But in such a situation are we realistically going to say the entire population MUST hold a job that provides objective value? Isn't there such a thing as TOO MUCH redundancy?
If we require people to hold jobs that provide others with only subjective value how do we make that sort of a system equitable and accessible to all? If we're just rating people's ability to satisfy the meaningless but pleasing desires, how do we truly rate, measure or rank that? Because if we're going to coerce compliance from the greater society we owe it to them to guarantee that their compliance in this system will make each and every individual equally happier as fairly as possible. Right now I don't think humans know enough about themselves to truly do something like that.
No, it doesn't. The value of slashdotting, even its value for myself alone, varies based on mood, how ill I'm feeling, weather, other things going on in my life. And that's not including value to other people...
Maybe it does for you, okay, bad example. My point was the value you get from slashdotting (outside of the occasional insightful/informative/funny posts which have slight chance of altering your perception by introducing new information into your mind) is still equally subjective. Yes, factors in your life influence your specific enjoyment from it. However the point is that no amount of these factors changes the fundamentally that the satisfaction you get is based on the unique configuration of your person and isn't actually tied to you doing anything substantially productive, at least no more or less productive than just spending an hour or so a day checking the news anywhere else.
And the point is that it's these myriad of factors which created psychologically the mechanism that gives you pleasure from reading slashdot or whatever other tech news sites you go to. This means that if you had not grown up as you, you wouldn't possibly like slashdot at all. This MATTERS when it comes to job assignments. This is what I meant about subjectivity, are we going to force people to post on slashdot because you and I enjoy it? Even if THEY hate it? How would we compensate those people to ensure the pain of their having to come post on slashdot was somehow reimbursed through their own equally subjective ways? How do you maintain that kind of an exchange?
Now, you can say that making games and making art has value to more people than just you and while this is tempting to use as a scale to measure desires against one another I am entirely unconvinced it is a fair way. If we are at the point where the bulk of the population cannot do productive work: Doctoring (and related medical professions), Lawyering (and related legal professions), Spying, Soldiering, Diplomacy, Research, and Engineering. and that this leaves them with a handicap where, for whatever reason, since we have to ensure they ALL GO DO SOME WORK EACH DAY we must put them to work doing things to enrich the happiness of
It really depends on who you talk to about education. At first I was sufficiently confused by the subject since the funding can sometimes be so hard to see past. There are a lot of studies however that have been done to figure out what creates the gap in education. And, while yes, school funding does play a level the single most important thing in predicting a child's educational success is their home life. If their parents come from good socioeconomic backgrounds, there's no abuse, and the parents are involved, the child will probably do pretty well. But if not? Well, the numbers for all those poor school districts bear that out.
But it's an interesting answer to what had seemed like a chicken-egg problem. Poor (usually minority) students do a lot worse in school, especially poorly funded schools that might not have the best teachers, because their home life is calamitous enough (food insecurity is a real hell of a problem.) they just don't have the time, energy or perhaps even the willpower (how would they have Internal motivation if no one teaches them why education is valuable? My own parents loved to get off on their own authority with "Because I said so!" style proclamations and I know that if they hadn't been so hard involved on doggedly keeping me in school I might never have even graduated myself because of everything else going on at the time. But for people on the lower end of the scale with less involved parents it's easy to see why a lot of kids don't value school...even moreso with all of the college grads flooding unemployment rolls.) necessary to change any of those things for long enough to make it up a rung or two.
But those are the exact problems a certain segment of society least wants fixed. At this point there's little question that a majority of our ills are being caused by the effects of our incredibly high economic inequality coupled with low social mobility. The pie is divided incredibly unevenly and many people are priced out of reach of the things they need. While yes in many cases there are help, the help varies region by region and many people aren't even taught how to properly apply for it, have to content with hostile environment when applying for benefits, and can often get caught in various coverage gaps if they do accept help that might prevent them from advancing further up the ladder either (such as with public housing.)
The reality is, the only solution long term is to fund a series of smart investments in public works (like an infrastructure bank) through a series of progressive tax reforms. If we did that then it's possible that we could resolve this issue given enough time (our present situation took 30 years to get this bad.) and political will. Of course, we never ever will, too much money invested in us doing otherwise and too many people who would rather we become the next Somalia than allow Uncle Sam to put $1.00 into the hands of a single poor person (they didn't earn that! They don't deserve it! To hell with the economy!)
Unfortunately "Something valuable" is meaninglessly subjective in most cases. Unless there's a crisis facing the present civilization then "something valuable" in a post scarcity society is synonymous with: "Something some arbitrary number of people arbitrarily consider not a waste of time." If your physical needs are all met and society only really has general "needs" for are either high-end knowledge workers, or potentially extremely dangerous physical service work, like soldiering/security; then you have only a minuscule chance of ever doing what might be considered "valuable, productive work" (producing public goods or performing essential services that keep society running.)
You spending all day reading/posting to slashdot contributes exactly as much as someone who spends their days making art, video games, designs cars, etc. At that point since all you'd be contributing would be aesthetics/luxuries, your work, while it might still be personally enriching, would still be practically useless towards advancing anyone towards achieving any practical goals. Only those who wanted to spend decades schooling themselves and doing the hard business of science would be societies "Producers." Well, unless we hadn't fully automated maintenance work, if we hadn't the maintenance workers would certainly be one of the only other "productive" (advancing goals of the greater society/civilization/species) class outside of soldiers, scientists, spies, and diplomats (though the last two are only separate jobs some of the time! ;p.)
I use the term "liar" descriptively: either you make statements that you know are wrong, or that misrepresent assumptions as facts.
And yet, when I even went so far as to specifically ASK for the full description...you did not provide it, and your attempt to rephrase the question again betrays this. So I shall restate myself: What was the lie? What was the premise, why was the premise false or misleading, and what evidence do you have that I was being intellectually dishonest or otherwise purposefully misrepresenting facts in the statement you claim I made which was a lie?
Either you can answer these questions and "describe" my lie, or you cannot, and you were just throwing mud at random to see what stuck. But please, enlighten me! ;)
You haven't backed up shit. Your "citations" are worthless political fluff pieces.
The statement I have made is that people can budget and live on less than $1000. If that requires a citation, you really aren't fit to survive in the real world.
And you obviously haven't even read any of them. As can be evidenced by the fact your post is devoid of any and all complimentary/supplementary details describing any of the specifics of what it was you read. You're just being intellectually lazy and trying to cover it up by making a blanket "Tehse sources r 4ll b4d! b3cUz!" accusations; After all if you were serious then you would've explained in full WHY each and every source I used was wrong or otherwise did not support what I was saying. Just like how earlier when you said I was lying, and I asked you what the lie was, why it was false, etc. and you ran away form that statement with your brain between your legs, pretending I didn't write it. Because, you knew you couldn't back that shit up.
You don't just get to slap random labels (like Liar!) down thar buddy, they don't work that way. Adjectives are meant to describe something that already exists, you don't just call something a name and suddenly change what it is. It has to already be what you call it (and you need to be able to explain in detail why it is) for that to work. ;p
And this is why I'm just laughing at you. You're not even a smart troll. Every single thing you've said is superficial nonsense that betrays either you're retarded and don't have the brains to comprehend what I write; or you're an intellectual coward who thinks they can practice selective reading while I'm around and have me take them at their word. Game. Set. Match. ;D
You're a jerk for repeatedly putting words into my mouth. And aside from your rudeness, you have no facts to back up your statements, but plenty of arrogance.
Says the guy who can't bother to make on Citation when I back up what I say with sources. You never even tried to seriously dispute them. No, it was you who insulted me first by refusing to abide by the burden of proof in a debate. You were the one who claimed all of these things were possible and yet you have refused to offer any proof. I'm only making it plainly obvious to everyone else what the actual sentiment contained behind your words is. ;p
That's the typical reaction from progressives: anyone who posts numbers seem to defy math gets asked to post evidence otherwise they get accused of being rich and playing tricks with their money like Mitt Romney. No, I'm not privileged; and I absolutely refuse under any circumstances to prove even one bit that I am indeed not. But you're apparently so privileged and pampered that you think that spending $1000/month amounts to poverty, and worse, you had THE NERVE to ask me to post my expenses and income to prove it! I don't have to prove anything you insolent little shit! I AM RIGHT ENTIRELY BECAUSE I SAY I AM!
Well gee thar buddy, if that's the way you want to play it, go right ahead. ;p
But you know like Mitt Romney, you could've cleared this one up really quickly, especially since you don't have such a good track record with how you've been dodging things I've been saying. Like how the Tax Calculator was supposedly off on payroll taxes...but no, please proceed.
Everybody gets a free high school education, and if you have even a minimal aptitude, you can attend college. In addition, the Internet provides a vast library and a huge number of online courses. How is anybody denied the ability to get a good education?
Just because everyone gets to go to school does not mean everyone learns there. Both the quality of the school AND the quality of the home life of millions of Americans living at or near the poverty line can create calamitous conditions which make it very difficult for children to stay involved and want to learn. Poverty is often a generational trap with one generation after another spreading dysfunctional behavior that without intervention of some kind will just continue on and on.
Almost anybody with low income has SNAP and a variety of additional state programs available to them.
SNAP is not always available to single individuals and the benefit is rarely enough to feed a family. The minimum benefit is around $200 a month, and not everyone has been personally taught or equipped with how to make that money last the most. Here's another example of the same principle at work with college.
When you grow up in those circumstances no one often tells you at all or makes all of the information available in the manner you might need to make sure you can even do things like get aid paperwork in on time. These situations breed people who are uniquely unaware of how to obtain the proper help even when it's available to them.
No, it is you who has failed to show that there is a problem at all; I don't care if six out of seven billion people on this earth were about to simultaneously commit suicide because they hated their existence. If I don't believe in it, it doesn't exist! What? You expected me to agree with your namby pamby feelings, and your "world peace" and your tree hugging and your goddamn Tax Calculator that is wrong because it makes my arguments inconvenient?! What kind of moron are you?
And even if that problem were to exist in some alternate reality based on empirical fact, you still haven't convinced me that this "problem" you postulate exists can be fixed by throwing more money and government regulation at it. We have been doing that for decades, and the problems have (according to progressives themselves) been getting worse. More and more Americans are dependent on the Federal Government.
Which is of course Asinine because you're treating all regulation and all expenses as equal when they are inherently not. Simple Econ 101 tells us that different investments have different money multiplier effects on the economy. You generate more wealth when you invest smartly, and in many cases the biggest investments are poverty programs like Food Stamps ($1.83 generated for every $
I spend less than $1000/month, crushing poverty according to people like you. The rest I save.
And so what? Your ability to spend less than $1,000 a month now may have been predicated on some entirely exotic arrangements you were able to make with other people out of sheer luck/privilege. You need to do more than say "I did it myself! why is everyone else so darned lazy?!" I make a lot of money right now because I was lucky enough to develop skills in high demand and figure out a way to market myself. I was lucky, not everyone's in the same boat as me. For all I know you only spend $1,000 a month because your Rich parents bought you a condo and pay for any of your emergencies. You again have failed to do your work here in trying to explain how your situation represents a series of choices that are universally available to everyone. Claiming something is true is not the same thing as proving it is, in fact, true.
I gave you market average returns; anybody can realize those returns. It requires neither "starting capital" nor "top funds" nor any experience. It does require foregoing some consumption every month and having a basic understanding of personal finance.
And how are those investments going to get made? You were perhaps not understanding my larger point regarding education. Those who live in poverty simply do not get a good education, food insecurity makes learning harder, uninvolved and/or stressed out (possibly even abusive) parents also works against this as does the fact that our current model of funding education entrenches privilege by allowing the wealthy to cloister their children. Their development and access to opportunity is cut short from the start.
I'm not going to respond to the rest of your drivel. You really need to get yourself a basic financial education. But you demonstrated again what the problem is we're having in this country: many people have become so helpless that they would starve if someone didn't show them where their mouth is. People need to worry about retirement, health care, housing, savings, etc. themselves; there simply is no workable alternative. If you tell people "oh, don't worry about ending up on the street, government programs will take care of you no matter what", more and more people will fall into poverty and experience ill health.
No, you really just need to understand my larger point. It is simply impossible to give people a basic education on anything if they're regularly worried about being shot, possibly by their own parents, and can't guarantee they'll even get a next meal (let alone have any idea how they're going to get it.) The type of psychological despair that is unique to the impoverished stunts their development and in every study we've born out this link between poverty and education outcomes.
It's not that people are lazy; it's that they're too busy trying to solve problems the rest of society doesn't ever deal with. This is why they seem to be so un-motivated or uninvolved, because they're living in a very different, far more insecure world and experiments on learned helplessness prove that this is what can happen to people if they grow up living under those sorts of conditions.
The same way someone making 10-20% less supports their family.
Send their children to America to work on a farm to exploit the currency exchange rate so that they can finally make enough money in Mexico to eat?
Something tells me this strategy isn't going to work again...
First you need to give some examples of people who can survive admirably on low wages with dignity. You can't just insinuate that people are able to live like that well without even the slightest shred of proof that is, in fact, the case. Not after I just posted links showing the crushing poverty many face. That's like saying "I'm going to pretend your evidence does not exist, because I simply don't like it!"
What does auto insurance have to do with health care and retirement benefits? Uninsured driver insurance is something you can choose to buy if you choose to drive. But saving $40000 is fairly easy: invest about $250/month, and after 10 years, you'll have about that much money.
No, I mean if you get into a serious accident and have to spend two days in the hospital that the hospital bill alone if you have no health insurance will be $40,000. Yes, normally you have liability in the case of cars but people perform hit and runs every day so that means not everyone has their bills paid for but everyone who gets hit has to go to the hospital if they get injured. That right there is a classic example of how a single bill can destroy someone's earnings.
Secondly, $250 a month is not do-able for everyone. I even went so far to lay the math out to explain it, but apparently you do not like to give credit to anything which disagrees with your position regardless of its potential veracity.
Although your numbers are ludicrously wrong, so terribly, horribly unimaginably wrong that I MUST REFUSE TO OFFER EVEN THE SLIGHTEST CREDIBLE EVIDENCE THAT THEY ARE, IN FACT, WRONG...let's try and stick with that example anyway. Average annualized return on stocks is about 9.5%. Let's use 8% to account for inflation. Investing $125/month for 45 years, he would have about $580000 at retirement age in current dollars, investing just $40/month (social security only), he'd have about $185000. Given current life expectancies, that means even a minimum wage worker only breaks about even on social security compared to the situation where he invested it himself.
LOL, your critical mistake is assuming these people have sufficient starting capital to make investments. Not all investments are created equal and you yourself should know that access to top funds with high returns is only available to the major players who have a considerable pot to invest. Not only that we have to deal with the consequences of low socioeconomic status, which often result in poor education outcomes and little interest that would even lead someone down the path of making proper investments let alone guarantee they would be able to pick smart long term investments to make for 45 years.
Remember that whole 2008 crash? Yeah, a lot of those middle-class investors like you're trying to encourage here lost their entire life savings because Goldman Sachs was able to pawn off all of its toxic assets onto pension funds and other investment vehicles predominantly used by America's non-mega-wealthy classes. Your advice does not in any way guarantee the outcome you assert and omits a great many determining factors which would work to prevent this outcome from being universally achievable.
Where do you think the money comes from? The tooth fairy?
Currently? We print it, and despite the unrelenting shrieks of the Austrians we have not had any runaway inflation even with three rounds of QE AND ongoing QE. "Money" in abstract is a tool for commerce, it represents liquid value for trade and it's an entirely abstract concept. Gold is not money, Silver is not money, Platinum is not money. All of those things are precious metals that while highly "Valu
But these fears are entirely irrational.
Going to actually TRY to back that up with more than your own opinion or do we get to hear about how you, too, are "The Voice of God" who merely hath speak to fashion thine words into truth? ;p
Nonsense. If you save 10-20% of your income every month
Assuming you CAN save 10-20% per month. Tell me, how are wal-mart workers trying to support a family on minimum wage going to do that? They can only starve themselves so far before it cuts into their productivity after all. Not everyone has something to cut, hell even people who make more can get saddled with massive medical or student loan debts. Student loans, by the way, are non-dischargeable, which means you get the carry that lovely saddle to your grave no matter what happens.
you quickly have more than enough of a safety net to cover just about every emergency, medical or otherwise
Really? I can save $40,000 to cover an emergency hospitalization because a drunk driver just performed a hit and run on me? And I can do that making minimum wage?
and everybody can save 10-20%.
Really? Even these folks here? (I can start quoting stories if you really aren't going to bother trying to understand my point here.)
If you are one step away from financial disaster, you only have yourself to blame.
Or your parents, damn them for being born poor! right?! ;p
Seeing as socioeconomic mobility is at its lowest levels ever.
Furthermore saving 10-20% would be even easier if government wouldn't force you to waste your money on costly and overpriced insurance programs: unemployment insurance, health insurance, disability insurance, etc.
LMAO! Here's an example (From a tax calculator) of what your average 40 hour minimum wage job paycheck is going to look like after withholding.
Bi-weekly Gross Pay $660.00
Federal Withholding $46.64
Social Security $40.92
Medicare $9.57
California $3.72
SDI $6.60
Net Pay $552.55
Now if you add up all the payroll taxes and multiply by 26 to get your yearly payroll tax cost? That's $1,581.06. That might be enough to cover regular preventative checkups if you're healthy and some prescriptions if you get sick. That's not enough to cover the cost of a serious disease or even a single 24 hour hospital state. Remember, not all insurance lets you get away with a quick co-pay, in many cases you have a deductible that has to be met first and that can be even higher than the number I gave above. Mine on my current plan for instance is $1750.
Now, if you were working SEVERAL jobs and managing 80 hours per week at three places total (which is what your typical minimum wage worker is doing) then yes, you MIGHT be able to afford healthcare IF YOU ARE SINGLE. Try doing that with a family to support. Rent for a two bedroom will easily run you at least $1200 anywhere reasonably populated, add on top of that food for several people, gas, essential toiletries, cleaning supplies, etc and that number gets stretched thin very quickly. Yes if you work three jobs you can probably still manage to survive, but you are effectively one disaster away from financial catastrophe.
Those programs are a gigantic rip-off; people are forced to pay into them not because they are "cost effective,"
More cost-effective compared to what? Letting poor people slowly starve to death on the streets until their rotting corpses choke our gutters? Oh certainly not! It's much cheaper to let the masses deal with the huge variety
F@*!K The last sentence got trimmed. That was a link to a site that offers good historical analysis of the verbiage in the 2nd Amendment by looking at the writings of the Founders to explain what those words meant at the time. This is critical to understanding how the words have evolved since then, and how the problems we face have changed.
[citation needed] Everything I've seen says that more and more people are owning guns.
So glad you asked! The Guardian probably has the best full summary and charts but I can give you the same data a few ways. Sadly there's no report of guns per household but you can see the trends. Overall gun ownership is on the decline or stagnant while gun purchases are going up. Seems to suggest this quite strongly, yes?
Again, you don't understand the second amendment. It's not for "me", it's for the nation. Congrats on failing civics.
Holy selective reading Batman! I think we're facing our arch-nemesis again ....The Straw-Man! The point is that you've can't even manage an actual intellectual defense the purpose of the 2nd amendment. You remind me of how at the opening of Starship Troopers Casper Van Dien's character just banally quotes the textbook about the difference between a citizen and a civilian (when asked by the professor) without understanding what those words mean. Later near the end of the movie after most of his friends have died he realizes the true nature of the sacrifice those words entail and he gives a proper answer as if he were there.
You come off just like that: You can quote your civics textbooks but I doubt you'd know true Public Virtue if it bit you in the ass. You're just trying to defend your own pre-existing opinions by very poorly attempting to claim they're constitutionally justified. When challenged you'll spew any quote or sound bytes that at least superficially seems to support your point without ever trying to understanding what those words truly mean. As Inigo Montoya would say: You keep using these words...I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
[citation needed] In fact, that's not what the second amendment is for at all, and if you had studied the issue you would know that instead of being wrong about literally everything.
Here we go again. What the hell am I citing here? I'm not QUOTING SOMEONE I am explaining what appears to be an evident principle regarding the evolution of our constitutional principles with regard to the present situation. If you want to claim my assessment is wrong you are perfectly free to. But that requires you to explain IN FULL WHY I AM WRONG. Which means highlighting the specific error I made, explaining why it is an error, and THEN giving your own answer with an explanation of why it is more correct. My point in the previous post was that even IF IT WAS originally meant to stop a Rogue government, even IF it was meant to offer us this protection. It does not and will no longer suffice for billions of obvious reasons, the most important ones I gave directly in my last post. Of course seeing as you've decided to edit out all of the paragraphs I spent EXPLAINING EXACTLY WHY THIS IS SO it sure does SEEM crazy.
Good work thar buddy, sadly I notice these things! ;p
You can't just cut all of the wheat out of my field (context out of my posts) so you can snipe at all the scarecrows (create a series of easy to target straw men to knock down.) I'd say it's you who's obviously out of your element. IF YOU HAD OBVIOUSLY STUDIED THIS then YOU WOULD EASILY BE ABLE TO CORRECT ME. You, however, have not done this. You've said I'm wrong without ever explaining why. You're speaking in short sound bytes rather than talking in paragraphs and falling back on the convenient defense of asking for evidence whenever I make an assertion in hopes that I wouldn't have done my research and you could defeat me without having to ever actually prove anything yourself.
I am explaining that according to my understanding of the 2nd Amendment and constitutional principles; they were all adopted to serve practical purposes. These purposes however do not remain static, they're created to solve problems at the time but
"Liberals" (in the modern US sense of progressives / left wing) are enormously fearful and risk averse: they want governmental protection against unemployment, against medical expenses, against global warming, against guns, and lots of other things. Granted, the nature of these fears are seemingly more rational and plausible than those of conservatives (who seem to fear anything from the wrath of God to being tempted into homosexuality by gay marriage), but they are still driven by fear.
The only group who isn't driven by fear is libertarians, people who actually have trust in their ability to make a living somehow and survive in an uncertain and changing world, independent of God or government help. Libertarians are often linked with "conservatives", but they are more accurately described as classical liberals.
You're muddling the functional definition of fear in the present context. "Fear" is being used as a less-inflammatory substitute for "Phobia" and it's meant to express that these concerns of theirs are entirely without basis in observable reality. That's what one means when they say one is "Fear based." Meanwhile, yes, Liberals want a safety net, but it's harder to say that these fears are entirely irrational. In fact nowadays everyone's getting very good at messaging to show how easy it can be for just about anyone to fall through the cracks; all it takes these days is often a medical emergency.
It's all about separating out who's trying to responsibly govern and make Government responsive to the present needs (not to be confused with wants/desires, though there is some overlap) of the public.
Dealing with fear is a big problem. I find myself fighting with it a lot today still. I went through similar problems as yourself. I had a mental illness that wasn't discovered until much later but the bullying was horrible. 2, 4, 6 kids at once and then they'd exploit the school's zero tolerance policy by running to a teacher right afterwards to lie in concert about what just happened. It was ME trying to attack them they'd say, and with six against one who's the teacher going to believe?
Also had really religious parents who thought the answer to all of this for the longest time was "More Jesus!" Suffice to say the entire thing drove me crazier than I already was and today I still have scars from that experience. But my politics evolved over time because I was able to separate a number of concepts out regarding morality and public policy to help distinguish between sensible personal decisions and sensible public decisions. Because while I, like you, don't ever want to be bullied again, I also realize that I alone am not sole arbiter of truth or justice in the world. This is a government by and for us all which means that to truly serve us all in many ways government must strive to be value-less and empower its citizens as best as possible to find meaning/value/happiness in their lives on their own terms.
On point #2 you're viewing the government in an unrealistic way. You're viewing logical possibilities without attempting to calculate their realistic probability and you're missing a lot of other options because they don't fit with your prevailing narrative. Just because the government CAN do something does not mean IT WILL. You're taking a huge amount of unrealistic hypotheticals and using them to justify what sounds like outright paranoia. Dude, seriously that isn't healthy and you probably need to see a therapist about this. No Joke, I had no small end of help needed in my own situation to see past these things. You might think you're being pragmatic but the problem is that when you have a lot of those bad formative experiences it can create a negative bias where you'll color events far more likely to happen then they really are.
This is why trusting SCIENCE is so important. You can use the sciences to route around defective cognitive biases like this and answer serious questions about whether or not this is actually a pressing concern.
#3: Again, more hypotheticals. What laws are you objecting to? Why are you objecting to them? When you express your concerns so devoid of any real-world context it makes an honest answer to your fears impossible. If your fears have no basis in real situations then how can I possibly allay them? Also, if they have no basis in real-world situations, what authority do you have to believe these fears deserve any serious respect?
You want a government that will protect "Your rights." But without going any further to enunciate what you believe are "Your Rights" (as you are obviously using the word in an irregular fashion that warrants redefinition) all you're doing is boxing yourself in. Maybe you're a really sensible guy, but we don't know that from how you just wrote your post. You pushed a bunch of vague implausible fears as your justification for a paranoid belief we should restrict the Democratic Voting Rights of others.
Let me tell you a thing or two about bullies. Once they can't use their fists anymore, they're a lot easier to beat. You've just got to work your head a bit more. ;)
What is wrong with your brain? Do you not understand how to rebut with substance? You do not just say "Hurr! Durr! I be OFFENDEDED @ u! u R wr0ng! Bcuz I sai so! I am right! I am right! I am right because I say so!"
You had me until you blamed me, the victim. I have plenty of confidence in myself. The only confidence I have in my nation is that it will misbehave. This nation was founded upon genocide and we continue to treat the scattered remnants like subhumans. Illegal acts are par for the course for our government, on a daily basis. Police commit crimes at at least the same rate as the general population.
A victim of what? A Victim of Whom? How in the hell do we know you're not just an angry spoiled child whining that his toys got taken away if you don't FILL IN THE BLANKS HERE! Tell your story before you go telling someone else they're blaming the victim here. You need to ESTABLISH FIRST WITH THE FACTS THAT YOU WERE INDEED A VICTIM before claiming such status.
Everything is wrong with what you said here.
Enlighten us as to what this "everything" is.
Why would I?
Gun ownership stats show that over time fewer and fewer people are owning guns but sales are going up. It seems a small minority of gun owners is stockpiling weapons and that's just the data. It's not meant to reflect on YOU specifically but a general trend among gun owners.
So why did you use the inlammatory word "Boogeyman"? Oh right, simply to discredit your imaginary opponent, because you know you have no valid argument with which to do so.
Because the idea of taking out a rogue government is beyond the realm of fantasy nonsense. The people who feel the need to stockpile arms are usually doing it out of paranoid fear of a government going rogue. Thing is, in any realistic situation where the government goes Rogue we are not going to see Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo. An F-22 will drop a J-DAM on any city found harboring insurgents, Sherman/Sheridan's Scortched Earth strategy will be updated to devastating effect and the insurgents will quickly find themselves responsible for wiping entire sections of civilization off of the map as we try to end the conflict swiftly.
The Media apparatus that was able to smear an entirely Non-Violent Occupy protest series would have A FIELD DAY with an armed and violent insurgency that has tinges of sexism, racism and homophobia in its ranks. They will have the entire country hating you faster than you can say "Zucotti Park", only this time they'll be fully successful at isolating you from general population support in all but the deepest strongholds of paranoia.
Let's face it, WACO, TX proved a hard truth. No matter how many guns you have, even if you have fully automatic weapons and Rocket launchers to take out helicopters...if the government wants you dead they have more than enough manpower and heavy armarments to kill you. THIS is why the idea of boogeymen and fantasy nonsense has to constantly be bandied about. We must kill dead this unrealistic idea of resisting a fully armed federal military with violent force. All you would be doing is sending your friends and relatives to die an ultimately pointless death that will not only not change things the way they want but may in fact make them ACTIVELY WORSE if they were even to try. It is beyond foolish.
What? [citation needed]
Not quite sure on that one myself but I think it's a reflection of the fact that if we're serious about taking down a rogue government we have to immediately legalize full auto rifles as well as explosives and rocket/grenade munitions so the general population might have a fighting change (for about two days) against the military.
You don't understand the second amendment, and should cease commenting on this issue until you do. It's not there just for self-defense or for hunting. It's there for defen
err, that has NOT EXCELLED at anything other than being able to continuously produce novel luxury goods*