You make it sound like they're all of one mind WRT politics. They're a "voluntary grouping" , right? But they're not. They're just there to work and pay the bills; they haven't "voluntarily grouped " for political reasons at all.
That's a crock. If that were true then they wouldn't be allowed to go work somewhere else if they didn't like their job.
The only groups that aren't voluntary today are militaries and labor unions. (Volunteer militaries are obligatory once you've signed up.) At least you can leave a corporation at any time of your choosing, however labor unions will take your money and spend it on whatever political cause they want even if you disagree with it, and if you don't like it tough shit, if you leave they force you out of your job even if you like your job.
That's just the thing, I'm not saying I'm poor. I never did. I'm saying that by his definition (income) I am poor. He goes by the liberal definition, which goes by a spreadsheet that says "if your income falls below X number, you're officially poor." By his definition, it's possible for your income to even rise a little bit, but have the goalpost move over you so that you suddenly go from being called middle class to being called poor. You may not actually be poor, you may not feel poor, but you are in fact poor, so sayeth the spreadsheet.
He uses that talking point (with what I believe is the ultimate purpose) to say that we need to have the government pave a road with good intentions, and perhaps we'll have less poor. But you know where the road paved with good intentions leads.
I certainly don't feel poor.
For your other questions, yes, I have health insurance. Throw this acronym into google: AHCCCS
I explained in another post how my phone bill works.
I pay the water/trash bill ($90) and the internet bill ($32). Mortgage and electricity is divied up among everybody else. I bought my TV for a grand I think two years ago, it's a 47" samsung and serves as my PC monitor. My computer I've incrementally upgraded over a long period of time, with the last major upgrade being over a year ago. I don't own a blu-ray player (I neither need or want one.) I do have a nice sound system that I built from components though.
And what's a normal human being? Part of being normal requires living in an upscale area? The fact is that you're a regular ol' spoiled Marie Antoinette.
I'm going to throw you a reality check: People like you and I are spoiled by living in first world conditions. Occupy wall street rails against the 1%. You know what the 1% is? Anybody who makes over $40,000 per year are within the top 1% of income earners in the world. Think about that for a minute. Now think about this: India is the happiest country in the world, and they're poor as shit. They literally build their houses out of garbage...and family members? They stick 8 of them in a 10 by 10 room. You know why they're happy? Because they don't continually tell themselves that their lives suck and the only way to make things good is to have more money. Meanwhile somebody at occupy wall street is complaining because some thug stole their ipad while they were sleeping in a tent instead of their upscale apartment that day.
Life is really only as crappy as you think it is. That's not to say we should all lower our standards and just always settle for less, rather you can't define yourself based on what you have all the time, and you should try to make the best of things even in shitty situations, otherwise you'll just needlessly make yourself miserable. I know this as I've been through that, I've been through the depression, anxiety, and other shit. I'm cured of that now though, I've found my own way. My trick is to just live in the present. Maybe one day I'll need a heart transplant too? Who knows, it's too far down the line to worry about, all I can do is take care of what I have now and just focus on that. And right now I'm comfortable with how I'm living - I've already got a few living donors who have volunteered their kidneys to me, right now I'm just waiting for the transplant team to get back to me. And yes, medicaid is paying for that, it is cheaper than dialysis.
And on that subject - Look at me, my health is shitty and I need a kidney, but I don't put any demands on people to cater to my whims. It's my problem, I'm dealing with it, and I have zero expectation for anybody to come to my rescue. They came voluntarily. I probably sound like an asshole to you guys because my philosophy on work and economics differs from yours so much, but people always tell me I'm a very nice guy. Every time a blood van came to my high school, work, college, I was always there to donate, so maybe its karma, who knows?
And on the subject of the poor and being taken advantage of - we live in a society that says it is better to let people die of organ failure than to potentially take advantage of the poor by allowing them to voluntarily sell their organs and get money for it, so we ban the practice. How crappy is that? Iran is the only country in the world where people are allowed to sell their own organs, and consequently it's the only country in the world where there is no organ shortage and nobody dies while waiting for an organ transplant. You don't even have to be rich to buy organs there either, charities and government organizations will buy them on your behalf, so you can get them even if you're poor. There's no black market for organs there either - probably the only country in the world truly without one.
I'm fortunate in that I don't have to deal with that BS, but sadly about a million in the US have to face the reality of our backwards system. They have to die with the knowledge that we're so backwards, we'd rather tell them to die than let somebody sell them an organ.
In the US, if you're rich you don't wait for organs anyways. Usually it means you're popular as well so some random fan is likely to donate to you anyways. Name one Hollywood celebrity who ever waits on an organ for example. The people who get fucked are still the poor ones.
I pay a share of $23 a month for a t-mobile subscription (I'm the account owner and I have 5 people on the account with a fixed bill of $115 a month - they each pay their fifth.) Unlimited everything with Nexus 4 is pretty damn nice - yet another luxury you can have even if you're poor.
I practically live at wal-mart and fry's grocery store (that's Kroger in most states). Wal-mart is my savior, a few days ago I bought 3 pounds of peaches for a dollar, and they were pretty damn good. I say fuck anybody who shit talks wal-mart shoppers by the way; wal-mart are among those who make my life livable. Yeah you can get some nasty looking people in there and some of the employees can be dicks, but it's worth it. Wal-mart gets a slim profit, I get what I need, what's not to like?
You can live pretty cheap if you need to, all you have to do is be smart about it. If you don't have a whole lot of money there are plenty of ways to get by. Every day I poke and prod at slickdeals.net for something I might need, and I'm not even the best at it. Some of those guys on the forum make trophy lists of deals they get. The best deal I ever got was back in January (prior to me coming down with what I have) I built myself a NAS with a 9TB ZFSoL raid array for $300 using the bestbuy mastercard amazon giftcard trick.
It requires you work at least X number of quarters for so many years prior to becoming "disabled". I fell a bit short because I spent quite a bit of time in college.
If that was the case, then libertarians would be communists. Communists talk as if they'd prefer no government (this is the Marx view) but that never actually happens because communism ultimately fails without having somebody to bullwhip people into working (instead of playing world of warcraft) and making sure they don't leave the country. Slavery by definition.
The favored economist of liberals (Paul Krugman) doesn't believe in the concept of a living wage, by the way. He too believes it should be what the market will bear. In fact I can't think of any liberal economists who strongly support strict wage controls - they all know better.
In order to end up in a situation where you end up with $0 an hour and absolutely cannot find a job to save your life, first an environment has to be created where either the demand for the lunch is zero, or the supply is just too low. We're consumers by nature, so the first environment is an impossibility in practice. We've only actually seen the later happen once in the history of the US, and that was the result of the Smoot-Hawley tariff act creating a sudden artificial supply barrier.
When they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, actions like Smoot-Hawley is what they are referring to. It was supposed to reduce unemployment after the stock market crash, and instead it caused the great depression.
Luddites and their followers have been predicting for ages (even before the original Luddites themselves) that technology will eventually kill jobs for the common man - but that has just never happened. Instead what happens is new industries rise up when suddenly we find we no longer have a need for one type of job, and that labor ends up moving somewhere else instead. It causes frictional unemployment for sure, but eventually things keep on trucking. Case in point, the internet continues to reduce the need for a post office and a phone company. In their place we now have ISP's and cloud services.
And then you get quality of life improvements that aren't realizable in dollars. For example, this conversation you and I are having right now wouldn't even occur if there was no internet to support it - if we wanted something similar to happen without an internet in the past, we'd have to pay somebody to deliver our messages to a central board, compile them, and then mail them back out. Without an internet, we simply wouldn't even bother, instead we'd spend our time doing something else - maybe something even more boring.
I don't know who he, but I get the feeling that if he keeps publicizing everything that people send his way or do to him, it might become an internet past-time for more people to start doing the same. It'll be like an internet gameshow:
"Who can send the craziest thing to Brian Krebs?"
It's all fun and games til somebody decides to send a shit covered blasting cap or who knows what else.
Chandler, Arizona is the location of the worlds most advanced semiconductor fabrication plant, and Intel owns it. Yet everything you buy that comes out of it is stamped "Made in Malaysia."
Why? That's where it's packaged.
I shouldn't have used the word domestic like that though - domestic could imply domestic to the US, but in reality many secmiconductor fabs are located abroad, but often not in China, and are domestic to the actual company who designs the chip (which is what I meant) - usually Japan, South Korea (Samsung being a big one), and even Europe. TSMC is probably the biggest in China, though some argue Taiwan isn't China.
Oh? If we go based on income standards, I'm poor right now actually. I have Nephrotic Syndrome to the point where I'm tired all the time and can't stay awake worth shit to hold a job for damn, even so much as sitting in a chair for a few hours causes my feet to swell up so bad with edema that they hurt like a bitch, and even with supplements my calcium levels are so low that I get severe muscle cramps just walking around. My income? Other than whatever random tasks I can scrape by (usually fixing somebody's computer or something for a whopping $50, an event that rarely occurs) zero. I don't even get social security.
You know what though? I still have some pretty nice shit. I can't afford my own place so I live in a shared domicile, but I do have a car and I don't drive like a teenager so insurance is cheap, and since I don't have to commute I don't spend much on gas. I have a nice computer with a big TV and a netflix subscription, which combined with my internet bill (50/10) is $40 a month. It's not so bad, I have my own room and my combined monthly expenses are about $300. The trick is to not live in New York where the rent and taxes are so god damn high that minimum wage will never cover your expenses, and then wonder why you can't make ends meet like a retard. Instead I live in the suburbs in a modest metro area, so the city is close enough that I can acquire provisions on the cheap. Living arrangements such as this are available easily if you just look. Instead I find people who complain the most tend to insist upon living in some upscale area beyond their means, hence the "occupy movement" was formed.
Had it not been for my kidney disease, I'd probably be working at a major tier 1 ISP who just showed massive interest in hiring me (they called me in for multiple interviews, with them telling me they were impressed with my skillset, and with me telling them that I'm sick in all of them - I'm not going to do the douchy thing of playing the ADA card and forcing them to hire me when I can't perform their tasks reliably) so it isn't as if I'm just refusing to work either. Believe me, if I could take that job, I so would, I love networking with a passion. I literally do it for fun.
If I even made less than minimum wage, I'd be better off right now. So yeah by your income definition, I'm an actual fucking poor person.
So long as the demand for a lunch still remains, somebody would still have to pay for it and therefore be paid for it. So for somebody to truly not have the ability to make a buck, this person would have to lose the ability to make a lunch to begin with, otherwise there would be such thing as a free lunch.
For those who are unable (health issues for example) I'm not opposed to working out accommodations, but I personally have no sympathy for somebody who believes a job at McDonalds is ever below them, which research shows is the attitude that the majority of the homeless have. We already give people with this mindset free food and shelter, which I strongly believe is more than adequate.
If you think McDonalds is bad, try having some of the jobs I've had, one of which included sitting in a lab filling chemical powder samples into little jars all day long. At least at McDonalds I'd be able to move around more and chat with customers on occasion. It required more skill because I had to know clean room handling, but it only paid about the same. Being a garbage man actually pays pretty well in some areas, but nobody takes that job because they don't like the idea of being called a garbage man.
Well the article states that these printers can mostly print themselves.
What they can't print are the things like the logic boards and connectors. However those aren't often made in China anyways, usually they're made in domestic facilities and then sent to China for assembly.
Although unlikely, it's not unreasonable to believe that these printers could one day come in incomplete kits, and you can e.g. have your neighbor print up what isn't included and just assemble it yourself.
19. A 3D printer is invented that can make a full course meal in seconds, we call it a replicator eventually we don't have to do any real work anymore so Scotty becomes obese. 20. Since we don't do any real work anymore, soon it becomes popular to randomly speak in meaningless technobabble so that people can still feel important.
I don't think the cries would come from any one industry or group, but from several.
A lot of these designs that they use are rather simple, and somebody could come up with them on their own without much effort, so I don't think it would be an intellectual property thing. However the complaints would arrive thus:
Retail stores, who usually see most of their profit come from accessory markup decline. UPS/USPS/Fedex shipments decline (as a result of the above from online retailers) Labor unions that represent assembly line workers as well as the above workers might see loss of union dues.
I think what you'll see against 3d printers is more akin to what is going on with the rideshare service: Environmentalists will complain that they are energy hogs, health "experts" will complain about the dangers of nanoparticles, 3d printers can be used to print dangerous objects (i.e. the liberator.) These arguments will be used by lobbyists representing the above industries (as well as gun control-type groups) to try to regulate the crap out of their usage, regardless of whether they are actually dangerous or not.
At which point society reaches a crossroads:
The question will come down to whether or not people see having reduced need for labor as being a good thing. Personally I always see it as being a good thing. I've frequently said I'd rather live in a world where my income is $10 an hour and my lunch costs $4 than being in a world where my income is $20 an hour and my lunch costs $20. In the later scenario, although I have more income, I am in fact poorer by every definition. Technology makes you wealthier, even if it might reduce your income - it makes nice stuff available for cheaper or available easier. Cheaper stuff means somebody got paid less to make it.
And it shows: Today's "poor" are wealthier than they've ever been. The poor in America now frequently own personal computers, cell phones, blu-ray players, playstations, big screen TV's, and don't have any problems paying for food. Recall during the 80's how only the filthy rich had a car phone or a TV larger than 40" (with a picture quality that is crap by today's standards) and the kid with the rich parents had both a sega and a nintendo. Don't confuse wealth with money - the notion that income disparity is creating more poor and killing the middle class is a flawed one, because it's simply moving the goalpost based on a single number on a spreadsheet and completely ignores everything else that should properly define the word "poor" (material possessions being one of them.)
Does this mean 3D printers put China out of business? (Well not completely of course - though you can print the iphone case, you still can't print the iphone yet, but the little accessories and nicknacks make up a huge chunk of the Chinese exports.)
That's only going to last as long as their oil reserves continue to sell though. Their economy doesn't really produce much else (glancing at wiki indicates that only 10% of their GDP comes from non-oil sources.)
Communism is fine until everybody decides that they'd rather play world of warcraft instead of work. That's why communist economies have always deteriorating GDP in spite of population growth. Look at the Icarians, they had an entire town with all facilities and infrastructure pre-built just handed to them for free, yet they eventually had to resort to forcing people to work, in spite of only accepting people who already had a good work ethic into their commune. Eventually they fell apart, just like nearly all communist societies have done.
The only communist societies that lasted longer than a few decades were able to do so because they put up laws that would just bull whip people into submission if they weren't working enough. The communist societies who haven't fallen apart peacefully converted to capitalism. Compare that to conversion to communism which always involves violent revolution and forced re-education camps.
Also communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.
Why even care about the party? It's the same crap no matter what side it comes from. I myself tend to favor the republican viewpoint, but the more you pay attention to the way things work, the more you realize that it really doesn't matter. These politicians will go towards whatever gets them the votes at the next election - whether that means falling in line with a major campaign sponsor or falling in line with major public sentiment at the time. They seldom make decisions based on principle, even the ones who you otherwise think have integrity.
The Republican/Democrat war is basically just a show. Think like watching a football game where you have Cowboys fans who hate Bills fans. Nobody really knows why they hate the fans of the other team, they just do. Tons of liberals are pro second amendment yet even the ones who are still vote for politicians who want to ban firearms just because they got that D next to their name. Likewise, tons of conservatives are all for smaller government, yet they still vote for big spenders just because they have that R next to their name. It's all a bunch of nonsense. Personally I'm not even bothering to register to vote anymore, the show can go on without me. Picking the lesser of two evils in an election is a horrible idea because you're giving that lesser evil your endorsement. If you just stop voting for them period then they have no endorsement. So what if your lack of a vote causes the more evil one to win? When has that actually made things worse? I mean look, we have fucking race baiting, domestic spying, nobel prize winning Obama in office, how much worse can things get?
It feels good not to vote for them, it's like when I canceled my cable subscription so ESPN doesn't collect $10 a month from me anymore, and I think if enough people do it you might actually see some change where the cable providers finally shed expensive content providers, and should that day ever come it might be worth paying for again.
This wonderful 2.4ghz "unlicensed free for all" utopia you speak of only works in the way you see it because devices that use it seldom reach beyond your domicile. So of course, you can have millions of them being all happy go lucky because they are too far away to bother one another on a large scale.
But when you start dealing with devices that communicate over several miles, then you're going to run into problems. Especially when everybody decides that they all want to use the low frequency spectrum due to its high penetration and long range, further complicated by the fact that it offers less bandwidth.
And then there's the issue of orthogonal frequencies. These modulation techniques (such as that used by LTE) only work when everybody on that channel is using the same modulation technique and even then agrees on how they'll handle contention. All it takes is for some derp to use some incompatible modulation technique on the same frequency to kick everybody else off, either that or some other derp to decide he wants his datacenter backbone to run off of that band and eats up the channel, telling everybody else to go pound salt.
The current licensed model isn't perfect, but it works.
All of which they are aggressively working on. Yet again, see: Network Vision
And see the article I linked. It's not the only one that explains why Network Vision is more hype than promise and has been poorly executed the entire time.
Verizon has announced the same strategy, so I don't see why you keep harping on Sprint. Rate increases are to be expected, in the face of inflation and whatnot.
Verizon can get away with it because they actually have a very robust infrastructure to back it up. Sprint does not, hence they are literally losing customers by the millions. T-mobile on the other hand is doing a much better job of building out their infrastructure while actually lowering prices, and meanwhile they are also gaining subscribers by the hundreds of thousands per month.
There tend to be two worlds here in the subscribers mind: Verizon: Expensive as hell, but you're covered basically everywhere you go so its worth it. T-mobile: Coverage not so great, but areas that are served are served very well, the price is a great value, and there are no data overages.
And then there's this:
Sprint: Costs as much, possibly more than Verizon, coverage isn't as good, and even where it is covered the service is spotty. Sure it's got unlimited data, but it's too slow and unreliable so what good is it?
Given the above two alternatives, why would anybody go with Sprint? Hence sprint is hemorrhaging customers.
Don't take my word for all of this, don't even take the article's word for it, just look at the SEC filings.
Or perhaps Sprint just figured all that customers really care about is that it has the 4g sticker on it, an assumption they now still make. One of the big problems with their wimax implementation was that it is at a higher frequency, so penetration is crap. Much in the same, they now maintain an LTE network with the lowest reliability, highest number of dead spots, and slowest data rates (mainly due to a crappy backhaul.)
Once again, their current strategy is hoping that the customers notice the "4g" sticker and don't realize how bad the service is before getting locked in. Or rather, that is part of it. The other part is doing whatever they can to make existing contract subscribers pay more - the SEC filings themselves even state that as being their plan for keeping revenues up in fact.
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You make it sound like they're all of one mind WRT politics. They're a "voluntary grouping" , right? But they're not. They're just there to work and pay the bills; they haven't "voluntarily grouped " for political reasons at all.
That's a crock. If that were true then they wouldn't be allowed to go work somewhere else if they didn't like their job.
The only groups that aren't voluntary today are militaries and labor unions. (Volunteer militaries are obligatory once you've signed up.) At least you can leave a corporation at any time of your choosing, however labor unions will take your money and spend it on whatever political cause they want even if you disagree with it, and if you don't like it tough shit, if you leave they force you out of your job even if you like your job.
Just better hope he's not middle eastern, otherwise homeland security might confiscate it.
(Yeah I know, a very un-PC joke, I level them all the time against my Iranian friend so I'm used to it.)
Or perhaps I'm just not poor.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4038569&cid=44449763
That's just the thing, I'm not saying I'm poor. I never did. I'm saying that by his definition (income) I am poor. He goes by the liberal definition, which goes by a spreadsheet that says "if your income falls below X number, you're officially poor." By his definition, it's possible for your income to even rise a little bit, but have the goalpost move over you so that you suddenly go from being called middle class to being called poor. You may not actually be poor, you may not feel poor, but you are in fact poor, so sayeth the spreadsheet.
He uses that talking point (with what I believe is the ultimate purpose) to say that we need to have the government pave a road with good intentions, and perhaps we'll have less poor. But you know where the road paved with good intentions leads.
I certainly don't feel poor.
For your other questions, yes, I have health insurance. Throw this acronym into google: AHCCCS
I explained in another post how my phone bill works.
I pay the water/trash bill ($90) and the internet bill ($32). Mortgage and electricity is divied up among everybody else. I bought my TV for a grand I think two years ago, it's a 47" samsung and serves as my PC monitor. My computer I've incrementally upgraded over a long period of time, with the last major upgrade being over a year ago. I don't own a blu-ray player (I neither need or want one.) I do have a nice sound system that I built from components though.
Normal human lifestyles? At least 90% of the world lives on less expenses than I do, see my last post.
And what's a normal human being? Part of being normal requires living in an upscale area? The fact is that you're a regular ol' spoiled Marie Antoinette.
I'm going to throw you a reality check: People like you and I are spoiled by living in first world conditions. Occupy wall street rails against the 1%. You know what the 1% is? Anybody who makes over $40,000 per year are within the top 1% of income earners in the world. Think about that for a minute. Now think about this: India is the happiest country in the world, and they're poor as shit. They literally build their houses out of garbage...and family members? They stick 8 of them in a 10 by 10 room. You know why they're happy? Because they don't continually tell themselves that their lives suck and the only way to make things good is to have more money. Meanwhile somebody at occupy wall street is complaining because some thug stole their ipad while they were sleeping in a tent instead of their upscale apartment that day.
Life is really only as crappy as you think it is. That's not to say we should all lower our standards and just always settle for less, rather you can't define yourself based on what you have all the time, and you should try to make the best of things even in shitty situations, otherwise you'll just needlessly make yourself miserable. I know this as I've been through that, I've been through the depression, anxiety, and other shit. I'm cured of that now though, I've found my own way. My trick is to just live in the present. Maybe one day I'll need a heart transplant too? Who knows, it's too far down the line to worry about, all I can do is take care of what I have now and just focus on that. And right now I'm comfortable with how I'm living - I've already got a few living donors who have volunteered their kidneys to me, right now I'm just waiting for the transplant team to get back to me. And yes, medicaid is paying for that, it is cheaper than dialysis.
And on that subject - Look at me, my health is shitty and I need a kidney, but I don't put any demands on people to cater to my whims. It's my problem, I'm dealing with it, and I have zero expectation for anybody to come to my rescue. They came voluntarily. I probably sound like an asshole to you guys because my philosophy on work and economics differs from yours so much, but people always tell me I'm a very nice guy. Every time a blood van came to my high school, work, college, I was always there to donate, so maybe its karma, who knows?
And on the subject of the poor and being taken advantage of - we live in a society that says it is better to let people die of organ failure than to potentially take advantage of the poor by allowing them to voluntarily sell their organs and get money for it, so we ban the practice. How crappy is that? Iran is the only country in the world where people are allowed to sell their own organs, and consequently it's the only country in the world where there is no organ shortage and nobody dies while waiting for an organ transplant. You don't even have to be rich to buy organs there either, charities and government organizations will buy them on your behalf, so you can get them even if you're poor. There's no black market for organs there either - probably the only country in the world truly without one.
I'm fortunate in that I don't have to deal with that BS, but sadly about a million in the US have to face the reality of our backwards system. They have to die with the knowledge that we're so backwards, we'd rather tell them to die than let somebody sell them an organ.
In the US, if you're rich you don't wait for organs anyways. Usually it means you're popular as well so some random fan is likely to donate to you anyways. Name one Hollywood celebrity who ever waits on an organ for example. The people who get fucked are still the poor ones.
Well here's some examples:
I pay a share of $23 a month for a t-mobile subscription (I'm the account owner and I have 5 people on the account with a fixed bill of $115 a month - they each pay their fifth.) Unlimited everything with Nexus 4 is pretty damn nice - yet another luxury you can have even if you're poor.
I practically live at wal-mart and fry's grocery store (that's Kroger in most states). Wal-mart is my savior, a few days ago I bought 3 pounds of peaches for a dollar, and they were pretty damn good. I say fuck anybody who shit talks wal-mart shoppers by the way; wal-mart are among those who make my life livable. Yeah you can get some nasty looking people in there and some of the employees can be dicks, but it's worth it. Wal-mart gets a slim profit, I get what I need, what's not to like?
You can live pretty cheap if you need to, all you have to do is be smart about it. If you don't have a whole lot of money there are plenty of ways to get by. Every day I poke and prod at slickdeals.net for something I might need, and I'm not even the best at it. Some of those guys on the forum make trophy lists of deals they get. The best deal I ever got was back in January (prior to me coming down with what I have) I built myself a NAS with a 9TB ZFSoL raid array for $300 using the bestbuy mastercard amazon giftcard trick.
It requires you work at least X number of quarters for so many years prior to becoming "disabled". I fell a bit short because I spent quite a bit of time in college.
If that was the case, then libertarians would be communists. Communists talk as if they'd prefer no government (this is the Marx view) but that never actually happens because communism ultimately fails without having somebody to bullwhip people into working (instead of playing world of warcraft) and making sure they don't leave the country. Slavery by definition.
The favored economist of liberals (Paul Krugman) doesn't believe in the concept of a living wage, by the way. He too believes it should be what the market will bear. In fact I can't think of any liberal economists who strongly support strict wage controls - they all know better.
In order to end up in a situation where you end up with $0 an hour and absolutely cannot find a job to save your life, first an environment has to be created where either the demand for the lunch is zero, or the supply is just too low. We're consumers by nature, so the first environment is an impossibility in practice. We've only actually seen the later happen once in the history of the US, and that was the result of the Smoot-Hawley tariff act creating a sudden artificial supply barrier.
When they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, actions like Smoot-Hawley is what they are referring to. It was supposed to reduce unemployment after the stock market crash, and instead it caused the great depression.
Luddites and their followers have been predicting for ages (even before the original Luddites themselves) that technology will eventually kill jobs for the common man - but that has just never happened. Instead what happens is new industries rise up when suddenly we find we no longer have a need for one type of job, and that labor ends up moving somewhere else instead. It causes frictional unemployment for sure, but eventually things keep on trucking. Case in point, the internet continues to reduce the need for a post office and a phone company. In their place we now have ISP's and cloud services.
And then you get quality of life improvements that aren't realizable in dollars. For example, this conversation you and I are having right now wouldn't even occur if there was no internet to support it - if we wanted something similar to happen without an internet in the past, we'd have to pay somebody to deliver our messages to a central board, compile them, and then mail them back out. Without an internet, we simply wouldn't even bother, instead we'd spend our time doing something else - maybe something even more boring.
I don't know who he, but I get the feeling that if he keeps publicizing everything that people send his way or do to him, it might become an internet past-time for more people to start doing the same. It'll be like an internet gameshow:
"Who can send the craziest thing to Brian Krebs?"
It's all fun and games til somebody decides to send a shit covered blasting cap or who knows what else.
Chandler, Arizona is the location of the worlds most advanced semiconductor fabrication plant, and Intel owns it. Yet everything you buy that comes out of it is stamped "Made in Malaysia."
Why? That's where it's packaged.
I shouldn't have used the word domestic like that though - domestic could imply domestic to the US, but in reality many secmiconductor fabs are located abroad, but often not in China, and are domestic to the actual company who designs the chip (which is what I meant) - usually Japan, South Korea (Samsung being a big one), and even Europe. TSMC is probably the biggest in China, though some argue Taiwan isn't China.
Oh? If we go based on income standards, I'm poor right now actually. I have Nephrotic Syndrome to the point where I'm tired all the time and can't stay awake worth shit to hold a job for damn, even so much as sitting in a chair for a few hours causes my feet to swell up so bad with edema that they hurt like a bitch, and even with supplements my calcium levels are so low that I get severe muscle cramps just walking around. My income? Other than whatever random tasks I can scrape by (usually fixing somebody's computer or something for a whopping $50, an event that rarely occurs) zero. I don't even get social security.
You know what though? I still have some pretty nice shit. I can't afford my own place so I live in a shared domicile, but I do have a car and I don't drive like a teenager so insurance is cheap, and since I don't have to commute I don't spend much on gas. I have a nice computer with a big TV and a netflix subscription, which combined with my internet bill (50/10) is $40 a month. It's not so bad, I have my own room and my combined monthly expenses are about $300. The trick is to not live in New York where the rent and taxes are so god damn high that minimum wage will never cover your expenses, and then wonder why you can't make ends meet like a retard. Instead I live in the suburbs in a modest metro area, so the city is close enough that I can acquire provisions on the cheap. Living arrangements such as this are available easily if you just look. Instead I find people who complain the most tend to insist upon living in some upscale area beyond their means, hence the "occupy movement" was formed.
Had it not been for my kidney disease, I'd probably be working at a major tier 1 ISP who just showed massive interest in hiring me (they called me in for multiple interviews, with them telling me they were impressed with my skillset, and with me telling them that I'm sick in all of them - I'm not going to do the douchy thing of playing the ADA card and forcing them to hire me when I can't perform their tasks reliably) so it isn't as if I'm just refusing to work either. Believe me, if I could take that job, I so would, I love networking with a passion. I literally do it for fun.
If I even made less than minimum wage, I'd be better off right now. So yeah by your income definition, I'm an actual fucking poor person.
So long as the demand for a lunch still remains, somebody would still have to pay for it and therefore be paid for it. So for somebody to truly not have the ability to make a buck, this person would have to lose the ability to make a lunch to begin with, otherwise there would be such thing as a free lunch.
For those who are unable (health issues for example) I'm not opposed to working out accommodations, but I personally have no sympathy for somebody who believes a job at McDonalds is ever below them, which research shows is the attitude that the majority of the homeless have. We already give people with this mindset free food and shelter, which I strongly believe is more than adequate.
If you think McDonalds is bad, try having some of the jobs I've had, one of which included sitting in a lab filling chemical powder samples into little jars all day long. At least at McDonalds I'd be able to move around more and chat with customers on occasion. It required more skill because I had to know clean room handling, but it only paid about the same. Being a garbage man actually pays pretty well in some areas, but nobody takes that job because they don't like the idea of being called a garbage man.
Well the article states that these printers can mostly print themselves.
What they can't print are the things like the logic boards and connectors. However those aren't often made in China anyways, usually they're made in domestic facilities and then sent to China for assembly.
Although unlikely, it's not unreasonable to believe that these printers could one day come in incomplete kits, and you can e.g. have your neighbor print up what isn't included and just assemble it yourself.
You forgot:
19. A 3D printer is invented that can make a full course meal in seconds, we call it a replicator eventually we don't have to do any real work anymore so Scotty becomes obese.
20. Since we don't do any real work anymore, soon it becomes popular to randomly speak in meaningless technobabble so that people can still feel important.
http://www.spike.com/video-clips/mr9tu4/cinemassacre-top-10-star-trek-technobabbles
21. But it's ok because people still end up making more sense than your rant just did.
I don't think the cries would come from any one industry or group, but from several.
A lot of these designs that they use are rather simple, and somebody could come up with them on their own without much effort, so I don't think it would be an intellectual property thing. However the complaints would arrive thus:
Retail stores, who usually see most of their profit come from accessory markup decline.
UPS/USPS/Fedex shipments decline (as a result of the above from online retailers)
Labor unions that represent assembly line workers as well as the above workers might see loss of union dues.
I think what you'll see against 3d printers is more akin to what is going on with the rideshare service: Environmentalists will complain that they are energy hogs, health "experts" will complain about the dangers of nanoparticles, 3d printers can be used to print dangerous objects (i.e. the liberator.) These arguments will be used by lobbyists representing the above industries (as well as gun control-type groups) to try to regulate the crap out of their usage, regardless of whether they are actually dangerous or not.
At which point society reaches a crossroads:
The question will come down to whether or not people see having reduced need for labor as being a good thing. Personally I always see it as being a good thing. I've frequently said I'd rather live in a world where my income is $10 an hour and my lunch costs $4 than being in a world where my income is $20 an hour and my lunch costs $20. In the later scenario, although I have more income, I am in fact poorer by every definition. Technology makes you wealthier, even if it might reduce your income - it makes nice stuff available for cheaper or available easier. Cheaper stuff means somebody got paid less to make it.
And it shows: Today's "poor" are wealthier than they've ever been. The poor in America now frequently own personal computers, cell phones, blu-ray players, playstations, big screen TV's, and don't have any problems paying for food. Recall during the 80's how only the filthy rich had a car phone or a TV larger than 40" (with a picture quality that is crap by today's standards) and the kid with the rich parents had both a sega and a nintendo. Don't confuse wealth with money - the notion that income disparity is creating more poor and killing the middle class is a flawed one, because it's simply moving the goalpost based on a single number on a spreadsheet and completely ignores everything else that should properly define the word "poor" (material possessions being one of them.)
Does this mean 3D printers put China out of business? (Well not completely of course - though you can print the iphone case, you still can't print the iphone yet, but the little accessories and nicknacks make up a huge chunk of the Chinese exports.)
I'll buy a vowel.
That's only going to last as long as their oil reserves continue to sell though. Their economy doesn't really produce much else (glancing at wiki indicates that only 10% of their GDP comes from non-oil sources.)
Communism is fine until everybody decides that they'd rather play world of warcraft instead of work. That's why communist economies have always deteriorating GDP in spite of population growth. Look at the Icarians, they had an entire town with all facilities and infrastructure pre-built just handed to them for free, yet they eventually had to resort to forcing people to work, in spite of only accepting people who already had a good work ethic into their commune. Eventually they fell apart, just like nearly all communist societies have done.
The only communist societies that lasted longer than a few decades were able to do so because they put up laws that would just bull whip people into submission if they weren't working enough. The communist societies who haven't fallen apart peacefully converted to capitalism. Compare that to conversion to communism which always involves violent revolution and forced re-education camps.
Also communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.
Why even care about the party? It's the same crap no matter what side it comes from. I myself tend to favor the republican viewpoint, but the more you pay attention to the way things work, the more you realize that it really doesn't matter. These politicians will go towards whatever gets them the votes at the next election - whether that means falling in line with a major campaign sponsor or falling in line with major public sentiment at the time. They seldom make decisions based on principle, even the ones who you otherwise think have integrity.
The Republican/Democrat war is basically just a show. Think like watching a football game where you have Cowboys fans who hate Bills fans. Nobody really knows why they hate the fans of the other team, they just do. Tons of liberals are pro second amendment yet even the ones who are still vote for politicians who want to ban firearms just because they got that D next to their name. Likewise, tons of conservatives are all for smaller government, yet they still vote for big spenders just because they have that R next to their name. It's all a bunch of nonsense. Personally I'm not even bothering to register to vote anymore, the show can go on without me. Picking the lesser of two evils in an election is a horrible idea because you're giving that lesser evil your endorsement. If you just stop voting for them period then they have no endorsement. So what if your lack of a vote causes the more evil one to win? When has that actually made things worse? I mean look, we have fucking race baiting, domestic spying, nobel prize winning Obama in office, how much worse can things get?
It feels good not to vote for them, it's like when I canceled my cable subscription so ESPN doesn't collect $10 a month from me anymore, and I think if enough people do it you might actually see some change where the cable providers finally shed expensive content providers, and should that day ever come it might be worth paying for again.
I don't think that would work too well.
This wonderful 2.4ghz "unlicensed free for all" utopia you speak of only works in the way you see it because devices that use it seldom reach beyond your domicile. So of course, you can have millions of them being all happy go lucky because they are too far away to bother one another on a large scale.
But when you start dealing with devices that communicate over several miles, then you're going to run into problems. Especially when everybody decides that they all want to use the low frequency spectrum due to its high penetration and long range, further complicated by the fact that it offers less bandwidth.
And then there's the issue of orthogonal frequencies. These modulation techniques (such as that used by LTE) only work when everybody on that channel is using the same modulation technique and even then agrees on how they'll handle contention. All it takes is for some derp to use some incompatible modulation technique on the same frequency to kick everybody else off, either that or some other derp to decide he wants his datacenter backbone to run off of that band and eats up the channel, telling everybody else to go pound salt.
The current licensed model isn't perfect, but it works.
All of which they are aggressively working on. Yet again, see: Network Vision
And see the article I linked. It's not the only one that explains why Network Vision is more hype than promise and has been poorly executed the entire time.
Verizon has announced the same strategy, so I don't see why you keep harping on Sprint. Rate increases are to be expected, in the face of inflation and whatnot.
Verizon can get away with it because they actually have a very robust infrastructure to back it up. Sprint does not, hence they are literally losing customers by the millions. T-mobile on the other hand is doing a much better job of building out their infrastructure while actually lowering prices, and meanwhile they are also gaining subscribers by the hundreds of thousands per month.
There tend to be two worlds here in the subscribers mind:
Verizon: Expensive as hell, but you're covered basically everywhere you go so its worth it.
T-mobile: Coverage not so great, but areas that are served are served very well, the price is a great value, and there are no data overages.
And then there's this:
Sprint: Costs as much, possibly more than Verizon, coverage isn't as good, and even where it is covered the service is spotty. Sure it's got unlimited data, but it's too slow and unreliable so what good is it?
Given the above two alternatives, why would anybody go with Sprint? Hence sprint is hemorrhaging customers.
Don't take my word for all of this, don't even take the article's word for it, just look at the SEC filings.
Or perhaps Sprint just figured all that customers really care about is that it has the 4g sticker on it, an assumption they now still make. One of the big problems with their wimax implementation was that it is at a higher frequency, so penetration is crap. Much in the same, they now maintain an LTE network with the lowest reliability, highest number of dead spots, and slowest data rates (mainly due to a crappy backhaul.)
http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/sprints-lte-rollout-hampered-lack-backhaul-and-network-vision-issues/2013-07-24
Once again, their current strategy is hoping that the customers notice the "4g" sticker and don't realize how bad the service is before getting locked in. Or rather, that is part of it. The other part is doing whatever they can to make existing contract subscribers pay more - the SEC filings themselves even state that as being their plan for keeping revenues up in fact.