Actually there are quite big differences between your left and right hemispheres. I'm highly left hemisphere dominant due to a medical condition, and it shows because compared to a lot people I am very logical, aspiritual, and skeptical. This isn't zodiac or tarot nonsense, it is scientifically proven.
I wonder if that would include patching in support for the existing LTE radio on the Nexus 4? It has a four band LTE radio IIRC (in addition to its existing pentaband UMTS radio) and it does actually work with t-mobile LTE and I'm fairly certain AT&T LTE as well.
In that respect, it already does what TFA is making a big deal about, only unofficially.
Archery isn't very dependent upon both eyes as far as I can tell. Fencing probably, but not archery.
Your depth perception is only useful at somewhat close distances as far as I'm aware, say 30 feet or less, and I think even that is pushing it. I could be wrong on that number, but that's just the way parallax works - your eyes would have to be further apart to be more effective at judging depth at longer distances.
Rift might actually be good for that, I'm not sure. I remember about this time I was first into stereoscopic gaming with using Asus's 3d shutter glasses on my first geforce card. I didn't use it that much because it was really hack(ish) in that a lot of games either didn't work at all, or worked but had numerous problems. In fact, I can't think of any games that didn't exhibit any problems.
I think it did serve a therapeutic purpose, I'm just not sure to what extent because I didn't do it for very long.
Unless my understanding is wrong, personally I don't think this would cure lazy eye, rather it is just one step in the process. Yes, it does teach you to use both eyes at the same time (in the same vein as being able to walk and chew gum) but it doesn't do anything to force you to use both eyes towards a common task, or rather working on processing the same object. In this case, the eyes are seeing two different objects, so I'm not sure how that would help in this regard.
I think it would go a long ways towards developing motor skills in your bad eye as well as stopping the partial suppression of your visual field, which is a good thing, and probably one of the most effective means of doing so that I've heard, but there are other ways to do that for free (see my other posts in this topic) so if this does die without seeing commercialization, it wouldn't be a problem in my opinion. In fact, I bet if it did go commercial, it would probably be expensive as hell just like every other medical apparatus, like hearing aids for example.
The step after the problem this helps solve is to learn to look at an object with both eyes as being just one object, rather than two objects. This is very difficult at first, particularly for somebody who is older and has no dedication. After that you need to learn to properly converge and diverge your eyes on demand without having to think about it (the last step is probably easiest IMO.)
Though it takes work on your own to fix it. It's not as if you just get the surgery and the problem is gone, you have to be proactive at making sure you make a habit of looking at objects correctly for quite a while, because if you just retain your old habits then the surgery won't do anything at all.
Unfortunately the surgeons don't emphasize this well enough to most patients, probably because they don't know as they've never had the condition to begin with, so they don't truly understand what it takes to correct the problem (other than stripping out some muscle fibers to allow your brain to re-align your eyes in a normal way - I think they just assume that either your brain works the problem out on its own or it doesn't and the surgery just does nothing.)
You can repeat the surgery multiple times if you want because it isn't exactly destructive. It is very painful for the first 36 or so hours afterwards though. If you are proactive enough though, you should only need it once.
I bet it is more successful at younger ages for the same reason that learning second languages is easier at younger ages: brain plasticity. But still, you can learn to speak new languages fluently even way late in life.
I cured my own lazy eye, in spite of being told repeatedly that it wasn't possible, and it wasn't through corrective lenses. Video games did play a major role however.
Basically I did my own research about what the cause is (one eye being worse than the other, so the brain learning over time to suppress the double input and only pay attention to the remainder) and what treatments did work for kids. They however said this couldn't be done with older people.
But, I took my own initiative anyways. I used something similar to a patch method where I basically just covered my good eye for a few weeks while watching TV and - you guessed it - video games. This resulted in double vision since I stopped suppressing the partial vision in my worse eye which was corrected with a prism (and my optometrist told me how bad of an idea this was, etc, which later I was told that his advice was wrong.) In addition, during this process I developed the eye in ways it hadn't before (namely, fine motor motion that was previously just ignored.)
After a long period of wearing the prism, I slowly learned how to read with both eyes. Or rather, how one eye leads the other eye - nobody taught me that, I just had to learn it on my own.
Later on down the line I found a competent doctor who said he could treat my double vision, and did so with an excruciatingly painful surgery (morphine couldn't cure my headaches.)
5 years later, I was able to eventually get it so that I would rarely if ever see double, no prism required. Every optometrist I've seen since then tells me that I never had a lazy eye. It's not true though because my medical records up until I was 21 say otherwise, rather they haven't seen anybody who was able to correct it in the way I have.
There's still one issue that I had to correct since then, namely being able to diverge the eyes on demand, which solves a range of other problems (such as not having double vision while laying down.) It was tricky to figure out how to train my brain how to do that, but once I did the results were good. Here's the gist of it:
Go find one of those "magic eye" cards where you try to see a 3d object by diverging your eyes (if you were around in the 90's, you might recall these as those annoying books that people used to faddishly carry around,) only use the simpler ones with more easily recognizable patterns. Something like this would do:
Try to diverge your eyes so that two of those lizards become one. It is very difficult at first. A good trick is to have this picture displaying on a glossy (or at least somewhat reflective) monitor, and then put a light very far in front of your monitor so that it is behind you. Then position it so that it glares off of the screen, and each instance of that glare you see in your two eyes covers two of those lizards. Then simply focus your vision back and forth from that lightbulb, eventually getting rid of the lightbulb. Eventually you'll want to get to the point where you can cup your hands between your eyes so that your fingers guide each one to the lizards. Go from one lizard apart to two lizards apart, then three, then four.
This should take you about a week to do pretty well. Once that happens, you'll easily be able to master diverging your eyes proper at any angle you look at something.
Use different stereograms if you have to, just make sure they have that distinctive object in them rather than a bunch of small otherwise indistinguishable dots.
Personally, I still am unable to spot the 3d objects in those, but neither can a lot of people with perfect eyesight, so don't sweat it. However they still make good divergence training tools.
Now keep in mind that this is for the SDK and not AOSP itself. Amazon is going to have a difficult time taking android in a separate direction if they can't modify the SDK.
I don't think that would be a wise tactical decision. Not saying that we'll be attacked any time soon, or that a natural disaster is imminent, but keeping any industry concentrated in a very small area such as DC probably isn't a good idea.
Don't give me any crap about how the republicans subsidize the rich and the democrats don't. If anything, I'd go so far as to say the democrats are the worst offenders of that as they enact corporate welfare more than anybody. They are the ones who believe that some corporations are too big to fail, that we need corn subsidies, that the steel industry needs protection from competition (tariffs), that green energy manufacturers need loan guarantees even if they have no indication of a sustainable business model (fisker, solyndra, many others.) They believe that government destroying used cars and then handing money to dealerships for new ones is a good idea. They also (most of them, including Obama) subscribe to the Keynesian model which posits that government spending on private sector works spurs economic growth.
Also, social programs don't do anybody any long term favors. The give a man a fish and teach him to fish analogy comes to mind.
I don't care whether you're a democrat or not, but to paint that party as innocent as you just did is just plain foolish.
If everybody agrees on cuts, then how does increasing revenue prevent problems like the one at hand? No matter what happens, spending goes down, so groups just like the FAA complain anyways.
Stop playing this favoritism game, it's annoying beyond belief.
That's because everybody likes to think that they are the good guy. Even when they make dick moves, they still think they're the good guy most of the time. Look at Kevin Trudeau, piece of shit con artist, yet when the rule of law comes down upon him (like it just did last month) he actually believes in his own innocence, and so do is followers (there are a lot of them.) Those followers are the goon squad, like how they spammed that judge at his request, or how they constantly harass anybody who calls him out. They aren't even getting paid anything, in fact it's more likely that they have paid him. The rule of law did its job though. He was fined of basically everything he has and was sentenced to jail. Unfortunately he fled the country before his sentence could be carried out, but nonetheless his days of plundering here are over.
Well socialists tend to work under the assumption that things will be broken until a change in laws comes to fix it. They assume that the free market will most of the time make the wrong decision if left to its own devices. Consequently, throughout recent history the government has screwed a lot of things up as they try to "fix" things. Smoot-Hawly is a great example of that.
But yeah, I really don't get why some people say we need higher prices to support the little guy. Walmart for example makes nice stuff easier for the poor to afford. Actions exactly like this are what increases the wealth of the poor. Money is not wealth. I get annoyed when people look at dollar figures of income (adjusted for inflation of course) and make the assumption that the poor or middle class are now worse off. Thanks to the wal-marts of the world, even the poor can own flat screen TV's and get fat from over eating. But because they have fewer pieces of green paper, even though their bargaining power has increased, they are now worse off.
Yet the anti-walmart crowd insists that if everybody pays higher prices, we'll somehow be better off.
Right now China is doing us a massive service. Even though they might be taking some jobs and a fair bit of money, they are making us wealthy. And what a lot of people don't realize is that all we are giving them for these nice things is just paper. That's it, just paper. It ultimately can't be used for anything except to buy American made goods, and even if they don't, inflation effectively taxes that money away from them. Yet, many people think China is a problem for us.
What you're talking about doesn't happen unless a government fails in its obligations and organized crime and/or political corruption takes over. Goon squads, by their nature, are organized crime. It doesn't even take a high school education to know that.
That would happen easily in an anarchistic situation. However in a libertarian one, that wouldn't happen because libertarians believe in rule of laws and justice, just not social justice (a term which I despise, by the way, though I think you probably already knew that.) Capitalism by its nature requires law and order to exist to begin with in order to enforce say contract obligations, or to make sure say store owners don't get robbed or have to pay protection money. Again, that should be common sense.
Except both the car and shoes are increasingly made by robots.
And so the cycle repeats, just as it always has.
What you pay for is more and more parts and automated factories, not wages. So that money circulates but eventually usually land in the pockets of one of the 1%ers not in any worker's pocket.
Those 1%ers aren't what you think they are, nor are they what the occupy movement thinks they are. (I really do hate that term because it is so arbitrary...why not the top 10%, or the top 3.14159%, or the top 0.87%? It also paints an invisible boogyman for the flock to rally against, an Emmanuel Goldstein of sorts.) If you actually look at how those top 1% vote, it's mostly Democrat; I'm fairly certain that it is because Democrats tend to favor corporate welfare the most because Democrats almost universally subscribe to the Keynesian model, which emphasizes corporate welfare as a means of spurring economic growth.
Also if those 1% disappeared overnight, our economy would collapse overnight, as would the government due to a sudden loss of a third of its income. Those evil 1%ers tend to be the Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and George Sorros of the world. Unlike another arbitrary number, say the bottom 47%, they are the ones that give people jobs to begin with. They also tend to be very charitable, and since they make so much to begin with, their charitable donations don't do anything at all to reduce their income taxes (in most cases, anyways.)
So please, for fucks sakes, stop using the 1% as your arbitrary "lets point fingers at" enemy. I mean shit, many of them are even on your side.
Don't bother accusing me of repeating any propaganda or being a shill. I didn't obtain any of this information off of any blogs or from anything whispered into my ear, this is my own personally gathered information. Sure you can create a conspiracy theory that one or both of the above applies to me, but it doesn't help society any more than Alex Jones and his whacko ideas do.
The restaurant owner is a classic capitalist, his main income is from owning the restaurant not working there. He buys a car, most of the profit is passed to the car company owners who are also capitalists. They buy themselves a new yacht, with most of the profit passed to the yacht company's owner and so on. Is the pattern starting to be clear now?
Meanwhile, most workers are trapped in a downwards spiral where they go to the robot chef and buy things made in China from Wal*Mart and Amazon because they can't afford more, which of course reduces the need for workers and puts even more pressure on wages. All those people in brick-and-mortar stores got paid wages which they used to spend in the local economy so there's less money to pay waiters and chefs which again have less money to spend in the brick and mortar stores. Instead the big companies are taking all the profit on the way, the profit is not just moved it is removed from the workers.
I know many restaurant owners, and most of them are middle class. They don't own any yachts. Maybe if they are the CEO of a very large chain of restaurants or something, but most restaurants are independently run, and even the big name ones (e.g. McDonalds) are franchises, the owners of which aren't exactly rich.
Humans have never had competition like this before, no matter how many jobs mechanization and industrialization has eliminated it has always seemed like there was an infinite number of jobs we'd need people for. With advanced machinery it even seemed we needed more skilled labor to operate it, not less. Except computers and robots are starting to leapfrog us, they do thing autonomously that require less skills or no intervention from us except for the very rare developer, robot designer and repairman. The value of labor might go way down before any equilibrium is reached.
Apparently you haven't heard of the luddites. They were fighting against the ad
Well this is what I think is basically a dick move on the part of Amazon, namely taking the Android platform, making it their own, and then giving the finger to those who provided it to them for free to begin with. I knew this was going to happen the minute they launched their app store, even expressed that it was a dick move, and got shouted down for it wherever I brought it up.
Anyways, I'm actually thinking about letting my prime subscription run out. They charge sales tax in my state now, and where I live it is pretty close to 10%. (They keep increasing it because they say they need more money for firefighters and education - though I'm trying to figure out how they didn't manage that back when it was 6% only a decade ago. Raising the rate to compensate to lost out of state purchases doesn't help because people will just want to do that even more.) Fry's electronics will price match just about any website out there, so I can get their prices locally anyways. Although Amazon's larger selection is nice, I can probably manage just fine with the free super saver shipping when I need to. If there's a hot deal somewhere, I'll just go to a website that doesn't charge sales tax.
I haven't found a solution to the cablecard problem yet, but so far in what little free time I've had, I've been working on improving an automated bittorrent based solution I already have. Perhaps you should do the same.
When the day comes that everything that can be invented has been invented, then we can start talking about future job allocation. For now, it's best to let market forces decide that.
Now hold on a minute. 40 hour work week is a counter example? There isn't anything to conclusively suggest that.
South Korea puts in more working hours than any country in the world, yet their unemployment figures are among the lowest in the world. In fact, they even sit below what is the natural unemployment rate. Try living in South Korea and not finding a job.
Telling them to go down to our 40 hour work week would raise their unemployment dramatically. You don't even need to be an economics major (I'm not) to see why this is easily the case. If you make them work less, then they also earn less. Since they have less to spend, their businesses make less. So then those businesses have to start laying people off. Chain reaction. Just in a thought experiment alone it is easy to show why playing games with work hours only serves to disrupt an economy that is otherwise already at a comfortable equilibrium.
If you allowed people who want to work longer hours to do so, you can very well lower the unemployment rate. It's not guaranteed of course, but it won't hurt. The notion that if one person works more then another person works less, while intuitively understandable, is nonsense. Intuitively you'd think that going around breaking windows would create jobs, but it too is nonsense, just as the parable of the broken window tells us.
I make similar arguments against tariffs all the time here on slashdot because they create costs unseen. I get modded down when I suggest we get rid of every single one of them though because some people work for unions that hate competition.
New stuff will come around; it always does. Everything that can be invented hasn't been invented. 100 years ago nobody would have imagined there being even a robot technician. So what will happen later? Who knows, but the economy will always find an equilibrium somewhere.
What an economy ultimately solves is how we allocate scarce resources. Because in the end, that is what people want. First you start with the minimum (e.g. food, shelter) and then you go to the luxuries.
Politicians usurping this process by making artificial changes to perceived labor problems (Smoot-Hawly is a great example) create more problems than they solve. This has always been the case.
So you say stop playing politics, but then in the same argument you propose changing the law. Wait, what is the career title of somebody who changes the law? Somebody help me here, I don't recall...
Anyways: No, you're dead wrong on the 100 hours figure. Technology has actually permitted longer working hours than we used to do naturally, both in terms of time of day (artificial lighting) and seasons (most people used to be farmers). The period of the industrial revolution is probably the most we worked, because that is about the time when technology permitted the most work, and simultaneously required the most manual labor for extended periods. Yet during that time, we only worked about 60 hours a week:
In-coincidentally, this is about the same time of the rise of communism. I think that mainly came about because people didn't like working as much as they did for as little as they got, which was unprecedented. Technology remedied that problem; not politicians. Communism only made things worse.
(And yes, I know that isn't a word, I just like the feel of it though.)
History has shown us repeatedly that legislating a reduction in working hours only makes the unemployment problem worse. France is the best recent example of that. People like you assume that the demand for labor is inelastic. You couldn't be more wrong, and history has demonstrated that quite decisively.
The worst that could happen is that the demand for labor goes low enough that people find their own way of acquiring the resources that they want, which would include things like starting smaller businesses. People like you don't realize this and make knee-jerk votes towards politicians who claim to have answers, and that results in situations like the one France is in now.
I wouldn't be terribly concerned about a human pathogens which tend to be controllable, but rather mutated lab animals that turn out to be invasive species in the wild. Then you go from saving a few hundred mice/rabitts to damaging or even destroying an entire ecosystem on a large scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, not that I believe what GP is saying by the way, my comments only relate to left vs right brain.
Actually there are quite big differences between your left and right hemispheres. I'm highly left hemisphere dominant due to a medical condition, and it shows because compared to a lot people I am very logical, aspiritual, and skeptical. This isn't zodiac or tarot nonsense, it is scientifically proven.
I wonder if that would include patching in support for the existing LTE radio on the Nexus 4? It has a four band LTE radio IIRC (in addition to its existing pentaband UMTS radio) and it does actually work with t-mobile LTE and I'm fairly certain AT&T LTE as well.
In that respect, it already does what TFA is making a big deal about, only unofficially.
Archery isn't very dependent upon both eyes as far as I can tell. Fencing probably, but not archery.
Your depth perception is only useful at somewhat close distances as far as I'm aware, say 30 feet or less, and I think even that is pushing it. I could be wrong on that number, but that's just the way parallax works - your eyes would have to be further apart to be more effective at judging depth at longer distances.
Rift might actually be good for that, I'm not sure. I remember about this time I was first into stereoscopic gaming with using Asus's 3d shutter glasses on my first geforce card. I didn't use it that much because it was really hack(ish) in that a lot of games either didn't work at all, or worked but had numerous problems. In fact, I can't think of any games that didn't exhibit any problems.
I think it did serve a therapeutic purpose, I'm just not sure to what extent because I didn't do it for very long.
Unless my understanding is wrong, personally I don't think this would cure lazy eye, rather it is just one step in the process. Yes, it does teach you to use both eyes at the same time (in the same vein as being able to walk and chew gum) but it doesn't do anything to force you to use both eyes towards a common task, or rather working on processing the same object. In this case, the eyes are seeing two different objects, so I'm not sure how that would help in this regard.
I think it would go a long ways towards developing motor skills in your bad eye as well as stopping the partial suppression of your visual field, which is a good thing, and probably one of the most effective means of doing so that I've heard, but there are other ways to do that for free (see my other posts in this topic) so if this does die without seeing commercialization, it wouldn't be a problem in my opinion. In fact, I bet if it did go commercial, it would probably be expensive as hell just like every other medical apparatus, like hearing aids for example.
The step after the problem this helps solve is to learn to look at an object with both eyes as being just one object, rather than two objects. This is very difficult at first, particularly for somebody who is older and has no dedication. After that you need to learn to properly converge and diverge your eyes on demand without having to think about it (the last step is probably easiest IMO.)
Worked on me at 20.
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3679275&cid=43534193
Though it takes work on your own to fix it. It's not as if you just get the surgery and the problem is gone, you have to be proactive at making sure you make a habit of looking at objects correctly for quite a while, because if you just retain your old habits then the surgery won't do anything at all.
Unfortunately the surgeons don't emphasize this well enough to most patients, probably because they don't know as they've never had the condition to begin with, so they don't truly understand what it takes to correct the problem (other than stripping out some muscle fibers to allow your brain to re-align your eyes in a normal way - I think they just assume that either your brain works the problem out on its own or it doesn't and the surgery just does nothing.)
You can repeat the surgery multiple times if you want because it isn't exactly destructive. It is very painful for the first 36 or so hours afterwards though. If you are proactive enough though, you should only need it once.
I bet it is more successful at younger ages for the same reason that learning second languages is easier at younger ages: brain plasticity. But still, you can learn to speak new languages fluently even way late in life.
I cured my own lazy eye, in spite of being told repeatedly that it wasn't possible, and it wasn't through corrective lenses. Video games did play a major role however.
Basically I did my own research about what the cause is (one eye being worse than the other, so the brain learning over time to suppress the double input and only pay attention to the remainder) and what treatments did work for kids. They however said this couldn't be done with older people.
But, I took my own initiative anyways. I used something similar to a patch method where I basically just covered my good eye for a few weeks while watching TV and - you guessed it - video games. This resulted in double vision since I stopped suppressing the partial vision in my worse eye which was corrected with a prism (and my optometrist told me how bad of an idea this was, etc, which later I was told that his advice was wrong.) In addition, during this process I developed the eye in ways it hadn't before (namely, fine motor motion that was previously just ignored.)
After a long period of wearing the prism, I slowly learned how to read with both eyes. Or rather, how one eye leads the other eye - nobody taught me that, I just had to learn it on my own.
Later on down the line I found a competent doctor who said he could treat my double vision, and did so with an excruciatingly painful surgery (morphine couldn't cure my headaches.)
5 years later, I was able to eventually get it so that I would rarely if ever see double, no prism required. Every optometrist I've seen since then tells me that I never had a lazy eye. It's not true though because my medical records up until I was 21 say otherwise, rather they haven't seen anybody who was able to correct it in the way I have.
There's still one issue that I had to correct since then, namely being able to diverge the eyes on demand, which solves a range of other problems (such as not having double vision while laying down.) It was tricky to figure out how to train my brain how to do that, but once I did the results were good. Here's the gist of it:
Go find one of those "magic eye" cards where you try to see a 3d object by diverging your eyes (if you were around in the 90's, you might recall these as those annoying books that people used to faddishly carry around,) only use the simpler ones with more easily recognizable patterns. Something like this would do:
http://www.eyetricks.com/3dstereo83.htm
Try to diverge your eyes so that two of those lizards become one. It is very difficult at first. A good trick is to have this picture displaying on a glossy (or at least somewhat reflective) monitor, and then put a light very far in front of your monitor so that it is behind you. Then position it so that it glares off of the screen, and each instance of that glare you see in your two eyes covers two of those lizards. Then simply focus your vision back and forth from that lightbulb, eventually getting rid of the lightbulb. Eventually you'll want to get to the point where you can cup your hands between your eyes so that your fingers guide each one to the lizards. Go from one lizard apart to two lizards apart, then three, then four.
This should take you about a week to do pretty well. Once that happens, you'll easily be able to master diverging your eyes proper at any angle you look at something.
Use different stereograms if you have to, just make sure they have that distinctive object in them rather than a bunch of small otherwise indistinguishable dots.
Personally, I still am unable to spot the 3d objects in those, but neither can a lot of people with perfect eyesight, so don't sweat it. However they still make good divergence training tools.
Google did exactly that.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/144804-google-attempts-to-stymie-android-fragmentation-by-locking-down-the-android-sdk
Now keep in mind that this is for the SDK and not AOSP itself. Amazon is going to have a difficult time taking android in a separate direction if they can't modify the SDK.
You misunderstand me. I am NOT sticking up for republicans, nor am I being apologetic.
I don't think that would be a wise tactical decision. Not saying that we'll be attacked any time soon, or that a natural disaster is imminent, but keeping any industry concentrated in a very small area such as DC probably isn't a good idea.
Don't give me any crap about how the republicans subsidize the rich and the democrats don't. If anything, I'd go so far as to say the democrats are the worst offenders of that as they enact corporate welfare more than anybody. They are the ones who believe that some corporations are too big to fail, that we need corn subsidies, that the steel industry needs protection from competition (tariffs), that green energy manufacturers need loan guarantees even if they have no indication of a sustainable business model (fisker, solyndra, many others.) They believe that government destroying used cars and then handing money to dealerships for new ones is a good idea. They also (most of them, including Obama) subscribe to the Keynesian model which posits that government spending on private sector works spurs economic growth.
Also, social programs don't do anybody any long term favors. The give a man a fish and teach him to fish analogy comes to mind.
I don't care whether you're a democrat or not, but to paint that party as innocent as you just did is just plain foolish.
If everybody agrees on cuts, then how does increasing revenue prevent problems like the one at hand? No matter what happens, spending goes down, so groups just like the FAA complain anyways.
Stop playing this favoritism game, it's annoying beyond belief.
That's because everybody likes to think that they are the good guy. Even when they make dick moves, they still think they're the good guy most of the time. Look at Kevin Trudeau, piece of shit con artist, yet when the rule of law comes down upon him (like it just did last month) he actually believes in his own innocence, and so do is followers (there are a lot of them.) Those followers are the goon squad, like how they spammed that judge at his request, or how they constantly harass anybody who calls him out. They aren't even getting paid anything, in fact it's more likely that they have paid him. The rule of law did its job though. He was fined of basically everything he has and was sentenced to jail. Unfortunately he fled the country before his sentence could be carried out, but nonetheless his days of plundering here are over.
Well socialists tend to work under the assumption that things will be broken until a change in laws comes to fix it. They assume that the free market will most of the time make the wrong decision if left to its own devices. Consequently, throughout recent history the government has screwed a lot of things up as they try to "fix" things. Smoot-Hawly is a great example of that.
But yeah, I really don't get why some people say we need higher prices to support the little guy. Walmart for example makes nice stuff easier for the poor to afford. Actions exactly like this are what increases the wealth of the poor. Money is not wealth. I get annoyed when people look at dollar figures of income (adjusted for inflation of course) and make the assumption that the poor or middle class are now worse off. Thanks to the wal-marts of the world, even the poor can own flat screen TV's and get fat from over eating. But because they have fewer pieces of green paper, even though their bargaining power has increased, they are now worse off.
Yet the anti-walmart crowd insists that if everybody pays higher prices, we'll somehow be better off.
Right now China is doing us a massive service. Even though they might be taking some jobs and a fair bit of money, they are making us wealthy. And what a lot of people don't realize is that all we are giving them for these nice things is just paper. That's it, just paper. It ultimately can't be used for anything except to buy American made goods, and even if they don't, inflation effectively taxes that money away from them. Yet, many people think China is a problem for us.
What you're talking about doesn't happen unless a government fails in its obligations and organized crime and/or political corruption takes over. Goon squads, by their nature, are organized crime. It doesn't even take a high school education to know that.
That would happen easily in an anarchistic situation. However in a libertarian one, that wouldn't happen because libertarians believe in rule of laws and justice, just not social justice (a term which I despise, by the way, though I think you probably already knew that.) Capitalism by its nature requires law and order to exist to begin with in order to enforce say contract obligations, or to make sure say store owners don't get robbed or have to pay protection money. Again, that should be common sense.
Except both the car and shoes are increasingly made by robots.
And so the cycle repeats, just as it always has.
What you pay for is more and more parts and automated factories, not wages. So that money circulates but eventually usually land in the pockets of one of the 1%ers not in any worker's pocket.
Those 1%ers aren't what you think they are, nor are they what the occupy movement thinks they are. (I really do hate that term because it is so arbitrary...why not the top 10%, or the top 3.14159%, or the top 0.87%? It also paints an invisible boogyman for the flock to rally against, an Emmanuel Goldstein of sorts.) If you actually look at how those top 1% vote, it's mostly Democrat; I'm fairly certain that it is because Democrats tend to favor corporate welfare the most because Democrats almost universally subscribe to the Keynesian model, which emphasizes corporate welfare as a means of spurring economic growth.
Also if those 1% disappeared overnight, our economy would collapse overnight, as would the government due to a sudden loss of a third of its income. Those evil 1%ers tend to be the Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and George Sorros of the world. Unlike another arbitrary number, say the bottom 47%, they are the ones that give people jobs to begin with. They also tend to be very charitable, and since they make so much to begin with, their charitable donations don't do anything at all to reduce their income taxes (in most cases, anyways.)
So please, for fucks sakes, stop using the 1% as your arbitrary "lets point fingers at" enemy. I mean shit, many of them are even on your side.
Don't bother accusing me of repeating any propaganda or being a shill. I didn't obtain any of this information off of any blogs or from anything whispered into my ear, this is my own personally gathered information. Sure you can create a conspiracy theory that one or both of the above applies to me, but it doesn't help society any more than Alex Jones and his whacko ideas do.
The restaurant owner is a classic capitalist, his main income is from owning the restaurant not working there. He buys a car, most of the profit is passed to the car company owners who are also capitalists. They buy themselves a new yacht, with most of the profit passed to the yacht company's owner and so on. Is the pattern starting to be clear now?
Meanwhile, most workers are trapped in a downwards spiral where they go to the robot chef and buy things made in China from Wal*Mart and Amazon because they can't afford more, which of course reduces the need for workers and puts even more pressure on wages. All those people in brick-and-mortar stores got paid wages which they used to spend in the local economy so there's less money to pay waiters and chefs which again have less money to spend in the brick and mortar stores. Instead the big companies are taking all the profit on the way, the profit is not just moved it is removed from the workers.
I know many restaurant owners, and most of them are middle class. They don't own any yachts. Maybe if they are the CEO of a very large chain of restaurants or something, but most restaurants are independently run, and even the big name ones (e.g. McDonalds) are franchises, the owners of which aren't exactly rich.
Humans have never had competition like this before, no matter how many jobs mechanization and industrialization has eliminated it has always seemed like there was an infinite number of jobs we'd need people for. With advanced machinery it even seemed we needed more skilled labor to operate it, not less. Except computers and robots are starting to leapfrog us, they do thing autonomously that require less skills or no intervention from us except for the very rare developer, robot designer and repairman. The value of labor might go way down before any equilibrium is reached.
Apparently you haven't heard of the luddites. They were fighting against the ad
Yes, it did. He will find something else. Meanwhile the price of food decreased. I think lower priced food makes people happier.
Well this is what I think is basically a dick move on the part of Amazon, namely taking the Android platform, making it their own, and then giving the finger to those who provided it to them for free to begin with. I knew this was going to happen the minute they launched their app store, even expressed that it was a dick move, and got shouted down for it wherever I brought it up.
Anyways, I'm actually thinking about letting my prime subscription run out. They charge sales tax in my state now, and where I live it is pretty close to 10%. (They keep increasing it because they say they need more money for firefighters and education - though I'm trying to figure out how they didn't manage that back when it was 6% only a decade ago. Raising the rate to compensate to lost out of state purchases doesn't help because people will just want to do that even more.) Fry's electronics will price match just about any website out there, so I can get their prices locally anyways. Although Amazon's larger selection is nice, I can probably manage just fine with the free super saver shipping when I need to. If there's a hot deal somewhere, I'll just go to a website that doesn't charge sales tax.
If anybody recalls:
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/13/03/07/1947228/ask-slashdot-dealing-with-flagged-channels-for-xbmc-pvr
I haven't found a solution to the cablecard problem yet, but so far in what little free time I've had, I've been working on improving an automated bittorrent based solution I already have. Perhaps you should do the same.
When the day comes that everything that can be invented has been invented, then we can start talking about future job allocation. For now, it's best to let market forces decide that.
Now hold on a minute. 40 hour work week is a counter example? There isn't anything to conclusively suggest that.
South Korea puts in more working hours than any country in the world, yet their unemployment figures are among the lowest in the world. In fact, they even sit below what is the natural unemployment rate. Try living in South Korea and not finding a job.
Telling them to go down to our 40 hour work week would raise their unemployment dramatically. You don't even need to be an economics major (I'm not) to see why this is easily the case. If you make them work less, then they also earn less. Since they have less to spend, their businesses make less. So then those businesses have to start laying people off. Chain reaction. Just in a thought experiment alone it is easy to show why playing games with work hours only serves to disrupt an economy that is otherwise already at a comfortable equilibrium.
If you allowed people who want to work longer hours to do so, you can very well lower the unemployment rate. It's not guaranteed of course, but it won't hurt. The notion that if one person works more then another person works less, while intuitively understandable, is nonsense. Intuitively you'd think that going around breaking windows would create jobs, but it too is nonsense, just as the parable of the broken window tells us.
I make similar arguments against tariffs all the time here on slashdot because they create costs unseen. I get modded down when I suggest we get rid of every single one of them though because some people work for unions that hate competition.
New stuff will come around; it always does. Everything that can be invented hasn't been invented. 100 years ago nobody would have imagined there being even a robot technician. So what will happen later? Who knows, but the economy will always find an equilibrium somewhere.
What an economy ultimately solves is how we allocate scarce resources. Because in the end, that is what people want. First you start with the minimum (e.g. food, shelter) and then you go to the luxuries.
Politicians usurping this process by making artificial changes to perceived labor problems (Smoot-Hawly is a great example) create more problems than they solve. This has always been the case.
So you say stop playing politics, but then in the same argument you propose changing the law. Wait, what is the career title of somebody who changes the law? Somebody help me here, I don't recall...
Anyways: No, you're dead wrong on the 100 hours figure. Technology has actually permitted longer working hours than we used to do naturally, both in terms of time of day (artificial lighting) and seasons (most people used to be farmers). The period of the industrial revolution is probably the most we worked, because that is about the time when technology permitted the most work, and simultaneously required the most manual labor for extended periods. Yet during that time, we only worked about 60 hours a week:
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.work.hours.us
Pre-industrial times saw shorter work weeks than now:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
In-coincidentally, this is about the same time of the rise of communism. I think that mainly came about because people didn't like working as much as they did for as little as they got, which was unprecedented. Technology remedied that problem; not politicians. Communism only made things worse.
(And yes, I know that isn't a word, I just like the feel of it though.)
History has shown us repeatedly that legislating a reduction in working hours only makes the unemployment problem worse. France is the best recent example of that. People like you assume that the demand for labor is inelastic. You couldn't be more wrong, and history has demonstrated that quite decisively.
The worst that could happen is that the demand for labor goes low enough that people find their own way of acquiring the resources that they want, which would include things like starting smaller businesses. People like you don't realize this and make knee-jerk votes towards politicians who claim to have answers, and that results in situations like the one France is in now.
I wouldn't be terribly concerned about a human pathogens which tend to be controllable, but rather mutated lab animals that turn out to be invasive species in the wild. Then you go from saving a few hundred mice/rabitts to damaging or even destroying an entire ecosystem on a large scale.