They have metal detectors and police in schools, and there are rumors of Metal detectors and armed guards being set up at movie theatres and malls.
Which probably has less to do with anyone's totalitarian ambitions and more with the seemingly neverending supply of armed domestic terrorists striking there.
Most companies (and people, and anything) are mediocre by definition. Since that's not acceptable to the stockholders, the managers turn to voodoo in desperation. Of course that simply makes things worse, both by wasting time and effort and by annoying the employees, but that's hubris for you.
A cynical, but possibly effective, solution might be for a company to buy and annul its own stock instead of paying dividends. That will cause the price to go up, thus simultanously pleasing the investors and getting rid of them. Once the company reaches the point where it can exit the stock market it can concentrate on long-term viability rather than short-term minmaxing.
The question is: does the law allow completely independent legal entities to exist?
You are blaming the "fall of Detroit" on communism. I pointed out that Detroit is an American town most renowed for its association with American corporations, making your assertion absurd.
But no, I'm not blaming Detroit on the corps. The corps have no more choice than any other actor caught in the system. They move manufacturing where it's cheapest or they go bankrupt. Or both, in the case of American auto industry, but incompetence is not a moral failure. It's the system - capitalism - that's to blame.
The corps were the ones that made Detroit rich in the first place. And the fall of Detroit doesn't correspond with anything the corps did. It corresponds rather with the great cities program which Detroit was the center piece of... and you basically nuked the city.
Auto companies made Detroit a center of manufacturing, which led to a population boom requiring infrastructure development, which became a problem when those companie's fortunes turned. It's a classic "boom town" cycle.
Basically, Detroit is detritus left behind by the chaotic economic tides of the capitalist system. Manufacturing moved away, people were left behind. It's the kind of thing that happens when individual actors simply pursue their own goals with no mutual planning or coordination.
As to your evasions... keep wriggling on the spit. It amuses me.
And there come the fantasies again. The model of the system you've internalized feeds you both the mental image and the feelings it wants you to associate with it. It pulls your strings and controls your likes and dislikes, and through them your choices. It's the invisible chain that explains why capitalism - or any system - so rarely needs to resort to overt force and can thus maintain a veneer of respectability.
The problem is, as more people fall into deeper poverty their despair breaks the spell and the violence becomes visible, which helps disillusion more people. Revolution is sparked and fed by the inhuman aspects of capitalism; I hope it can be steered away from becoming inhuman itself, like it did in the past. Ideally the new economic system is built and functions parallel to and simply absorbs people and organizations who abandon or are abandoned by capitalism, leading it to shrivel away with the minimum of disruption.
But then the marketing trolls decided that they could just re-define words to mean whatever the hell they wanted to and 4G went from a well defined standard to arbitrary marketspeak. Some telco's had rebranded HSPA+ as 4G, because of this 5G has no real meaning and it will just lead to marking one-upmanship. "Our competitors are still on 6G, we've gone to 11G" without actually telling you they haven't changed technology at all.
You are failing to see that there is a supply/demand curve for workers, too. When there are not enough workers willing to work for $8.00 an hour, wages will rise to $9.00 an hour, or whatever the market will bear, until it finds an equilibrium.
And you're forgetting that the demand for workers isn't static. It goes up and down in response to the demand for products - goods and services - those workers produce. And that, in turn, depends on how much disposable cash people have. After all, you can't spend money you don't have. Thus, every time someone gets laid off or a paycut the total demand for products goes down, which causes less demand for workers, which causes less money paid in total wages, which causes less demand, and so on.
Cheap credit kept the economy afloat for a few decades by subsidizing consumers, but that only works as long as creditors don't expect to be actually repaid; as soon as they do, the situation turns from a gradual downward spiral into a tailspin. Which is happening now.
As to Detroit being a communist state, so you're saying you don't associate socialism with communism?
I do. I simply don't see what Detroit has to do with either. Except, perhaps, as a cautionary tale about the results of leaving your community's fortunes up to the whims of the markets and (in)competence of corporations, but I doubt you were going for that.
Because Marx did.
While that has nothing to do with Detroit, it does bring up another weakness of past revolutions: dogmatism. It's understandable - if you're assembling a murder machine to force your will upon others you don't want that murder machine to think for itself, least it refuses your orders - but it will inevitably lead to idiocy like Lysenkoism. Giving up violence also allows future revolutions far more flexibility, since they no longer need to justify killing people and thus can treat Marx as an economist he was, rather than the semi-divine figure USSR (had to) turn him into.
The US is now kind of despised by a lot of people around the world. The main reason is how the US mess with the world and how Americans are "arrogant".
Not really. US is a celebrity amongst countries and people like to gossip about celebrities, and especially about scandals involving them - and there's been a lot of them lately. But actually despising the US seems to correlate strongly with being despicable people themselves.
Personally, I think this comic pretty much sums it up.
About 5% is considered "full employment" because it is normal for about 1 out of 20 people to be between jobs.
"It's not a bug, it's a feature!"
I'm sure some economist is already busy coming up with justifications for simply defining "normal" unemployment as the running average of the past year or so, thus solving unemployment once and for all.
If the unemployment rate goes below ~5%, it means that employers are struggling to fill positions, and may need to raise pay to attract more people into the workforce.
Many families do not have the savings to miss a single paycheck.
That's a problem of money management, not lousy employers.
It's neither. In an efficient market profits tend towards zero. That's terrific if you're doing the buying but terrible if you're selling, for example your labour. If you have any money left over after paying the production costs, in this case your upkeep, someone else can undercut you by settling for less, and after that for a less expensive (lower quality) lifestyle. Nor can an employer afford to pay their employees more than they have to, since then their competitors can undercut them. The end result is a workforce just barely getting by, followed by an economic collapse since destitute people can't generate the demand required to keep economy going.
In short, markets can't distinguish between human beings and lumps of coal, thus can't treat them differently, and have enough true believers to sabotage any attempt to rectify the situation until it gets bad enough to trigger outright revolutions, like after WWI. Blaming systemic problems on individual actors, be they humans, organizations or even nations, is simply one of the defence mechanisms built into the ideological structure of most systems (metasystem?).
As to your citation of hobby jet engines to presume to contradict my obvious point... this is the point in the discussion where I spit in your face. *Spit* Are you serious?
Thus far you've moved the issue under discussion from cellphones to sports cars to jet engines. Frankly, it seems like you're trying to find something resource-intensive enough to manufacture that each person can't have their own in hopes of then (mis)applying the conclusions back to the cell phones. But I tried to give you the benefit of doubt.
As to externalities (The catch all term for stuff that can't be quantified and is arbitrarily made up on the spot to support a position), I'm not excluding them at all.
So... how do you avoid excluding something that, according to yourself, can't be quantified?
I'm just not letting you arbitrarily decide what is and is not relevant. You don't have that right.
I don't have a right to decide to take long-term consquences into account?
The market decides what it considers something costs and you can't contradict it with your opinions.
That's an odd assertion, since I just did.
As to democracies of dollars not being like normal democracies... that's probably why I used a different term.
No, you used the term democracy, and are still talking about democracy.
What have you clowns accurately predicted with your world view?
That as the changes brought by it continue to eat away its underpinnings, capitalism will get into crisis after crisis, which will lead to social unrest and eventually revolutions.
If the communists have such a perfect vision of the future then why do they keep getting raped by reality?
Like I said: the previous generation of communist revolutions failed because they clung to violence. They tried to fight capitalism with capitalism's own weapons, which of course led them to merely embracing its worst aspects in the form of oppressive corporate states.
Tell me, how is Detroit doing? That was your great experiment, shithead.
Detroit was a communist state?
As to the people... you're threatening me with violence.:-)
No, I'm not. I specifically said resorting to violence was the fatal fault of previous communist revolutions. Future ones will need to utterly disown it to have a chance at success.
I literally get hard thinking of you trying it. Literally. Please start your revolution... do it now. I want you to so badly. Nothing would put a spring in my step as much as you dropping you in self defense.
Of course you do. You live in a system based on violence. It could hardly persist if it didn't indoctrinate you to approve of and even participate in that violence.
This is actually a good example of the contradictions inherent in capitalism: the system drives technological development, which includes ever deadlier weapons, which makes general approval of violence ever riskier, which in turn leads the system to the impossible position of requiring total approval of violence in some circumstances and total disapproval in all others, as well as the ability to keep moving the separating line as people figure out new ways to survive in a system that deems them worth less than profit.
Well, we see you coming. You think you're going to have the numbers with you when you start attacking random people in their homes to loot and steal everything like locusts? Have fun with that idea. I'm really really happy you were as obvious as you were. I might have taken you seriously even after your dumb point about jet engines. But reading through the rest of this... you're a bitter marxist!
That explains a lot about you, really. Maybe you'd be happier if you found a nice online echo chamber somewhere rather than pretend to take part in actual discussions?
it's either public or it isn't
Everything is. The only question is how much effort is needed to squeeze the information out of available data. For example, if you're having a discussion in your house, it can be listened from afar with a laser microphone due to sound causing windowpanes to vibrate. Does this mean the conversation was in fact public and no invasion of privacy took place?
But then again, it's easier to stop reading as soon as you're contradicted than bother with facts or logic. Oh well.
... You're claiming that there are billions of sports cars available for sale right now?
No. Like with all design decisions, "sports" implies tradeoffs in other areas which are more valuable to most people. Furthermore, all people don't want a new car right now, and it makes sense to delay production as long as possible since technology keeps developing.
Or did you perhaps confuse "everyone can have a car" with "everyone can have an infinite number of cars"?
As to status symbols... who said the product had to make sense?
Status symbols make perfect sense in a class-based society. However, they obey different economic rules than mass-produced goods, because status symbol's utility comes from its exclusiveness, while a mass-produced good's utility comes from its functionality (and thus doesn't go down when more is produced, and in the case of phones actually goes up).
But if you'd prefer something less silly we can talk about jet engines. Can we produce a jet engine for everyone? No. We cannot produce 5~7 billion jet engines.... we do not have the industrial base to do that. And even if we did, we wouldn't do it because it is inefficient
Right, so what does this have to do with either cell phones or cars?
What gives something value is our opinions of it or our desire for it to accomplish some goal. But when you cite your opinion of value as if everyone else should share it or the market should share it... you are either arrogantly presuming to tell everyone how they should structure their economy or you're just confused as to how the markets work.
Failing to account for externalities, in this case opportunity costs, is a well-known failure mechanism in market-based price forming.
it is a democracy of dollars.
It's an odd democracy where one person gets to cast hundreds of times as many votes as another. In fact it sounds more like a dictatorship to me.
As to the inevitable collapse of the final communist failures... yes. Their stupid ideology is doomed. It is ironically holding on strongest in the US... amongst our neo peasantry.
Ironic, yes, but predictable. As soon as the communist block collapsed, the upper classes began looting everyone beneath them - because what are these "neo peasants" going to do about it, start a new revolution? Which they will, once their situation gets bad enough, which it will, because the rich and powerful can always get a little more so by squeezing a little harder. So the cycle will repeat itself until one revolution actually manages to solve the inherent problems of capitalism (specifically, that wealth tends to concentrate towards the top without limit) through sheer dumb luck if nothing else. Whether it'll call itself communism, social democracy, anarcho-whatever or something else is irrelevant; either way, it's capitalism that's doomed, or at least delegated to guiding developing economies through Industrial Revolution to the Information Age. This might even mean perpetual existence, should we ever get serious about colonizing space.
It's not the Marx's and Lenin's who'll bring forth the downfall of capitalism, but the Trump's and Koch brothers.
But the ambitions of that sad ideology are quickly becoming moot... our industrial and economic systems are shifting beyond the reference frame of their conceptual model.
And that shift is taking them to a place where most people have little to look forward to except flipping burgers and waiting to see how they're screwed over next. The ideological structure of capitalism is starting to get
What if the final "Buy Now" function in one of your apps is a link rather than a button?
Then your app is broken.
You hover over it, thinking about it; but little do you know, your browser has already made the decision for you. When you realize your bank account doesn't have enough money for the purchase, you decide not to place the order, but then you check your email and have an order confirmation ID from the vendor.
And this is precisely why your app is broken. And even if your local consumer protection laws aren't up to the task, I'm pretty sure Visa and friends aren't going to be happy with a vendor who makes people hesitant to shop online and generates a lot of chargebacks in the process.
You can reduce those risks by becoming familiar with your route and how motorists behave at different times of day, then adjusting your riding habits accordingly.
So cycling basically means you get to play a rabbit in wolf-infested land, with permadeath of course.
At any price the world can only produce so many hand made sports cars built in some Italian factory. There's a limit. And the high ticket price of such things is largely a rationing system.
True but meaningless. The world can produce enough cars for everyone. It can even produce enough sport cars for everyone. The attributes "hand made" and "built in some Italian factory" are slapped on to turn an otherwise ordinary product into a status symbol, who's defining feature is exclusiveness. It has no consequences for people who simply want to get from point A to point B fast and thus need a (fast) car.
In other words, "hand made sports cars built in some Italian factory" are primarily the modern equivalent of Imperial Purple of ancient Rome: they advertize their owner's social position. They simply happen to have some utility as cars as well.
What this all means is that the economics of hand made sports cars have nothing to do with economics of communications. Everyone can't be richer than everyone else, but even the poorest person in a country could be well wealthy enough to have a 100 Mbit Internet connection on their cellphone. And in fact the wealthier they are, the more likely they are to participate in the economy, politics, culture etc. in a productive manner; for example this discussion is more likely to produce good ideas and expose bad ones as such than if all of us sat on a carboard box somewhere and tried to forget our growling stomachs.
Point is that Cuba can't sustainably provide more communication to the people than the people either want or can pay for.
It can, however, change the relative costs of various options to steer development away from local optimum towards true optimum, or even infinity. "Cost" here can involve either money, punishments for undesirable behaviour, or extending willpower to resist indoctrination. Theoretically, this can lead to better outcome due to planning ahead of time and thus having better coordination; in practice, this planning needs to be done by someone, and that someone is chosen from candidates filtered and heavily targeted by various interest's propaganda, leading to the reality-disconnected insanity we see in politicians and other powerful people all the time.
Luckily, better communications also make untrue indoctrination harder to maintain. There's a reason why, for example, religious fundamentalists oppose - either via terror like in Afghanistan or via sabotage like in the US - education: it might not destroy the student's faith in God, but sure does destroy the illusion that the group's dogma is God's will. It's why censorship is nearly synonymous with tyranny, and why everyone who's nation is building national firewalls or other such infrastructure can be certain there's nasty surprises in store. If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide, after all.
These days people are getting so fucking OVERLY Politically Correct, and scared of hurting anyone's feelings potentially, that if you make most any statement on something that would be based somehow on a per person basis, no matter how factual it is and for sound reasons....a pile of people will immediately jump up and shout racism, fat shaming, sexism......it is getting so bad today, that you can't have an intelligent conversation on hardly anything without someone shouting it is some sort of discrimination.
Very well then: your original message was pointless malice aimed at making other people's lives worse for no reason except appeasing whatever demons drive you, and your attempt to make a smokescreen out of political correctness is just plain sad. You "can't have an intelligent conversation on hardly anything" because you can't stop being an asshole long enough to say anything intelligent without shitting all over someone in the process, and the mechanisms that forced them to simply take it in the past are weaker nowadays. You aren't a victim just because other people are no longer forced to be yours.
You can't point out that the emperor has no clothes on,
Your emperor has no clothes on, and you're butthurt because this keeps getting pointed out to you. Also, your emperor isn't a vain but harmless moron but the Devil, and that's something you really don't like having pointed out.
The data was public, the information wasn't. That is, there was a barrier, an effort required to turn data points into a form convenient for some purpose, in this case tracking a person's movements. This tool removed that barrier, making the information public.
This distinction is becoming extremely important as computing power continues to grow and AI advances. Facial recognition, for example, makes security cameras a far greater risk to freedom than they were previously. The kind of mass surveillance we nowadays conduct wasn't physically possible before. Data mining will only continue to grow. The genie is not going back to the bottle, so we must decide how to deal with it. And since it's not possible in the general case to know all the conclusions that can be drawn from a given set of data, especially when combined with other data, blaming it all on the releaser of the data puts people into impossible situation.
The geek lives in this fantasy world where you can be fired for cause for a security breach at a Fortune 500 company and still remain employable.
...Why wouldn't you? Companies take risks all the time. To them, you're merely an investment who can pay off richly or blow up in their faces, just like any other. And frankly, adding one more leak to a sieve isn't much of a crime.
You have read the Top Secret intelligence on the people held in Guantanamo and assessed the cases against these enemy combatants? If you have access to the Top Secret information, I would recommend you not comment on it as it is a Felony to disclose classified information to someone who does not have the correct access to the information.
So anyone the government says deserves to be jailed deserves to be jailed and anyone who disagrees is either a traitor or talking out of his ass.
Actually....why NOT start basis fares on weight? It would maybe encourage people TO actually try to live and eat healthier. A heavier person does require more fuel, etc....so, it isn't a discriminating factor based on a person's looks, but upon a cold hard cash factor in that it is more $$ to fly that person than someone that weighs less. I know the money is a drop in the bucket on one flight, but it adds up significantly over the airlines' fleets.
Have you ever noticed that when people propose something purely to make someone else's life worse, they then immediately start to make excuses ("so, it isn't discriminating" = "I'm not a racist, but") thus indicating they're fully aware of the malicious bullshit nature of their own message, and knew it would be obvious to everyone else too, but chose to post it anyway?
Quite frankly, if I go to a bookstore to get information about books and what I get is an employee who knows less about books than me and turns to her computer to search Amazon for recommendations... I can do that myself, thank you! I was hoping that I'd find somewhere there who, ya know, KNOWS a thing about the shit they sell?
And what happens when they hire someone motivated (and thus expensive), and you then buy the actual book at Amazon anyway after getting the info you need?
Bookstores are simply outdated. They're going to die no matter what they do, and know that. So why spend any more fighting the inevitable rather than just extract what profit they can on their way out?
But of course, people who actually know what they're doing cost more money, so what you get is people who sell you mattresses today, books tomorrow and in a week you see them flipping burgers.
And they know that too. They're never getting out of poverty unless they get fantastically lucky, so why bother trying? People allocate their resources - including time and effort - based on expectations of results, and the expected result for a low-rank worker working hard is ending up flipping burgers.
A social system works by creating a kind of shared dream of how the world works, what kinds of positions are available, who can fill them, and what's expected of them. These dreams can take a certain amount of being contradicted by evidence, but not the kind of brutal beatdown Capitalism is currently experiencing, at least not without attaching religious feeling its dogma, which it has done. But even so, if things don't start improving fast, the disillusionment will spread until the entire machinery falls apart.
So, any guesses where the next round of Communistic revolutions (Neo-communism? Communism 2.0?) is going to start?
For comparison, look at a 100W lightbulb and a 100W Pentium 4. Both need to dissipate 100W, but one is doing it over the surface of a large bulb, the other over about a square centimetre on the top of the package - the total heat is the same, but it's a lot harder to keep the P4 cool than it is to cool the lightbulb.
Except, of course, that a lightbulb does not dissipate 100W of heat from the bulb's surface, it dissipates 100W of electromagnetic radiation from the filament. The glass absorbs - and thus dissipates - a fraction of that energy as heat. That's why a lit lightbulb is bright while a running P4 is not, at least not in visible wavelengths: P4 dissipates most of its energy as heat, while the lighbulb dissipates some as a lower-entropy form of energy.
Which is also the answer for a fusion plant: the plasma is very hot, so simply transfer the energy in the form of photons. They are steerable with mirrors, can be converted into heat easily, and could even be directly harvested by solar panels.
Slashdot Mirror
Which probably has less to do with anyone's totalitarian ambitions and more with the seemingly neverending supply of armed domestic terrorists striking there.
Most companies (and people, and anything) are mediocre by definition. Since that's not acceptable to the stockholders, the managers turn to voodoo in desperation. Of course that simply makes things worse, both by wasting time and effort and by annoying the employees, but that's hubris for you.
A cynical, but possibly effective, solution might be for a company to buy and annul its own stock instead of paying dividends. That will cause the price to go up, thus simultanously pleasing the investors and getting rid of them. Once the company reaches the point where it can exit the stock market it can concentrate on long-term viability rather than short-term minmaxing.
The question is: does the law allow completely independent legal entities to exist?
You are blaming the "fall of Detroit" on communism. I pointed out that Detroit is an American town most renowed for its association with American corporations, making your assertion absurd.
But no, I'm not blaming Detroit on the corps. The corps have no more choice than any other actor caught in the system. They move manufacturing where it's cheapest or they go bankrupt. Or both, in the case of American auto industry, but incompetence is not a moral failure. It's the system - capitalism - that's to blame.
Auto companies made Detroit a center of manufacturing, which led to a population boom requiring infrastructure development, which became a problem when those companie's fortunes turned. It's a classic "boom town" cycle.
Basically, Detroit is detritus left behind by the chaotic economic tides of the capitalist system. Manufacturing moved away, people were left behind. It's the kind of thing that happens when individual actors simply pursue their own goals with no mutual planning or coordination.
And there come the fantasies again. The model of the system you've internalized feeds you both the mental image and the feelings it wants you to associate with it. It pulls your strings and controls your likes and dislikes, and through them your choices. It's the invisible chain that explains why capitalism - or any system - so rarely needs to resort to overt force and can thus maintain a veneer of respectability.
The problem is, as more people fall into deeper poverty their despair breaks the spell and the violence becomes visible, which helps disillusion more people. Revolution is sparked and fed by the inhuman aspects of capitalism; I hope it can be steered away from becoming inhuman itself, like it did in the past. Ideally the new economic system is built and functions parallel to and simply absorbs people and organizations who abandon or are abandoned by capitalism, leading it to shrivel away with the minimum of disruption.
So 4G is the Firefox of wireless?
And you're forgetting that the demand for workers isn't static. It goes up and down in response to the demand for products - goods and services - those workers produce. And that, in turn, depends on how much disposable cash people have. After all, you can't spend money you don't have. Thus, every time someone gets laid off or a paycut the total demand for products goes down, which causes less demand for workers, which causes less money paid in total wages, which causes less demand, and so on.
Cheap credit kept the economy afloat for a few decades by subsidizing consumers, but that only works as long as creditors don't expect to be actually repaid; as soon as they do, the situation turns from a gradual downward spiral into a tailspin. Which is happening now.
I do. I simply don't see what Detroit has to do with either. Except, perhaps, as a cautionary tale about the results of leaving your community's fortunes up to the whims of the markets and (in)competence of corporations, but I doubt you were going for that.
While that has nothing to do with Detroit, it does bring up another weakness of past revolutions: dogmatism. It's understandable - if you're assembling a murder machine to force your will upon others you don't want that murder machine to think for itself, least it refuses your orders - but it will inevitably lead to idiocy like Lysenkoism. Giving up violence also allows future revolutions far more flexibility, since they no longer need to justify killing people and thus can treat Marx as an economist he was, rather than the semi-divine figure USSR (had to) turn him into.
Not really. US is a celebrity amongst countries and people like to gossip about celebrities, and especially about scandals involving them - and there's been a lot of them lately. But actually despising the US seems to correlate strongly with being despicable people themselves.
Personally, I think this comic pretty much sums it up.
Isn't the main reason Python code is so slow that it's nigh impossible to prove anything about it, even to a computer?
"It's not a bug, it's a feature!"
I'm sure some economist is already busy coming up with justifications for simply defining "normal" unemployment as the running average of the past year or so, thus solving unemployment once and for all.
And that's terrible.
It's neither. In an efficient market profits tend towards zero. That's terrific if you're doing the buying but terrible if you're selling, for example your labour. If you have any money left over after paying the production costs, in this case your upkeep, someone else can undercut you by settling for less, and after that for a less expensive (lower quality) lifestyle. Nor can an employer afford to pay their employees more than they have to, since then their competitors can undercut them. The end result is a workforce just barely getting by, followed by an economic collapse since destitute people can't generate the demand required to keep economy going.
In short, markets can't distinguish between human beings and lumps of coal, thus can't treat them differently, and have enough true believers to sabotage any attempt to rectify the situation until it gets bad enough to trigger outright revolutions, like after WWI. Blaming systemic problems on individual actors, be they humans, organizations or even nations, is simply one of the defence mechanisms built into the ideological structure of most systems (metasystem?).
You can go to another plantation, yes. Tell them all to go screw themselves and see how it'll go for you.
Thus far you've moved the issue under discussion from cellphones to sports cars to jet engines. Frankly, it seems like you're trying to find something resource-intensive enough to manufacture that each person can't have their own in hopes of then (mis)applying the conclusions back to the cell phones. But I tried to give you the benefit of doubt.
So... how do you avoid excluding something that, according to yourself, can't be quantified?
I don't have a right to decide to take long-term consquences into account?
That's an odd assertion, since I just did.
No, you used the term democracy, and are still talking about democracy.
That as the changes brought by it continue to eat away its underpinnings, capitalism will get into crisis after crisis, which will lead to social unrest and eventually revolutions.
Like I said: the previous generation of communist revolutions failed because they clung to violence. They tried to fight capitalism with capitalism's own weapons, which of course led them to merely embracing its worst aspects in the form of oppressive corporate states.
Detroit was a communist state?
No, I'm not. I specifically said resorting to violence was the fatal fault of previous communist revolutions. Future ones will need to utterly disown it to have a chance at success.
Of course you do. You live in a system based on violence. It could hardly persist if it didn't indoctrinate you to approve of and even participate in that violence.
This is actually a good example of the contradictions inherent in capitalism: the system drives technological development, which includes ever deadlier weapons, which makes general approval of violence ever riskier, which in turn leads the system to the impossible position of requiring total approval of violence in some circumstances and total disapproval in all others, as well as the ability to keep moving the separating line as people figure out new ways to survive in a system that deems them worth less than profit.
That explains a lot about you, really. Maybe you'd be happier if you found a nice online echo chamber somewhere rather than pretend to take part in actual discussions?
Everything is. The only question is how much effort is needed to squeeze the information out of available data. For example, if you're having a discussion in your house, it can be listened from afar with a laser microphone due to sound causing windowpanes to vibrate. Does this mean the conversation was in fact public and no invasion of privacy took place?
But then again, it's easier to stop reading as soon as you're contradicted than bother with facts or logic. Oh well.
No. Like with all design decisions, "sports" implies tradeoffs in other areas which are more valuable to most people. Furthermore, all people don't want a new car right now, and it makes sense to delay production as long as possible since technology keeps developing.
Or did you perhaps confuse "everyone can have a car" with "everyone can have an infinite number of cars"?
Status symbols make perfect sense in a class-based society. However, they obey different economic rules than mass-produced goods, because status symbol's utility comes from its exclusiveness, while a mass-produced good's utility comes from its functionality (and thus doesn't go down when more is produced, and in the case of phones actually goes up).
Right, so what does this have to do with either cell phones or cars?
Also, you do realize that small jet engines exist, right?
Failing to account for externalities, in this case opportunity costs, is a well-known failure mechanism in market-based price forming.
It's an odd democracy where one person gets to cast hundreds of times as many votes as another. In fact it sounds more like a dictatorship to me.
Ironic, yes, but predictable. As soon as the communist block collapsed, the upper classes began looting everyone beneath them - because what are these "neo peasants" going to do about it, start a new revolution? Which they will, once their situation gets bad enough, which it will, because the rich and powerful can always get a little more so by squeezing a little harder. So the cycle will repeat itself until one revolution actually manages to solve the inherent problems of capitalism (specifically, that wealth tends to concentrate towards the top without limit) through sheer dumb luck if nothing else. Whether it'll call itself communism, social democracy, anarcho-whatever or something else is irrelevant; either way, it's capitalism that's doomed, or at least delegated to guiding developing economies through Industrial Revolution to the Information Age. This might even mean perpetual existence, should we ever get serious about colonizing space.
It's not the Marx's and Lenin's who'll bring forth the downfall of capitalism, but the Trump's and Koch brothers.
And that shift is taking them to a place where most people have little to look forward to except flipping burgers and waiting to see how they're screwed over next. The ideological structure of capitalism is starting to get
Then your app is broken.
And this is precisely why your app is broken. And even if your local consumer protection laws aren't up to the task, I'm pretty sure Visa and friends aren't going to be happy with a vendor who makes people hesitant to shop online and generates a lot of chargebacks in the process.
So cycling basically means you get to play a rabbit in wolf-infested land, with permadeath of course.
Thanks, but I think I'll just take the car.
True but meaningless. The world can produce enough cars for everyone. It can even produce enough sport cars for everyone. The attributes "hand made" and "built in some Italian factory" are slapped on to turn an otherwise ordinary product into a status symbol, who's defining feature is exclusiveness. It has no consequences for people who simply want to get from point A to point B fast and thus need a (fast) car.
In other words, "hand made sports cars built in some Italian factory" are primarily the modern equivalent of Imperial Purple of ancient Rome: they advertize their owner's social position. They simply happen to have some utility as cars as well.
What this all means is that the economics of hand made sports cars have nothing to do with economics of communications. Everyone can't be richer than everyone else, but even the poorest person in a country could be well wealthy enough to have a 100 Mbit Internet connection on their cellphone. And in fact the wealthier they are, the more likely they are to participate in the economy, politics, culture etc. in a productive manner; for example this discussion is more likely to produce good ideas and expose bad ones as such than if all of us sat on a carboard box somewhere and tried to forget our growling stomachs.
It can, however, change the relative costs of various options to steer development away from local optimum towards true optimum, or even infinity. "Cost" here can involve either money, punishments for undesirable behaviour, or extending willpower to resist indoctrination. Theoretically, this can lead to better outcome due to planning ahead of time and thus having better coordination; in practice, this planning needs to be done by someone, and that someone is chosen from candidates filtered and heavily targeted by various interest's propaganda, leading to the reality-disconnected insanity we see in politicians and other powerful people all the time.
Luckily, better communications also make untrue indoctrination harder to maintain. There's a reason why, for example, religious fundamentalists oppose - either via terror like in Afghanistan or via sabotage like in the US - education: it might not destroy the student's faith in God, but sure does destroy the illusion that the group's dogma is God's will. It's why censorship is nearly synonymous with tyranny, and why everyone who's nation is building national firewalls or other such infrastructure can be certain there's nasty surprises in store. If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide, after all.
Very well then: your original message was pointless malice aimed at making other people's lives worse for no reason except appeasing whatever demons drive you, and your attempt to make a smokescreen out of political correctness is just plain sad. You "can't have an intelligent conversation on hardly anything" because you can't stop being an asshole long enough to say anything intelligent without shitting all over someone in the process, and the mechanisms that forced them to simply take it in the past are weaker nowadays. You aren't a victim just because other people are no longer forced to be yours.
Your emperor has no clothes on, and you're butthurt because this keeps getting pointed out to you. Also, your emperor isn't a vain but harmless moron but the Devil, and that's something you really don't like having pointed out.
The data was public, the information wasn't. That is, there was a barrier, an effort required to turn data points into a form convenient for some purpose, in this case tracking a person's movements. This tool removed that barrier, making the information public.
This distinction is becoming extremely important as computing power continues to grow and AI advances. Facial recognition, for example, makes security cameras a far greater risk to freedom than they were previously. The kind of mass surveillance we nowadays conduct wasn't physically possible before. Data mining will only continue to grow. The genie is not going back to the bottle, so we must decide how to deal with it. And since it's not possible in the general case to know all the conclusions that can be drawn from a given set of data, especially when combined with other data, blaming it all on the releaser of the data puts people into impossible situation.
...Why wouldn't you? Companies take risks all the time. To them, you're merely an investment who can pay off richly or blow up in their faces, just like any other. And frankly, adding one more leak to a sieve isn't much of a crime.
So anyone the government says deserves to be jailed deserves to be jailed and anyone who disagrees is either a traitor or talking out of his ass.
Have you ever noticed that when people propose something purely to make someone else's life worse, they then immediately start to make excuses ("so, it isn't discriminating" = "I'm not a racist, but") thus indicating they're fully aware of the malicious bullshit nature of their own message, and knew it would be obvious to everyone else too, but chose to post it anyway?
And what happens when they hire someone motivated (and thus expensive), and you then buy the actual book at Amazon anyway after getting the info you need?
Bookstores are simply outdated. They're going to die no matter what they do, and know that. So why spend any more fighting the inevitable rather than just extract what profit they can on their way out?
And they know that too. They're never getting out of poverty unless they get fantastically lucky, so why bother trying? People allocate their resources - including time and effort - based on expectations of results, and the expected result for a low-rank worker working hard is ending up flipping burgers.
A social system works by creating a kind of shared dream of how the world works, what kinds of positions are available, who can fill them, and what's expected of them. These dreams can take a certain amount of being contradicted by evidence, but not the kind of brutal beatdown Capitalism is currently experiencing, at least not without attaching religious feeling its dogma, which it has done. But even so, if things don't start improving fast, the disillusionment will spread until the entire machinery falls apart.
So, any guesses where the next round of Communistic revolutions (Neo-communism? Communism 2.0?) is going to start?
There is no proof in the real world. Only very thinly veiled suggestions.
Except, of course, that a lightbulb does not dissipate 100W of heat from the bulb's surface, it dissipates 100W of electromagnetic radiation from the filament. The glass absorbs - and thus dissipates - a fraction of that energy as heat. That's why a lit lightbulb is bright while a running P4 is not, at least not in visible wavelengths: P4 dissipates most of its energy as heat, while the lighbulb dissipates some as a lower-entropy form of energy.
Which is also the answer for a fusion plant: the plasma is very hot, so simply transfer the energy in the form of photons. They are steerable with mirrors, can be converted into heat easily, and could even be directly harvested by solar panels.