Not even socialism, but in fact communism. If memory serves me correctly, this is actually more or less why Marx thought communism was inevitable - the owners of the means of production would have to create the conditions that lead to revolution, because it was inherent in capitalism itself.
It seems sorta common sense that if you click on a link to a site, that site will know you clicked on it and where you're going.
What's not common-sense or obvious is that Google only give sites information on what SSL search query lead users to that site if the site paid money to Google for that click, and that they do so regardless of whether it causes the search terms used to be sent across the user's connection as plaintext or not.
The thing you're missing here is that more automation tends to result in materials and capital cost becoming a larger proportion of production costs and labour becoming a smaller proportion. The obvious consequence of this that more money goes to a tiny minority of very wealthy individuals that own the mines and the robot-manufacturing plants and the patents and run the banks required to finance those capital costs, and less to the 99% of the population that actually have to work for a living.
We're probably not actually talking very large quantities here; some of the reported deaths were of people who'd accidentally eaten bread made from grain treated with it, for example. It's quite a bit harder to accidentally poison yourself with salt or water, especially salt. (Also, too little water or salt is just as fatal whereas there's no health benefits to consuming organomercury compounds that anyone knows of.)
I expect you read it somewhere, probably in another comment on/. that went unchallenged. It' a common argument that sounds really convincing except for the small issue of being totally and utterly scientifically wrong. It's also appealing because it makes anti-vaccine posters sound like scientifically-illiterate idiots in a way that the actual evidence doesn't; while thiomersal in vaccines appears to be safe in practice, it's entirely plausible that it could have been dangerous.
The form of mercury in vaccines is actually known to be toxic in humans -fatally so in some cases - it's just not dangerous in the amounts contained in vaccines. Well, probably not anyway.
At least according to the Wikipedia article on thiomersal, we know that thiomersal is toxic in humans and are reasonably sure it's the result of it breaking down to form ethylmercury. The open questions are exactly how toxic it is and to what extent it bioaccumulates.
Mercury's generally the other way around though - organomercury compounds are often actually a lot more poisonous than elemental mercury. We're not actually sure about the biological effects of thiomersal (the mercury preservative used in vaccines); it appears to be harmless at the levels used in vaccines but it also seems to be quite impressively toxic in humans in larger amounts.
Why shouldn't the American Dream come with decent jobs for most people? What kind of American Dream is it where if you work hard and are healthy and skilled and get lucky you might be one of the 53% of the population with something resembling a decently paid job, and be able to rationalize the other half of the population that you could've ended up in as slackers who don't deserve to earn a living? A situation where half the population are always screwed and your best hope is that you can compete well enough not to end up in that half sounds more like a nightmare than a dream to me.
PS: the 53% slogan was created by one of the 1%. There's a picture of him holding up a sign about how he works three jobs, his health insurance costs are outrageous, and he can't sell his house - but what he doesn't mention is how well paid those jobs are (decent 6-figure salary for each of them as far as anyone can tell), or the fact that he basically got those jobs through knowing the right people rather than his skills, an option not open to 99% of the population.
Now comes along dear old Uncle Sam, who does two things. He first makes it very hard to default on Student Load debt, even a declared bankruptcy won't do it, and he secures the loans.
This obscures certain important details. It wasn't some hypothetical Uncle Sam that made it very hard to default on student loan debt, it was a whole bunch of Congressmen and women - and the reason they did it was because the banks providing student loans lobbied them to do it, no doubt with a few generous campaign contributions thrown in. Why do you think the OWS protesters are so angry?
Do the loan forgiveness programs apply to private-sector student loans? Those are also not discharged in bankrupcy, but they're generally a lot nastier, and the banks running them have been paying schools to run mandatory hard-sell sessions for their student loan schemes. (Don't attend the sales pitch and you can't graduate, that kind of thing.)
US student loan debts aren't discharged by bankrupcy anymore - the banks lobbied the government quite hard to get that. I'm not sure if anything short of the loanpayer's death discharges them.
They're just a requirement to have a decent chance of getting an above-minimum-wage job. Any above minimum wage job, including many that didn't used to require a degree AIUI.
The value of Bitcoins has absolutely NOTHING to do with the prices listed on mtgox and other exchanges. The value of Bitcoins is what goods and services you can get for Bitcoins.
Which in turn is linked to the price listed on Mt Gox. Most Bitcoin merchants - including those on the infamous Silk Road marketplace - actually set their prices in US dollars and use scripts to automatically update the Bitcoin pricing. All their costs are in either US dollars or a local currency that's much more stable against dollars than it is against bitcoins. If they set a fixed bitcoin price they'd end up selling goods at a potentially very substantial loss until they managed to update them.
The Bitcoin devs didn't, but they didn't really do much or any promotion of Bitcoin anyway. The Bitcoin community on the other hand very definitely promoted it as a way to make easy money, and they were how most people found out about Bitcoins. (Combine that with the annoying habit the main Bitcoin forums had now and then of deleting negative comments as "trolls", and...)
I think, at the peak mining speed of Bitcoin, it would've only cost a couple of million dollars to build hardware equal to the entire existing mining capacity. That's a lot for most people, but peanuts for others.
All the information I could find contradicts that; apparently the ARM version of Windows 8 will only have the Metro UI and not the classic desktop, and since that uses its own UI libraries that are very different from the previous Windows ones that means rewriting the UI of your application. (In addition, Metro apps will only be installable from Microsoft's new app store with Microsoft taking a 30% cut of the sale price. They really are blatently copying what Apple did with Mac OS X Lion and the iPad.)
According to the best estimate available (which isn't very good, but Bitcoin is hard to measure), 50% of all Bitcoins in existence are owned by 0.1% of users. There are only a few thousand Bitcoin owners in total out of the 6 billion people in the world. What's more, Bitcoin's designed so that the amount of control over transaction processing you have depends on how much you can afford to spend on hashing hardware - if a bank wanted to, they could spend about a million dollars and make sure that no Bitcoin transaction could be completed unless it gave them a cut.
If your parents are like my parents, and did see 40% of their 401K disappear during the financial disaster, then:
I expect they didn't "just see it disappear" - in most cases the people who were charged with managing them well and making sound investment decisions were raiding them through all kinds of excessive fees to fund their own lavish lifestyles even as they managed to screw up and lose their investors money, and it was even completely legal.
Slashdot Mirror
Not even socialism, but in fact communism. If memory serves me correctly, this is actually more or less why Marx thought communism was inevitable - the owners of the means of production would have to create the conditions that lead to revolution, because it was inherent in capitalism itself.
Oh, and it's not a coincidence that just like the Occupy Wall St protestors I'm talking about the 99% here. We can actually see this happening already and it has a good deal to do with why they're so pissed off, even if most of them don't know the exact figures. We've seen a massive increase in productivity due to technological advancements, but wages are at a record low percentage of the economy and corporate profits are nearly the highest percentage of the economy they've ever been. In fact, apparently hourly wages haven't increased in real terms for decades.
It seems sorta common sense that if you click on a link to a site, that site will know you clicked on it and where you're going.
What's not common-sense or obvious is that Google only give sites information on what SSL search query lead users to that site if the site paid money to Google for that click, and that they do so regardless of whether it causes the search terms used to be sent across the user's connection as plaintext or not.
The thing you're missing here is that more automation tends to result in materials and capital cost becoming a larger proportion of production costs and labour becoming a smaller proportion. The obvious consequence of this that more money goes to a tiny minority of very wealthy individuals that own the mines and the robot-manufacturing plants and the patents and run the banks required to finance those capital costs, and less to the 99% of the population that actually have to work for a living.
We're probably not actually talking very large quantities here; some of the reported deaths were of people who'd accidentally eaten bread made from grain treated with it, for example. It's quite a bit harder to accidentally poison yourself with salt or water, especially salt. (Also, too little water or salt is just as fatal whereas there's no health benefits to consuming organomercury compounds that anyone knows of.)
I expect you read it somewhere, probably in another comment on /. that went unchallenged. It' a common argument that sounds really convincing except for the small issue of being totally and utterly scientifically wrong. It's also appealing because it makes anti-vaccine posters sound like scientifically-illiterate idiots in a way that the actual evidence doesn't; while thiomersal in vaccines appears to be safe in practice, it's entirely plausible that it could have been dangerous.
It's actually quite hard to accidentally ingest a lethal dose of salt because it induces vomiting. Thiomersal and ethyl mercury on the other hand...
The form of mercury in vaccines is actually known to be toxic in humans -fatally so in some cases - it's just not dangerous in the amounts contained in vaccines. Well, probably not anyway.
At least according to the Wikipedia article on thiomersal, we know that thiomersal is toxic in humans and are reasonably sure it's the result of it breaking down to form ethylmercury. The open questions are exactly how toxic it is and to what extent it bioaccumulates.
Mercury's generally the other way around though - organomercury compounds are often actually a lot more poisonous than elemental mercury. We're not actually sure about the biological effects of thiomersal (the mercury preservative used in vaccines); it appears to be harmless at the levels used in vaccines but it also seems to be quite impressively toxic in humans in larger amounts.
Oh, and I forgot to mention - those three jobs aren't even close to full time. I'm not even sure they add up to one full-time job.
Why shouldn't the American Dream come with decent jobs for most people? What kind of American Dream is it where if you work hard and are healthy and skilled and get lucky you might be one of the 53% of the population with something resembling a decently paid job, and be able to rationalize the other half of the population that you could've ended up in as slackers who don't deserve to earn a living? A situation where half the population are always screwed and your best hope is that you can compete well enough not to end up in that half sounds more like a nightmare than a dream to me.
PS: the 53% slogan was created by one of the 1%. There's a picture of him holding up a sign about how he works three jobs, his health insurance costs are outrageous, and he can't sell his house - but what he doesn't mention is how well paid those jobs are (decent 6-figure salary for each of them as far as anyone can tell), or the fact that he basically got those jobs through knowing the right people rather than his skills, an option not open to 99% of the population.
Now comes along dear old Uncle Sam, who does two things. He first makes it very hard to default on Student Load debt, even a declared bankruptcy won't do it, and he secures the loans.
This obscures certain important details. It wasn't some hypothetical Uncle Sam that made it very hard to default on student loan debt, it was a whole bunch of Congressmen and women - and the reason they did it was because the banks providing student loans lobbied them to do it, no doubt with a few generous campaign contributions thrown in. Why do you think the OWS protesters are so angry?
Do the loan forgiveness programs apply to private-sector student loans? Those are also not discharged in bankrupcy, but they're generally a lot nastier, and the banks running them have been paying schools to run mandatory hard-sell sessions for their student loan schemes. (Don't attend the sales pitch and you can't graduate, that kind of thing.)
US student loan debts aren't discharged by bankrupcy anymore - the banks lobbied the government quite hard to get that. I'm not sure if anything short of the loanpayer's death discharges them.
They're just a requirement to have a decent chance of getting an above-minimum-wage job. Any above minimum wage job, including many that didn't used to require a degree AIUI.
Price-per-square-foot doesn't help you if you can't find a suitably-sized house because building bigger ones is so much more profitable.
The value of Bitcoins has absolutely NOTHING to do with the prices listed on mtgox and other exchanges. The value of Bitcoins is what goods and services you can get for Bitcoins.
Which in turn is linked to the price listed on Mt Gox. Most Bitcoin merchants - including those on the infamous Silk Road marketplace - actually set their prices in US dollars and use scripts to automatically update the Bitcoin pricing. All their costs are in either US dollars or a local currency that's much more stable against dollars than it is against bitcoins. If they set a fixed bitcoin price they'd end up selling goods at a potentially very substantial loss until they managed to update them.
Where? Show me where the Bitcoins devs did that.
The Bitcoin devs didn't, but they didn't really do much or any promotion of Bitcoin anyway. The Bitcoin community on the other hand very definitely promoted it as a way to make easy money, and they were how most people found out about Bitcoins. (Combine that with the annoying habit the main Bitcoin forums had now and then of deleting negative comments as "trolls", and...)
I think, at the peak mining speed of Bitcoin, it would've only cost a couple of million dollars to build hardware equal to the entire existing mining capacity. That's a lot for most people, but peanuts for others.
Buying Bitcoins often does involve sending money internationally, so I suspect that he may well have done so at least once.
All the information I could find contradicts that; apparently the ARM version of Windows 8 will only have the Metro UI and not the classic desktop, and since that uses its own UI libraries that are very different from the previous Windows ones that means rewriting the UI of your application. (In addition, Metro apps will only be installable from Microsoft's new app store with Microsoft taking a 30% cut of the sale price. They really are blatently copying what Apple did with Mac OS X Lion and the iPad.)
I think NVidia 3D Vision uses some proprietary API instead, though.
According to the best estimate available (which isn't very good, but Bitcoin is hard to measure), 50% of all Bitcoins in existence are owned by 0.1% of users. There are only a few thousand Bitcoin owners in total out of the 6 billion people in the world. What's more, Bitcoin's designed so that the amount of control over transaction processing you have depends on how much you can afford to spend on hashing hardware - if a bank wanted to, they could spend about a million dollars and make sure that no Bitcoin transaction could be completed unless it gave them a cut.
If your parents are like my parents, and did see 40% of their 401K disappear during the financial disaster, then:
I expect they didn't "just see it disappear" - in most cases the people who were charged with managing them well and making sound investment decisions were raiding them through all kinds of excessive fees to fund their own lavish lifestyles even as they managed to screw up and lose their investors money, and it was even completely legal.