... the reality is game developers have more power than ever because the internet allows them to tap the enormous stupidity of kids and mankind as a whole. You can now sell an unfinished game before you even finish it. You can now F2P classic games and charge for endless money for "fake unlocks" that you'd normally get with a full game. Like with league of legends, heroes and skins, and it's friggin ridiculous because most gamers are so god damn tech illiterate. Game devs/pubs have finally reached utopia of stupid morons feeding them endless amounts of money for worse content as a whole. Diablo 3 sucked a lot more than diablo 2 from both a multiplayer and single player standpoint. Same could be said of other games where it's merely rehashing and taking fans for a ride.
That being said, there are some bright spots like crowdfunding but those possibilities have been extremely uneven and there's a high failure rate. We have yet to see if 'big games' can be down via crowdfunding and not be as lackluster as every other typical publisher funded game.
... hard drives are much cheaper and faster to backup data with than blu-ray discs. Blu-ray discs were too costly for the storage they offered vs hard discs and added only the most marginal improvement over DVD for video vs the size of the files. The cost, speed and size of hard drives far outpaced blu-ray. You get a 10 discs at 25GB a piece that is only a measily 250GB for roughly $12-16 bucks. You can get a 3 Terabyte hard drive for around $100, it's faster to copy and record things to and you can re-use it.
... to survive, find mates and have kids. Everything else we got is extra. No one should expect the brain to do much more than what it was originally selected to do.
... online DRM'd games lead to this naturally. Game devs/pubs brought this on themselves by taking servers out of the control of players hands because of greed. Many people get hacks to get around paying for anything in online DRM'd games. Who'd of thought it, cheats being cheated by the original cheats (game pubs/devs).
... one issue based bullshit is not going to stop this. We had SOPA and CISPA and they are preparing CISPA round 3.
The internet is something 'everyone can agree on' but unfortunately most people trying to 'protect the internet' are too historically and politically illiterate to really do so. None of you who are hardcore capitalists are "protectors" of the internet, in fact why SOPA and TPP are trying to lock it down is BECAUSE they fear the masses rising up against corporate (capitalist) powers. That's why we got governments and corporations going gangusters on surveillance worldwide.
Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington.
This is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.
"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.
In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."
... food companies have scientists working 24/7 to hack human tastebuds for profit.
Much of this problem simply comes down to the fact that bad food is engineered to taste better than natural food we found in our environment over evolutionary history. The problem is our bodies aren't designed to deal with this new food environment and hence obesity. The environment that kids are raised in by clueless over stressed parents and shitty school environments doesn't help either.
Last but not least, human beings are not free. Probably one of the biggest myths that go along with the myth of responsibility.
"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society."
.. they got to be joking. Considering everyone is racing to total information awareness to gain competitive advantage (NSA, GCHQ, etc). There's no stopping this, this is all token bullshit at this point. The only way to deal with this is to make the opaque institutions more transparent. You create data wherever you go, modern technology is so embedded in everyday life that it's impossible not for someone to build any kind of profile on you. Corporations have long been buying and selling data six ways to sunday, we can already assume they (NSA and helpers) will turn the packets they are harvesting off the net from anything you've ever posted into a permanent dossier on you.
Let's just be honest the leaders don't give a fuck, Obama is a moderate right republican. Most voters in North america are completely and totally politically illiterate.
What the elite are worried about is political awakening... Many in the bottom billions of poor on planet earth are in abject poverty and oppression. Elites want to keep those people in their place, hence the elites desire to control the internet.
People are waking up to the fact that the governments are all power hungry and corrupt and are not there to serve the interests of the people, but that of the global elite and the multi-billion dollar corporations.
... it's about setting the tone for a story and then radically breaking from it. We saw this in mass effect 3's ending and Mass effect 2's ret-conning. ME3's ending was just fucking awful for all the amazing shit they set up in Mass effect 1. The reapers had a real mystery and atmosphere and that was slowly deflated by mistakes made in ME2 (aka the human abuction to create a human reaper, like wtf?) and then totally screwed over by ME3 with star child stupid ass choice ending.
If a game gives gamers the impression of being a serious story they set up those expectations. No one playing say Saints row 3 or SR4 is going to have serious expectations about the story. But it's different for RPG's like mass effect, etc. When you give the story a serious tone and show serious effort and then start phoning it in that's when gamers get pissed off. You need to decide from the start whether your story is going to be a serious effort or a half assed one and don't give gamers the impression otherwise.
... 80% of you in the US are competing over 5% of the money in the economy, you guys have no idea how unequal your society has become and you keep voting for more of getting screwed.
How you spend your time online, what you play, what websites you access. That information can be correlated and traced back to you. Say you move to another country, fire up steam. bam IP address, etc. Anytime you are tied to a website that you are communicating with you are leaving breadcrumbs from which who you are, how you spend your time and what kind of person you are can be reconstructed with math and theory.
NSA and other government agencies taking advantage of security holes in steam or infiltrating valve to spy on you and collect data (aka conversations, etc, etc). Anything chained to online DRM naturally leaves you open to being spied on.
Not only that, should valve store sensitive data on their servers about you (studies/etc). This could be stolen by hackers. Online just opens a huge can of worms. You're not thinking about what being exposed to the online world really means. This is why DRM is such a pain in the ass.
At the beginning of the first memo "Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances", the analysts introduce the subject:
Little of this note should tally with conventional thinking. Indeed, traditional thinking is likely to have issues with most of it. We will posit that:
1) the world is dividing into two blocs - the plutonomies, where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few, and the rest.
Plutonomies have occurred before in sixteenth century Spain, in seventeenth century Holland, the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties in the U.S. What are the common drivers of Plutonomy?
Disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist- friendly cooperative governments, an international dimension of immigrants and overseas conquests invigorating wealth creation, the rule of law, and patenting inventions. Often these wealth waves involve great complexity, exploited best by the rich and educated of the time.
2) We project that the plutonomies (the U.S., UK, and Canada) will likely see even more income inequality, disproportionately feeding off a further rise in the profit share in their economies, capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven productivity, and globalization.
Citigroup explains how the "non-rich" consumers become increasingly irrelevant within the "plutonomies":
4) In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take.
There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie. Consensus analyses that do not tease out the profound impact of the plutonomy on spending power, debt loads, savings rates (and hence current account deficits), oil price impacts etc, i.e., focus on the “average”consumer are flawed from the start. It is easy to drown in a lake with an average depth of 4 feet, if one steps into its deeper extremes. Since consumption accounts for 65% of the world economy, and consumer staples and discretionary sectors for 19.8% of the MSCI AC World Index, understanding how the plutonomy impacts consumption is key for equity market participants.
The analysts of Citigroup then invent a new term - "The New Managerial Aristocracy":
THE UNITED STATES PLUTONOMY - THE GILDED AGE, THE ROARING TWENTIES, AND THE NEW MANAGERIAL ARISTOCRACY
Let’s dive into some of the details. As Figure 1 shows the top 1% of households in the U.S., (about 1 million households) accounted for about 20% of overall U.S. income in 2000, slightly smaller than the share of income of the bottom 60% of households put together. That’s about 1 million households compared with 60 million households, both with similar slices of the income pie!
Clearly, the analysis of the top 1% of U.S. households is paramount. The usual analysis of the “average” U.S. consumer is flawed from the start. To continue with the U.S., the top 1% of households also account for 33% of net worth, greater than the bottom 90% of households put together. It gets better(or worse, depe
"The rational in that post made no sense at all. Knowledge must be based on fact, "
Thats because YOU don't know the science... is your mind in a position to know what the facts are? Your post demonstrates your overwhelming illiteracy with regards to the brain sciences.
"Even if this conclusion is wrong, what do you think the proper method is to deal with the irrational nature of humans? Set up some sort of inner cabal of "great minds" to run the world (ignoring the fact they're just as human, therefore just as irrational, as anyone else)? Try to find some inhuman ("angelic") agent to run the world, and hope their goals remain humanly comprehensible? Or just give up and go back to the caves?"
Say me and you don't have time to figure out enough while we are alive, we can agree there is a reality out there that we need to know to survive yes? Our main problem as human beings as there is no consensus as to what 'reality' is, or who's judgement is functioning properly (aka people feel left out, hurt feelings, 'fairness',etc). Plato explored this problem, since it is in no way new.
So let us up the stakes, let's say there's a nuclear bomb and we know there is only a tiny number of educated people that can diffuse it. (This is why we have education after all). Now probably even the most (insert political label here) takes physics seriously provided they as an animal have a deep respect for science and evidence over their feelings. AKA survival and truth comes before politics, and politics has to change if it gets in the way of survival in this case. So when push comes to shove we want someone who is scientifically informed about the laws of nature, we don't want joe sixpack (aka chances of disarming the bomb go way up and that is a good thing).
Survival being something everyone can agree on and usually when someone tries to be a dumbass we get rid of him from our society/tribe, yes?
So we'd develop a system of reasoning related to long term survival, now in the ancient world... it would make sense anyone who disagree'd with it we'd get rid of (either by prison or killing depending on the situation). Since if you don't survive, there isn't really any room for debate now is there?
Now in our time, the "good" half of the elites in the corporate world and upper classes believe in the dictatorship of the best and brightest (aka the smart over the stupid). The downside is that there is not enough of them and there is no guarantee that they are mature (just look at the bailouts).
Basically it would come down to us developing techniques to ferret out our own lies and illusions, there must be a method that we just haven't discovered/come up with yet (consider you reading this right now, you know that you 100% exist in order to read this text, so we begin with the brute fact that we exist, and try to figure out the relationships that are connected to this one brute fact of existence which we can base our knowledge upon). Since even if our brain is flawed, there still must be stuff that works 100% or else we couldn't have survived. So the answer MUST be in our biology. Just what is the ruler the mind is using to measure the universe, at the foundation of mind there must be an absolute idea/concept from which to build a theory of truth regarding long term survival. (aka the door is open or closed, if we couldn't know, we couldn't decide and hence hurt ourselves).
Now the utlimate rule by which people stay or go is: People who have respect for truth, survival and the laws of nature and people who don't. Our problem comes with giving respect to people who just don't value these things. These people need to be mocked/shamed/whatever'd. We'd have to find some way to deal with them.
That's what this comes down to in the end, those of us who are adults and the rest of mankind who are teenagers/childish. Since a respect for what is true is respect for your own survival (aka the highest value, since it is the foundation of everything else we value).
What you're stating would be great in a RATIONAL non superstitious world, where peoples brains worked according to enlightenment ideals but they don't.
If we took most of the people who voted 'against' global warming in the general population, how high do you think their scientific literacy would be? Human brains aren't blackboards, once bad information gets inside a persons mind through media it's damn near impossible to get it out. Think of it in terms of entropy, the energy you need to transform that brain back into a state where it has what is reasonable is overwhelming, especially when you're considering millions of people and let's say they don't trust you because you are black or for some other stupid unconscious reason.
Most people are not in a position to understand themselves and their own thinking, that's what the science says, aka, the average person is not qualified to 'scientifically debate' things like climate change. Or would you disagree with that assessment?
"So the answer to the grandparent's question is "Yes, I do fly off the handle much.""
Flying off the handle suggest I had an "over reaction", rather than a justified reaction to pseudo-intellectual geeks and fake nerds that comment on slashdot.
"Your post is self-defeating. First you claim no one is an authority on what he or she knows, then you claim to know something "
No it isn't self defeating, there are people who CAN reason through natural unconscious superiority, not that they are able to take credit for that. Because smart people are unable to justify why it is they know what they know because it simply takes too much time. i.e. our brains simply do not work like we think they do. Consider if I asked you how much a given representation of really boring bits of your everyday visual field cost in biological terms (how much does it cost to perceive a door, a car, etc). You would have no fucking answer, yet you are able to do it. So we are capable of knowing things and not being able to explain why we know them. The hard part is trying to explain to OTHER PEOPLE not because they are stupid but because they are unaware that they are flawed (aka it's a time vs resources vs what is that animals modus operandi problem). Human beings are locked in their brain circuitry, you search whats in your memory to make a judgement, the problem is you can't see the contents of your own memory. Most of the information you're using to make judgments is not available to your conscious awareness.
I'm interested in truth for no political reason, I just want to know how the universe works, but for others they see it as an attack on their religion, politics, etc.
The problem is to find truth you have to take the attitude to rip it apart all the time (how can this be wrong? etc?). The problem is you wouldn't be able to know if you were in a position to do this unless you already possessed that unconscious superiority. Now this doesn't mean it's impossible for you to learn, it just means you'd have to spend an inordinate amount of time with a fine tooth comb going over what it is you know to find the contradictions.
Most of this is really just a lack of time in one's life to ferret out one's own hidden false premises that are just beyond the edge of your conscious awareness.
And I know you've never done it, to really find what is true requires unreal dedication few people have and you have to do it not in an argumentative environment or mode of operation because you want to not deceive yourself. When you're trying to "win" you're not trying to understand. The natural world is an unfolding process and that is the approach you have to take.
You are just as scientifically illiterate as the prior poster. Your brain doesn't literally live in reality, and science has discovered that *people are not* good judges of what they know and what they don't know about themselves and reality. So that means everyone is affected. So a good thing to do at this point would be to try to destroy what you think it is you know by going and asking people who are experts in the topic and I know you and the prior poster have not thought about this.
Your brain DOESN'T live in reality, it lives in it's own abstract representational space which has some bits of reality, but you are not in a good position to understand what you don't know and science says so! Of course that would require education you are lacking.
Slashdot Mirror
... the reality is game developers have more power than ever because the internet allows them to tap the enormous stupidity of kids and mankind as a whole. You can now sell an unfinished game before you even finish it. You can now F2P classic games and charge for endless money for "fake unlocks" that you'd normally get with a full game. Like with league of legends, heroes and skins, and it's friggin ridiculous because most gamers are so god damn tech illiterate. Game devs/pubs have finally reached utopia of stupid morons feeding them endless amounts of money for worse content as a whole. Diablo 3 sucked a lot more than diablo 2 from both a multiplayer and single player standpoint. Same could be said of other games where it's merely rehashing and taking fans for a ride.
That being said, there are some bright spots like crowdfunding but those possibilities have been extremely uneven and there's a high failure rate. We have yet to see if 'big games' can be down via crowdfunding and not be as lackluster as every other typical publisher funded game.
... hard drives are much cheaper and faster to backup data with than blu-ray discs. Blu-ray discs were too costly for the storage they offered vs hard discs and added only the most marginal improvement over DVD for video vs the size of the files. The cost, speed and size of hard drives far outpaced blu-ray. You get a 10 discs at 25GB a piece that is only a measily 250GB for roughly $12-16 bucks. You can get a 3 Terabyte hard drive for around $100, it's faster to copy and record things to and you can re-use it.
"I just don't know what makes him think that the current administration is on the "respect freedom" side of things."
He means respecting the freedom for the rich to do whatever they want, and for everyone else to suck it up.
... to survive, find mates and have kids. Everything else we got is extra. No one should expect the brain to do much more than what it was originally selected to do.
... online DRM'd games lead to this naturally. Game devs/pubs brought this on themselves by taking servers out of the control of players hands because of greed. Many people get hacks to get around paying for anything in online DRM'd games. Who'd of thought it, cheats being cheated by the original cheats (game pubs/devs).
... one issue based bullshit is not going to stop this. We had SOPA and CISPA and they are preparing CISPA round 3.
The internet is something 'everyone can agree on' but unfortunately most people trying to 'protect the internet' are too historically and politically illiterate to really do so. None of you who are hardcore capitalists are "protectors" of the internet, in fact why SOPA and TPP are trying to lock it down is BECAUSE they fear the masses rising up against corporate (capitalist) powers. That's why we got governments and corporations going gangusters on surveillance worldwide.
If you doubt this check the spyfiles
https://wikileaks.org/the-spyf...
Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington.
Consider the G20 Protests in Toronto
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
This is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Look at the following graphs:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
And then...
WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap
http://www.businessinsider.com...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Free markets?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I...
"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.
In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture—attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies—to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion."
... food companies have scientists working 24/7 to hack human tastebuds for profit.
Much of this problem simply comes down to the fact that bad food is engineered to taste better than natural food we found in our environment over evolutionary history. The problem is our bodies aren't designed to deal with this new food environment and hence obesity. The environment that kids are raised in by clueless over stressed parents and shitty school environments doesn't help either.
Last but not least, human beings are not free. Probably one of the biggest myths that go along with the myth of responsibility.
Sam harris on free will
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"FTFY. If you're making this about (R) vs (D), you're part of the problem."
If you're making this about your libertarian or other capitalist fantasies you are part of the problem.
War is a racket
http://www.amazon.com/War-Rack...
WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap
http://www.businessinsider.com...
On elites
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Free markets?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I...
"We now live in two Americas. One—now the minority—functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other—the majority—is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority—which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected—presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society."
.. they got to be joking. Considering everyone is racing to total information awareness to gain competitive advantage (NSA, GCHQ, etc). There's no stopping this, this is all token bullshit at this point. The only way to deal with this is to make the opaque institutions more transparent. You create data wherever you go, modern technology is so embedded in everyday life that it's impossible not for someone to build any kind of profile on you. Corporations have long been buying and selling data six ways to sunday, we can already assume they (NSA and helpers) will turn the packets they are harvesting off the net from anything you've ever posted into a permanent dossier on you.
Let's just be honest the leaders don't give a fuck, Obama is a moderate right republican. Most voters in North america are completely and totally politically illiterate.
What the elite are worried about is political awakening... Many in the bottom billions of poor on planet earth are in abject poverty and oppression. Elites want to keep those people in their place, hence the elites desire to control the internet.
People are waking up to the fact that the governments are all power hungry and corrupt and are not there to serve the interests of the people, but that of the global elite and the multi-billion dollar corporations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
... it's about setting the tone for a story and then radically breaking from it. We saw this in mass effect 3's ending and Mass effect 2's ret-conning. ME3's ending was just fucking awful for all the amazing shit they set up in Mass effect 1. The reapers had a real mystery and atmosphere and that was slowly deflated by mistakes made in ME2 (aka the human abuction to create a human reaper, like wtf?) and then totally screwed over by ME3 with star child stupid ass choice ending.
If a game gives gamers the impression of being a serious story they set up those expectations. No one playing say Saints row 3 or SR4 is going to have serious expectations about the story. But it's different for RPG's like mass effect, etc. When you give the story a serious tone and show serious effort and then start phoning it in that's when gamers get pissed off. You need to decide from the start whether your story is going to be a serious effort or a half assed one and don't give gamers the impression otherwise.
"When will common people realize that invading privacy is a crime?"
Probably never, the enlightenment was wrong about how the brain worked, see here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
... 80% of you in the US are competing over 5% of the money in the economy, you guys have no idea how unequal your society has become and you keep voting for more of getting screwed.
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
How you spend your time online, what you play, what websites you access. That information can be correlated and traced back to you. Say you move to another country, fire up steam. bam IP address, etc. Anytime you are tied to a website that you are communicating with you are leaving breadcrumbs from which who you are, how you spend your time and what kind of person you are can be reconstructed with math and theory.
"The points is SO WHAT? Where's the Evil part?"
NSA and other government agencies taking advantage of security holes in steam or infiltrating valve to spy on you and collect data (aka conversations, etc, etc). Anything chained to online DRM naturally leaves you open to being spied on.
Not only that, should valve store sensitive data on their servers about you (studies/etc). This could be stolen by hackers. Online just opens a huge can of worms. You're not thinking about what being exposed to the online world really means. This is why DRM is such a pain in the ass.
Unfortunately you don't understand what science has discovered, human beings aren't very good judges of their own thinking and reasoning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
. . . the last time I checked, the Economist was not a US publication. Does the BBC World News have a, "US centric perspective," too?
Yes.
(from citigroup memo download below)
http://pissedoffwoman.files.wo...
http://pissedoffwoman.files.wo...
http://pissedoffwoman.files.wo...
At the beginning of the first memo "Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances", the analysts introduce the subject:
Little of this note should tally with conventional thinking. Indeed, traditional thinking is likely to have issues with most of it. We will posit that:
1) the world is dividing into two blocs - the plutonomies, where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few, and the rest.
Plutonomies have occurred before in sixteenth century Spain, in seventeenth century Holland, the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties in the U.S. What are the common drivers of Plutonomy?
Disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist- friendly cooperative governments, an international dimension of immigrants and overseas conquests invigorating wealth creation, the rule of law, and patenting inventions. Often these wealth waves involve great complexity, exploited best by the rich and educated of the time.
2) We project that the plutonomies (the U.S., UK, and Canada) will likely see even more income inequality, disproportionately feeding off a further rise in the profit share in their economies, capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven productivity, and globalization.
Citigroup explains how the "non-rich" consumers become increasingly irrelevant within the "plutonomies":
4) In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in
number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take.
There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie. Consensus analyses that do not tease out the profound impact of the plutonomy on spending power, debt loads, savings rates (and hence current account deficits), oil price impacts etc, i.e., focus on the “average”consumer are flawed from the start. It is easy to drown in a lake with an average depth of 4 feet, if one steps into its deeper extremes. Since consumption accounts for 65% of the world economy, and consumer staples and discretionary sectors for 19.8% of the MSCI AC World Index, understanding how the plutonomy impacts consumption is key for equity market participants.
The analysts of Citigroup then invent a new term - "The New Managerial Aristocracy":
THE UNITED STATES PLUTONOMY - THE GILDED AGE, THE ROARING TWENTIES, AND THE NEW MANAGERIAL ARISTOCRACY
Let’s dive into some of the details. As Figure 1 shows the top 1% of households in the U.S., (about 1 million households) accounted for about 20% of overall U.S. income in 2000, slightly smaller than the share of income of the bottom 60% of households put together. That’s about 1 million households compared with 60 million households, both with similar slices of the income pie!
Clearly, the analysis of the top 1% of U.S. households is paramount. The usual analysis of the “average” U.S. consumer is flawed from the start. To continue with the U.S., the top 1% of households also account for 33% of net worth, greater than the bottom 90% of households put together. It gets better(or worse, depe
You won't get the US centric perspective that you get from the economist.
http://www.paecon.net/
"The rational in that post made no sense at all. Knowledge must be based on fact, "
Thats because YOU don't know the science... is your mind in a position to know what the facts are? Your post demonstrates your overwhelming illiteracy with regards to the brain sciences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Even if this conclusion is wrong, what do you think the proper method is to deal with the irrational nature of humans? Set up some sort of inner cabal of "great minds" to run the world (ignoring the fact they're just as human, therefore just as irrational, as anyone else)? Try to find some inhuman ("angelic") agent to run the world, and hope their goals remain humanly comprehensible? Or just give up and go back to the caves?"
Say me and you don't have time to figure out enough while we are alive, we can agree there is a reality out there that we need to know to survive yes? Our main problem as human beings as there is no consensus as to what 'reality' is, or who's judgement is functioning properly (aka people feel left out, hurt feelings, 'fairness',etc). Plato explored this problem, since it is in no way new.
So let us up the stakes, let's say there's a nuclear bomb and we know there is only a tiny number of educated people that can diffuse it. (This is why we have education after all). Now probably even the most (insert political label here) takes physics seriously provided they as an animal have a deep respect for science and evidence over their feelings. AKA survival and truth comes before politics, and politics has to change if it gets in the way of survival in this case. So when push comes to shove we want someone who is scientifically informed about the laws of nature, we don't want joe sixpack (aka chances of disarming the bomb go way up and that is a good thing).
Survival being something everyone can agree on and usually when someone tries to be a dumbass we get rid of him from our society/tribe, yes?
So we'd develop a system of reasoning related to long term survival, now in the ancient world... it would make sense anyone who disagree'd with it we'd get rid of (either by prison or killing depending on the situation). Since if you don't survive, there isn't really any room for debate now is there?
Now in our time, the "good" half of the elites in the corporate world and upper classes believe in the dictatorship of the best and brightest (aka the smart over the stupid). The downside is that there is not enough of them and there is no guarantee that they are mature (just look at the bailouts).
Bailout vid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Basically it would come down to us developing techniques to ferret out our own lies and illusions, there must be a method that we just haven't discovered/come up with yet (consider you reading this right now, you know that you 100% exist in order to read this text, so we begin with the brute fact that we exist, and try to figure out the relationships that are connected to this one brute fact of existence which we can base our knowledge upon). Since even if our brain is flawed, there still must be stuff that works 100% or else we couldn't have survived. So the answer MUST be in our biology. Just what is the ruler the mind is using to measure the universe, at the foundation of mind there must be an absolute idea/concept from which to build a theory of truth regarding long term survival. (aka the door is open or closed, if we couldn't know, we couldn't decide and hence hurt ourselves).
Now the utlimate rule by which people stay or go is: People who have respect for truth, survival and the laws of nature and people who don't. Our problem comes with giving respect to people who just don't value these things. These people need to be mocked/shamed/whatever'd. We'd have to find some way to deal with them.
That's what this comes down to in the end, those of us who are adults and the rest of mankind who are teenagers/childish. Since a respect for what is true is respect for your own survival (aka the highest value, since it is the foundation of everything else we value).
Tragically you are uneducated and uninformed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
What you're stating would be great in a RATIONAL non superstitious world, where peoples brains worked according to enlightenment ideals but they don't.
If we took most of the people who voted 'against' global warming in the general population, how high do you think their scientific literacy would be? Human brains aren't blackboards, once bad information gets inside a persons mind through media it's damn near impossible to get it out. Think of it in terms of entropy, the energy you need to transform that brain back into a state where it has what is reasonable is overwhelming, especially when you're considering millions of people and let's say they don't trust you because you are black or for some other stupid unconscious reason.
Most people are not in a position to understand themselves and their own thinking, that's what the science says, aka, the average person is not qualified to 'scientifically debate' things like climate change. Or would you disagree with that assessment?
If you doubt it, look at the science:
http://bit.ly/OVMvjd
"So the answer to the grandparent's question is "Yes, I do fly off the handle much.""
Flying off the handle suggest I had an "over reaction", rather than a justified reaction to pseudo-intellectual geeks and fake nerds that comment on slashdot.
"Your post is self-defeating. First you claim no one is an authority on what he or she knows, then you claim to know something "
No it isn't self defeating, there are people who CAN reason through natural unconscious superiority, not that they are able to take credit for that. Because smart people are unable to justify why it is they know what they know because it simply takes too much time. i.e. our brains simply do not work like we think they do. Consider if I asked you how much a given representation of really boring bits of your everyday visual field cost in biological terms (how much does it cost to perceive a door, a car, etc). You would have no fucking answer, yet you are able to do it. So we are capable of knowing things and not being able to explain why we know them. The hard part is trying to explain to OTHER PEOPLE not because they are stupid but because they are unaware that they are flawed (aka it's a time vs resources vs what is that animals modus operandi problem). Human beings are locked in their brain circuitry, you search whats in your memory to make a judgement, the problem is you can't see the contents of your own memory. Most of the information you're using to make judgments is not available to your conscious awareness.
I'm interested in truth for no political reason, I just want to know how the universe works, but for others they see it as an attack on their religion, politics, etc.
The problem is to find truth you have to take the attitude to rip it apart all the time (how can this be wrong? etc?). The problem is you wouldn't be able to know if you were in a position to do this unless you already possessed that unconscious superiority. Now this doesn't mean it's impossible for you to learn, it just means you'd have to spend an inordinate amount of time with a fine tooth comb going over what it is you know to find the contradictions.
Most of this is really just a lack of time in one's life to ferret out one's own hidden false premises that are just beyond the edge of your conscious awareness.
And I know you've never done it, to really find what is true requires unreal dedication few people have and you have to do it not in an argumentative environment or mode of operation because you want to not deceive yourself. When you're trying to "win" you're not trying to understand. The natural world is an unfolding process and that is the approach you have to take.
You are just as scientifically illiterate as the prior poster. Your brain doesn't literally live in reality, and science has discovered that *people are not* good judges of what they know and what they don't know about themselves and reality. So that means everyone is affected. So a good thing to do at this point would be to try to destroy what you think it is you know by going and asking people who are experts in the topic and I know you and the prior poster have not thought about this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"You're irrational."
Actually it's you who are irrational, because I KNOW you are scientifically illiterate about how your own brain works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Your brain DOESN'T live in reality, it lives in it's own abstract representational space which has some bits of reality, but you are not in a good position to understand what you don't know and science says so! Of course that would require education you are lacking.