Not that anyone reads the classics any more...but Plato's "Republic" outlined a system where, the higher up one was in the political hierarchy, the more spartan their lifestyle was. The idea was to discourage people from entering politics unless their heart was truly in it.
Some of the aspects of the system were a bit totalitarian and heavy-handed, but still, it seems like it'd be a lot better than the god-awful mess we have now.
Our two party system only works were the two parties are not the same.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again...the left-leaning half of the Ruling Party is no more, or less, virtuous than the right-leaning half of the Ruling Party.
The only real difference between them is how they want to kill us. The left want to smother us in a stifling nanny-state bureaucracy that'll collapse under its own weight, and the right want to abandon us to fend for ourselves. The latter is more sustainable, but either way we die a miserable death.
Why not? After all, Yes album-cover artist Roger Dean is suing James Cameron because he thinks "Avatar" looks too much like his acid-drenched artwork...
Star Trek 5 was a disaster all around. And even Back to the Future had the sub-par part III.
I liked Star Trek 5! I've actually watched it several times. <spoiler>Spock's brother, meeting "God", and seeing a Klingon apologize made it worth it all by itself.</spoiler>
And I thought Back To The Future 2 was totally depressing. At least 3 was funny and entertaining.
So a "repressive" government (like Russia) is asking for a U.N. takeover of the Internet, to the great consternation of "freedom-loving" governments (like the U.S.).
Given recent revelations, it doesn't seem like the U.S. government is very freedom-loving any more.
So it's really between governments that don't pretend to love freedom, and governments that pretend to. No real difference except for the pretense.
I was a teenage pinheaded computer hacker, back in the day. ("Pinheaded" in the sense that I never stole anything, or caused any damage...I would break into a system and then do the computer equivalent of bouncing around like Daffy Duck — "Woo hoo! Woo hoo! Woo hoo!" The owners of the system would quickly realize that someone had broken in, and then work to close the hole.)
But my 18th birthday rolled around, and I decided to clean up my ethics, and only program for legitimate purposes.
WHAT AN IDIOT I WAS!
If I had kept up with it, upgraded my hacking skills to the Internet era, and worked to find security flaws created by lazy/stupid programmers, I would not only be working for the government, but I'd be hella rich.
Instead, I have to work with those lazy/stupid programmers on a daily basis, and have to deal with their sullen vitriol when I happen to point out that the code they squeezed out of their ass isn't the crown of creation.
I am so dumb. For this reason alone, I deserve my lousy career.
To be fair, I make far far less than you since I'm in college and working nearly fulltime at a 9.50 an hour job. And fail to see how you are barely getting by.
I'm barely getting by because I keep having to squander my savings during periods of unemployment.
And I had to put myself through my last year-and-a-half of college, taking classes full-time and working as much as I could (about 3/4 time). So I've been where you are. But for me, it's 20 years later.
There are people that make 20k a year that can afford a house. A large house? No. But a house.
You have to factor the savings of living in "the Hood" versus how much you're going to get stolen from you. It's cheaper to pay more and live in a nicer neighborhood.
Or why not just have/one/ car instead?
I need something to drive while the other car's getting fixed.
If you can't afford these things why not get a roommate?
I had an absolutely horrible experience with a roommate several years ago. He had been one of my closest childhood friends. Out of nowhere, he turned into a violent psychopath, crashed one of my cars, stole several things from me, and skipped town. I never saw that coming to save my life. After that, I've never been able to justify the risk of having a roommate.
Oh I see now, you're just trolling to bemoan the state of affairs in the US.
No, the purpose of my original post was to point out that this person was completely out of touch with reality, and was substituting a "positive attitude" for actual workable logic.
Can't get a job? Maybe it's time to roll your own. You're very good at what you do with several years of experience in the business. Surely you can think of something that all the companies you tried to apply to would buy from your company. Asperger's doesn't matter, you're the boss. Just hire someone else to handle sales and PR.
Asperger's does matter. How am I supposed to pick a good person to handle sales/PR? I don't know how to pick a good person who's good at that sort of thing. It'd be very likely that they'd drain all the accounts and skip town.
He's probably one of those ones that deserve top tier pay. So whenever he gets a job offer for 3% more salary, he jumps ship.
I do deserve top-tier pay — after 20 years in the industry, I'd better, otherwise I'd be a real idiot. But no, I don't jump ship if I get another offer — I'm loyal. That's probably one reason my job searches are so angst-ridden — I don't look for a job until I'm actually unemployed.
A few years ago, I worked for a company that, after 4 years, had to shut down. They wanted to continue with a vastly reduced staff; I became part of that staff, even though it was a major pay cut. Over the next year, my pay kept getting cut more and more, and my hours got reduced more and more. Finally, I had no choice but to look for another job. But I put up with this for an entire year before finally "jumping ship".
Therefore, I think your criticism is unwarranted.
Outside of the large external factors (the dot-com bubble bursting, the outsourcing phenomenon, the guest-worker phenomenon, the "perfect fit" phenomenon, and the fact that 70% of employees are not actively engaged at work), I think my real problem is the one described in "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand. I'm Howard Roark. His solution was to persevere until things got better. I don't think I have the strength to do that.
You feel like you are "fighting for scraps" because your big screen TV is 6 years old, you have a surround sound system but you don't like it, and your fridge 10?
No, I feel like I'm fighting for scraps because most of my job applications go completely ignored, and I have no choice but to take the first job offered. And I didn't say that I didn't like my surround-sound system, I said that it doesn't fit in my current house (because the house is too small). You are taking the few parts of my post where I concede your point, removing everything else, and then trying to force a conclusion with extremely selective data. That's very bad logic.
Let me guess...now that I've pointed that out, you hate me, and will now do everything in your power to destroy me. Welcome to my career.
Also consider that maybe, just maybe, you are part of the problem with your ability to get and keep a job. Layoffs are something that everyone is likely to face from time to time, but if you keep losing your job, if you are always having problems finding one, well then perhaps you are doing something wrong. I don't know much about you so I can't say what, but perhaps some introspection is in order. It is like the people who perpetually have bad relationships yet never seem to consider they may have a part of that.
Let me give you an example — this is from my previous job.
Our team was hired by a government agency to solve a problem. They had spent bazillions of dollars on a simulation product from a big defense contractor, but weren't getting value for their money; the product was crap, and the prime contractor had set things up to milk the government for all they were worth. They were the only ones who could write scenarios for their simulation, they took forever to do that, their simulations had little to do with current training doctrine, and they weren't very well done. So my team was hired to fix this.
I reverse-engineered the hell out of their scenarios; their format wasn't documented, so I had little choice. I figured out their format (which consisted of several XML files spread throughout a directory structure). I also figured out that they had thousands of errors spread throughout their 30-odd scenarios, and I reported my findings to everyone involved. That's when the long knives came out. Despite that, my team labored to create an error-checking editor that let anyone create new scenarios for this simulation product. It also allowed existing scenarios to be imported, and all the errors highlighted, so that they could be fixed. Our reward was bureaucracy and vitriol.
And the government agency that had hired us to do this, who had wanted the prime contractor's stranglehold on this project to be broken, reacted to the very predicable vitriol from the prime contractor...by rolling over and playing dead, pretending that the whole thing was our idea, that we came up with this idea all by ourselves solely to hurt the prime contractor's precious little feelings...and left us to hang. It all went downhill from there.
After the first year, our "reward" was to become a direct sub-contractor to this prime contractor, and the torture simply increased. No one in the chain of command, from the NCOICs, all the way up to the LtCol at the Pentagon in charge of all this, and all the DACs in between, would (or could) do anything about this. Eventually, our contract got cancelled for threadbare reasons, and now the government is back to being at the mercy of this prime contractor, and I, and the rest of my team, are out of a job. Our crime was doing what was asked of us, and doing an extremely good job of it.
This is an extreme example, but as far as my career is concerned, it's pretty par for the course.
Perhaps I just have really, really bad luck. But I don't know what to do about that. At least this time, it was a whole team of people that got shafted, instead of just me, so I can finally claim that this happens to people other than just me.
Reread your post. You've claimed to be shitty at managing your money and too crappy at your job to have steady employment.
I'm very good at my job, unless that "job" involves being a good ol' boy and the boss' drinking buddy, in which case, I suck.
And it's not that I'm shitty at managing my money. It's that unemployment is very expensive.
ask your employers and coworkers how you can improve.
I doubt they'd admit that they'd want me to be a worse programmer, so as not to draw attention to their own laziness/incompetence and (statistically) lack of engagement at work.
I've always had a job though so I've really been blessed.
I hope you continue to be blessed. I wouldn't wish my career on my worst enemy.
I can tell you that without Mexicans and other Central Americans this place would have a labor shortage. A severe one. I hear people bitching about illegal immigration but without it businesses would be hurting.
That's completely off-topic, but since you brought it up...we don't have a labor shortage, we have a shortage of labor at a price that the employers are willing to pay. The illegal immigrants you speak of don't make minimum wage; a legal worker would have to be paid minimum wage. The minimum-wage law is the real source of the problem, but it's apparently political suicide to say that.
Obviously your not VERY good at what you do - your obviously a flunky since you can't hold a job with a BS CS since that is one of the most desired skill sets in demand today. I have a BS CS and have never been unemployed since I graduated in 1983. Get a job work hard, go the extra mile, give 110%, study, study, study, and you'll never be out of work again.
As if. My career went down the drain after the dot-com bubble burst. That was followed by the outsourcing phenomenon, the guest-worker phenomenon, and now the "perfect fit" phenomenon. A BS in CS is not desired in the United States these days — not even close.
My best guess as to the real reason my career is such a disaster — aside from the four reasons in the previous paragraph — is that I actually work, and 70% of American employees are not actively engaged at work. When people like that meet someone like me, their only thought is to destroy my reputation by any means necessary, so as to distract from their own laziness and incompetence. It doesn't help that I have Asperger's.
Besides, I'm not going to take crap from a top-poster that doesn't know the difference between "your" and "you're". You are clearly not what you claim to be.
At that income you can afford to own your own house. Not a huge one, but plenty of space.
I've never been able to afford to buy a house, despite several years of an apparently "upper middle class income". For one thing, my employment isn't stable enough, despite having a BS in Computer Science and being very, very good at what I do.
You can afford to have a car that is nice, and in good working order, you don't have to fight with a junker.
My cars are 21 and 26 years old. They're in good working order because I've paid through the nose to keep them maintained.
You can have all the appliances of modern life: dishwasher, fridge, washer/dryer, A/C, stove, etc, etc.
I bought the fridge ~10 years ago on a payment plan. I bought the washer/dryer used from an appliance-repair shop. Everything else in your list came with the (rental) house.
You can get more food than you can or should eat, even if you eat out semi-regularly.
I cook most of my own food, to keep costs down. I buy 50 pound bags of pinto beans for $30. I make a lot of meatloaf and chili.
You can have entertainment, like a bigscreen TV, surround sound, modern computer, broadband Internet, etc.
My widescreen TV is 6 years old, and my newest computer is 7 years old. I have a surround-sound system, but it doesn't fit in my current house.
You have enough money you can afford to put some in savings, to deal with unexpected events and not be thrown into debt by them.
That's all I seem to save up for — periods of unemployment. Retirement is an impossible dream.
I want for nothing, I have an exceedingly good standard of living on a global scale and I am very, very grateful for it.
You won't have it for long. The federal government is bankrupt several times over, and the federal bank is now inventing money out of thin air (not even printing it...it just changes a number in a computer), giving the money away at 0% interest to prop up the stock market, and buying government debt with the money it just created out of thin air. This is not sustainable. The only reason the U.S. gets away with this is that Europe is presently in worse shape.
Do "the 1%" have it better than me? Sure, but I am not "fighting [for] scraps".
I apply for job after job, several of which I match perfectly, and hear nothing back. The book Why Good People Can't Get Jobs provided some catharsis — at least I don't have to feel so paranoid and cynical — but it doesn't actually help to know any of this. I sure feel like I'm fighting for scraps.
Someone once said they'd rather be lucky than smart. Amen to that.
What partisanship? The left-leaning half of the Ruling Party is no more, or less, virtuous than the right-leaning half of the Ruling Party.
The ruling elite that normally dominates the citizenry is operating here as it operates everywhere else in the world, except that here, instead of being right in our faces, it has disguised itself by giving us a false choice. The only real difference between them is how they want to kill us; the left wants to smother us in a nanny state, the right wants to leave us to fend for ourselves. Either way, we die.
You're correct when you say that both parties have pulled this kind of crap, but incorrect when you assume that there is any difference between the two parties.
I'm sorry, but I'm not buying the primary argument here — that this level of surveillance is necessary in order to catch terrorists. (Never mind that it took this scandal leaking for Obama to actually say "terrorists".)
Are terrorists actually stupid enough to communicate using public services like this? You'd think that, at the very least, they'd be using Tor, or their own private equivalents. More likely than not, they're not even communicating electronically; Bin Laden communicated with the outside world through a very non-electronic trusted courier.
It seems to me that their argument is a red herring — that their real purpose is surveilling us, for partisan/corrupt purposes. Witness the harassment of Tea Party groups by the IRS, journalists by the Attorney General, and the NYPD's abuse of that data.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that anyone reads the classics any more...but Plato's "Republic" outlined a system where, the higher up one was in the political hierarchy, the more spartan their lifestyle was. The idea was to discourage people from entering politics unless their heart was truly in it.
Some of the aspects of the system were a bit totalitarian and heavy-handed, but still, it seems like it'd be a lot better than the god-awful mess we have now.
Our two party system only works were the two parties are not the same.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again...the left-leaning half of the Ruling Party is no more, or less, virtuous than the right-leaning half of the Ruling Party.
The only real difference between them is how they want to kill us. The left want to smother us in a stifling nanny-state bureaucracy that'll collapse under its own weight, and the right want to abandon us to fend for ourselves. The latter is more sustainable, but either way we die a miserable death.
Then why hasn't Dick's estate sued?
Why not? After all, Yes album-cover artist Roger Dean is suing James Cameron because he thinks "Avatar" looks too much like his acid-drenched artwork...
At the risk of being modded "flamebait"...
Star Trek 5 was a disaster all around.
And even Back to the Future had the sub-par part III.
I liked Star Trek 5! I've actually watched it several times. <spoiler>Spock's brother, meeting "God", and seeing a Klingon apologize made it worth it all by itself.</spoiler>
And I thought Back To The Future 2 was totally depressing. At least 3 was funny and entertaining.
Ever see a shark eat a zebra?
I can't believe that Sharknado missed that one! Something for the sequel...
I would also like to vouch for AVG being lightweight. I run it on all my machines, including a 7-year-old XP box.
So a "repressive" government (like Russia) is asking for a U.N. takeover of the Internet, to the great consternation of "freedom-loving" governments (like the U.S.).
Given recent revelations, it doesn't seem like the U.S. government is very freedom-loving any more.
So it's really between governments that don't pretend to love freedom, and governments that pretend to. No real difference except for the pretense.
What a sad state of affairs.
I was a teenage pinheaded computer hacker, back in the day. ("Pinheaded" in the sense that I never stole anything, or caused any damage...I would break into a system and then do the computer equivalent of bouncing around like Daffy Duck — "Woo hoo! Woo hoo! Woo hoo!" The owners of the system would quickly realize that someone had broken in, and then work to close the hole.)
But my 18th birthday rolled around, and I decided to clean up my ethics, and only program for legitimate purposes.
WHAT AN IDIOT I WAS!
If I had kept up with it, upgraded my hacking skills to the Internet era, and worked to find security flaws created by lazy/stupid programmers, I would not only be working for the government, but I'd be hella rich.
Instead, I have to work with those lazy/stupid programmers on a daily basis, and have to deal with their sullen vitriol when I happen to point out that the code they squeezed out of their ass isn't the crown of creation.
I am so dumb. For this reason alone, I deserve my lousy career.
Any AV is a waste of money and of CPU cycles, there are no viruses on GNU/Linux.
Then why does rkhunter exist?
To be fair, I make far far less than you since I'm in college and working nearly fulltime at a 9.50 an hour job. And fail to see how you are barely getting by.
I'm barely getting by because I keep having to squander my savings during periods of unemployment.
And I had to put myself through my last year-and-a-half of college, taking classes full-time and working as much as I could (about 3/4 time). So I've been where you are. But for me, it's 20 years later.
There are people that make 20k a year that can afford a house. A large house? No. But a house.
You have to factor the savings of living in "the Hood" versus how much you're going to get stolen from you. It's cheaper to pay more and live in a nicer neighborhood.
Or why not just have /one/ car instead?
I need something to drive while the other car's getting fixed.
If you can't afford these things why not get a roommate?
I had an absolutely horrible experience with a roommate several years ago. He had been one of my closest childhood friends. Out of nowhere, he turned into a violent psychopath, crashed one of my cars, stole several things from me, and skipped town. I never saw that coming to save my life. After that, I've never been able to justify the risk of having a roommate.
Oh I see now, you're just trolling to bemoan the state of affairs in the US.
No, the purpose of my original post was to point out that this person was completely out of touch with reality, and was substituting a "positive attitude" for actual workable logic.
Can't get a job? Maybe it's time to roll your own. You're very good at what you do with several years of experience in the business. Surely you can think of something that all the companies you tried to apply to would buy from your company. Asperger's doesn't matter, you're the boss. Just hire someone else to handle sales and PR.
Asperger's does matter. How am I supposed to pick a good person to handle sales/PR? I don't know how to pick a good person who's good at that sort of thing. It'd be very likely that they'd drain all the accounts and skip town.
He's probably one of those ones that deserve top tier pay. So whenever he gets a job offer for 3% more salary, he jumps ship.
I do deserve top-tier pay — after 20 years in the industry, I'd better, otherwise I'd be a real idiot. But no, I don't jump ship if I get another offer — I'm loyal. That's probably one reason my job searches are so angst-ridden — I don't look for a job until I'm actually unemployed.
A few years ago, I worked for a company that, after 4 years, had to shut down. They wanted to continue with a vastly reduced staff; I became part of that staff, even though it was a major pay cut. Over the next year, my pay kept getting cut more and more, and my hours got reduced more and more. Finally, I had no choice but to look for another job. But I put up with this for an entire year before finally "jumping ship".
Therefore, I think your criticism is unwarranted.
Outside of the large external factors (the dot-com bubble bursting, the outsourcing phenomenon, the guest-worker phenomenon, the "perfect fit" phenomenon, and the fact that 70% of employees are not actively engaged at work), I think my real problem is the one described in "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand. I'm Howard Roark. His solution was to persevere until things got better. I don't think I have the strength to do that.
You feel like you are "fighting for scraps" because your big screen TV is 6 years old, you have a surround sound system but you don't like it, and your fridge 10?
No, I feel like I'm fighting for scraps because most of my job applications go completely ignored, and I have no choice but to take the first job offered. And I didn't say that I didn't like my surround-sound system, I said that it doesn't fit in my current house (because the house is too small). You are taking the few parts of my post where I concede your point, removing everything else, and then trying to force a conclusion with extremely selective data. That's very bad logic.
Let me guess...now that I've pointed that out, you hate me, and will now do everything in your power to destroy me. Welcome to my career.
Also consider that maybe, just maybe, you are part of the problem with your ability to get and keep a job. Layoffs are something that everyone is likely to face from time to time, but if you keep losing your job, if you are always having problems finding one, well then perhaps you are doing something wrong. I don't know much about you so I can't say what, but perhaps some introspection is in order. It is like the people who perpetually have bad relationships yet never seem to consider they may have a part of that.
Let me give you an example — this is from my previous job.
Our team was hired by a government agency to solve a problem. They had spent bazillions of dollars on a simulation product from a big defense contractor, but weren't getting value for their money; the product was crap, and the prime contractor had set things up to milk the government for all they were worth. They were the only ones who could write scenarios for their simulation, they took forever to do that, their simulations had little to do with current training doctrine, and they weren't very well done. So my team was hired to fix this.
I reverse-engineered the hell out of their scenarios; their format wasn't documented, so I had little choice. I figured out their format (which consisted of several XML files spread throughout a directory structure). I also figured out that they had thousands of errors spread throughout their 30-odd scenarios, and I reported my findings to everyone involved. That's when the long knives came out. Despite that, my team labored to create an error-checking editor that let anyone create new scenarios for this simulation product. It also allowed existing scenarios to be imported, and all the errors highlighted, so that they could be fixed. Our reward was bureaucracy and vitriol.
And the government agency that had hired us to do this, who had wanted the prime contractor's stranglehold on this project to be broken, reacted to the very predicable vitriol from the prime contractor...by rolling over and playing dead, pretending that the whole thing was our idea, that we came up with this idea all by ourselves solely to hurt the prime contractor's precious little feelings...and left us to hang. It all went downhill from there.
After the first year, our "reward" was to become a direct sub-contractor to this prime contractor, and the torture simply increased. No one in the chain of command, from the NCOICs, all the way up to the LtCol at the Pentagon in charge of all this, and all the DACs in between, would (or could) do anything about this. Eventually, our contract got cancelled for threadbare reasons, and now the government is back to being at the mercy of this prime contractor, and I, and the rest of my team, are out of a job. Our crime was doing what was asked of us, and doing an extremely good job of it.
This is an extreme example, but as far as my career is concerned, it's pretty par for the course.
Perhaps I just have really, really bad luck. But I don't know what to do about that. At least this time, it was a whole team of people that got shafted, instead of just me, so I can finally claim that this happens to people other than just me.
Reread your post. You've claimed to be shitty at managing your money and too crappy at your job to have steady employment.
I'm very good at my job, unless that "job" involves being a good ol' boy and the boss' drinking buddy, in which case, I suck.
And it's not that I'm shitty at managing my money. It's that unemployment is very expensive.
ask your employers and coworkers how you can improve.
I doubt they'd admit that they'd want me to be a worse programmer, so as not to draw attention to their own laziness/incompetence and (statistically) lack of engagement at work.
I've always had a job though so I've really been blessed.
I hope you continue to be blessed. I wouldn't wish my career on my worst enemy.
I can tell you that without Mexicans and other Central Americans this place would have a labor shortage. A severe one. I hear people bitching about illegal immigration but without it businesses would be hurting.
That's completely off-topic, but since you brought it up...we don't have a labor shortage, we have a shortage of labor at a price that the employers are willing to pay. The illegal immigrants you speak of don't make minimum wage; a legal worker would have to be paid minimum wage. The minimum-wage law is the real source of the problem, but it's apparently political suicide to say that.
Move the fuck out of California or New York. That is why you are struggling.
I live in Arizona.
The police are already much more heavily armed than any regular person could ever hope to be.
You must not live in Arizona, Texas, or Montana.
If I had mod points, I would totally upvote that. That was awesome.
It is on slashdot because it is a conservative victory, and this is a conservative web site.
Really? Slashdot, as a whole, seemed far more anarcho-capitalist to me than conservative.
But I guess people will see what they want to see.
Obviously your not VERY good at what you do - your obviously a flunky since you can't hold a job with a BS CS since that is one of the most desired skill sets in demand today. I have a BS CS and have never been unemployed since I graduated in 1983. Get a job work hard, go the extra mile, give 110%, study, study, study, and you'll never be out of work again.
As if. My career went down the drain after the dot-com bubble burst. That was followed by the outsourcing phenomenon, the guest-worker phenomenon, and now the "perfect fit" phenomenon. A BS in CS is not desired in the United States these days — not even close.
My best guess as to the real reason my career is such a disaster — aside from the four reasons in the previous paragraph — is that I actually work, and 70% of American employees are not actively engaged at work. When people like that meet someone like me, their only thought is to destroy my reputation by any means necessary, so as to distract from their own laziness and incompetence. It doesn't help that I have Asperger's.
Besides, I'm not going to take crap from a top-poster that doesn't know the difference between "your" and "you're". You are clearly not what you claim to be.
At that income you can afford to own your own house. Not a huge one, but plenty of space.
I've never been able to afford to buy a house, despite several years of an apparently "upper middle class income". For one thing, my employment isn't stable enough, despite having a BS in Computer Science and being very, very good at what I do.
You can afford to have a car that is nice, and in good working order, you don't have to fight with a junker.
My cars are 21 and 26 years old. They're in good working order because I've paid through the nose to keep them maintained.
You can have all the appliances of modern life: dishwasher, fridge, washer/dryer, A/C, stove, etc, etc.
I bought the fridge ~10 years ago on a payment plan. I bought the washer/dryer used from an appliance-repair shop. Everything else in your list came with the (rental) house.
You can get more food than you can or should eat, even if you eat out semi-regularly.
I cook most of my own food, to keep costs down. I buy 50 pound bags of pinto beans for $30. I make a lot of meatloaf and chili.
You can have entertainment, like a bigscreen TV, surround sound, modern computer, broadband Internet, etc.
My widescreen TV is 6 years old, and my newest computer is 7 years old. I have a surround-sound system, but it doesn't fit in my current house.
You have enough money you can afford to put some in savings, to deal with unexpected events and not be thrown into debt by them.
That's all I seem to save up for — periods of unemployment. Retirement is an impossible dream.
I want for nothing, I have an exceedingly good standard of living on a global scale and I am very, very grateful for it.
You won't have it for long. The federal government is bankrupt several times over, and the federal bank is now inventing money out of thin air (not even printing it...it just changes a number in a computer), giving the money away at 0% interest to prop up the stock market, and buying government debt with the money it just created out of thin air. This is not sustainable. The only reason the U.S. gets away with this is that Europe is presently in worse shape.
Do "the 1%" have it better than me? Sure, but I am not "fighting [for] scraps".
I apply for job after job, several of which I match perfectly, and hear nothing back. The book Why Good People Can't Get Jobs provided some catharsis — at least I don't have to feel so paranoid and cynical — but it doesn't actually help to know any of this. I sure feel like I'm fighting for scraps.
Someone once said they'd rather be lucky than smart. Amen to that.
They bill themselves as "the world's most private search engine" but that doesn't really mean anything.
It means about as much as "the world's most virtuous whore".
I would rather take the chance and try fend for myself rather than being smothered by a Leftist nanny state.
You missed the point. It's a false choice. There are more possibilities than these two degrading deaths.
What partisanship? The left-leaning half of the Ruling Party is no more, or less, virtuous than the right-leaning half of the Ruling Party.
The ruling elite that normally dominates the citizenry is operating here as it operates everywhere else in the world, except that here, instead of being right in our faces, it has disguised itself by giving us a false choice. The only real difference between them is how they want to kill us; the left wants to smother us in a nanny state, the right wants to leave us to fend for ourselves. Either way, we die.
You're correct when you say that both parties have pulled this kind of crap, but incorrect when you assume that there is any difference between the two parties.
I'm sorry, but I'm not buying the primary argument here — that this level of surveillance is necessary in order to catch terrorists. (Never mind that it took this scandal leaking for Obama to actually say "terrorists".)
Are terrorists actually stupid enough to communicate using public services like this? You'd think that, at the very least, they'd be using Tor, or their own private equivalents. More likely than not, they're not even communicating electronically; Bin Laden communicated with the outside world through a very non-electronic trusted courier.
It seems to me that their argument is a red herring — that their real purpose is surveilling us, for partisan/corrupt purposes. Witness the harassment of Tea Party groups by the IRS, journalists by the Attorney General, and the NYPD's abuse of that data.