Instead of blaming it on the "subcultures", blame the greater society in which these subcultures were born.
Why? The "greater society" regularly produces clear-thinking, educated, hard working people for whom minimum wage is a distant memory by the time they're still young but on to their second, better job. The problem actually is constrained to sub-sections of the society. Places where the government spends more per student on education, positions endless arrays of social services, and heaps money in program after program designed to provide the entitled equal outcomes you think should occur. But it doesn't work. Why? Because it's not about how much money is thrown into such programs, or whether the mom and pop store on the corner is suddenly force by the government to pay $15/hour to the kid who comes by for a couple hours a day after school to unload a truck or whatever.
What it's about is what happens when that kid goes home. Do his parents speak English? Do they get involved in his homework? Do they stay away from street crime and other influences that wreck households? Are they giving the kid the huge, proven advantage of having given birth to him in a family that will actually bother to have two parents pooling their time and resources to give the kid a decent start in life?
Should "the greater society" step in and force uninterested, absent parents to spend the 18 years of daily hours needed to raise a productive human being?
I'm always amazed that Americans are so poorly paid, and have terrible work conditions
And I'm always amazed that people think the condition of one American is the condition of all Americans. I have it on good authority that there is homeless street person in Berlin. I'm amazed that Germans have no homes and live in the street! Right? Right.
What you should be amazed by is that there are subcultures in the US that still haven't figured out that treating school like a chore to be avoided, and one's own children like an annoying stray dog to be left outside do its own devices results in... adults with very poor prospects.
Entry-level, minimum wage jobs aren't supposed to be careers. It's the sort of thing a high school kid or college freshman should be holding while getting ready for a real life. When some poor kid is born into an uneducated household with only one parent sticking around, and attends (for a little while) a school where the kids all agree that learning to do things like communicate clearly and think critically is for chumps, and the real local power structure is a spectrum of street gangs and thugs... yeah, it doesn't go well. So, Mr. Foreigner Who Comes From A Place Without Any Such Problems, what do you propose? Criminalize crappy parenting and toxic social influences?
Net Neutrality says that no service can be prioritized over another (Netflix over Hulu for example).
Which is why some idiot will find a way to complain that using a shorter/faster path to overwhelmingly popular name servers (like Google's, as opposed to very sleepy servers run by smaller operations) will some how be Eeeevil, despite it greatly speeding up life for all sorts of people and services.
Stock valuations are based not only on actual assets, but future growth and earnings potential. If I buy company X, it's because I think company X has a good product, business plan, and management and is going to be able to grow faster than inflation and faster than their competitors. I certainly don't want them to liquidate their current assets and give me my money back.
You've missed an important detail. They're not comparing the stock valuation to the assets alone. They're comparing the stock valuation to what the company would sell for if purchased. When you sell a company, you're also selling the "good will" and other value inertia things like brand familiarity, the value that will come from having the company in the future, etc.
The Breitbart bits at the end of TFS politicize what would have otherwise been a mediocre Sunday Slashdot submission.
So the fact that she actually did those things makes talking about them political? Or does pretending she didn't do them and talking around them make the conversation political? Hillary-centric submissions that wish away her behavior are the politicized ones.
And if I don't? If I find it's a far simpler business model to just let everyone wander up, and use (or ignore) web content without having to handle account management and transaction fees (and fraud, etc) per visitor, and just deal instead with a much smaller universe of ad agencies to fund the site... so? All you have to do is walk away. You don't have to see it. You don't have to care about it, and you don't have to wish that it would die. You can just stick with the web sites you prefer. Still not clear on what your problem is with that.
So, it appears that you are just one link in the chain intended to bind "consumers" into acting as you wish them to act - that is, to provide you with ever more money.
Since you don't actually do anything for a living, how do you bind other people into being your slaves and giving you food, housing, and the rest? Genuinely curious. Please be specific.
In the meantime, what is your specific problem with someone playing the roll of tending to the hosting environment that supports other people's web sites? You seem to think it's sinister to charge people for the professional service of managing that part of their IT landscape... but if everyone did it for themselves (exactly the same thing, and paid for it in having less time to do other things, instead), then that would be noble, and OK with you? Right.
So - shut up and get to work. BTW - WTF have you produced that I might be interested in? Anything? Gimme a link, and I'll tell you what I think it is worth.
If I thought you were part of my audience, or (more importantly, for me) the audience that my clients' customers intend to cultivate, and you weren't already aware of their content, products, or services, then I'd have something to think about. This isn't the venue for that, even if you were the slightest bit sincere.
Your attitude need not be passed on. YOU are the one with a sense of entitlement.
What? I'm the who foots the bill if I want something, want to risk resources to make something, or make poor choices. The people with whom I'm debating here want what I and/or my clients do for free, but also think that the source of money that provides it to them should be cut off, all because they think - among other things - that it costs "$5 to run a web site." It's possible you don't actually know what "entitled" means, especially in this context.
If you feel that I'm violating your rights by skipping ads, I guess I'll see you in court.
Not worth the trouble. But it is worth pointing out that you're a whiny leech. In my experience, people who conduct themselves that way in one area do so in other areas, as well. Which is why this sort of thing especially matters. People with a sense of entitlement tend to want others to do everything for them, not just create and host web content. I can tell you're one of those people.
What the hell are you talking about? The mutual decision by Pepsi and the web site's operator to include some of Pepsi's material doesn't obligate you in any way to buy Pepsi products. If Pepsi does, or doesn't sell some more of their products because of their ad, that's a matter for their internal marketing people to weigh and live with. But the person who runs the ad-carrying web site has already completed their business with Pepsi. Not that you don't already understand this (surely), and you're just trolling. Not sure who you think you're fooling, really.
Setting up a web site and typing some shit isn't all that complicated or expensive.
Really. That's what you think is involved in running a business? In producing enough content for the people who do so to actually earn a living? Nobody's entitled to a living, but that doesn't mean you should deliberately kid yourself that the overhead involved in running a high profile web presence is... $5.
You can just run a web site on any old PC, too.
Really? I run web sites. For a living. One of them involves two rack cabinets full of equipment, and more that's mirrored a thousand miles away. There are about 40 servers involved (some physical, some virtual), redundant storage, physical security, substantial redundant power and network operations, and people involved who absolutely do not want the back end databases to live on "the cloud" or operate in a massive multi-tenant platform like AWS or Azure. Let me guess... you think that all probably costs something really high, like $20 a month, right?
And no, a browser/server protocol like HTTP doesn't trump copyright considerations, trademarks, or other terms of use. Just like the protocol for opening the door to a retail store ("push, with hand, walk in") doesn't grant you license to walk out with whatever you like once you've done so.
Just pointing out that you're a whiny douchebag leach, and a hypocrite. You're the one who has to live with yourself. Everyone else just has to work a little harder to make up for your sense of entitlement, that's all. Please don't vote or reproduce. Thanks.
I was happy with the internet before ads and would welcome the return of an ads-free internet. The only commercial sites that I have any use for, are vendor sites whose products I already use and therefore need support.
Which means you don't even visit web sites that rely on advertising to cover the content creation and hosting costs. Which means you really have nothing to complain about, right? Right.
It didn't. You're just oddly confused (or pretending to be) over who is consuming a web site's content, and who is writing checks to the web site's operator. If you just visit and slurp up content, you're consuming that content. If you're doing business with that web site's operator (say, buying some ad space from them), you're a customer. You know, the one who foots the bill for the service you in turn get.
Keep calling me a consumer and I'll keep blocking your ads
So you're not consuming their content? If you're their "customer" instead, are you writing them a check every month to help defray their hosting and content creation costs? No. Their customers are the people who pay them (advertisers), and you are a consumer of the content that's presented.
I have no problem paying for a subscription (or forums account) for sites which matter to me. All of the truly important information I have found on the Internet has come from small enthusiast-run sites with no advertising, so I'm not too fussed if a majority of ad-sponsored sites either go subscription-only or simply die out.
Shockingly, a whole lot of people are more engaged than you with the wider world, and with subject matter that might newly interest them - perhaps even by the hour - because they aren't laser-focused on one or two topics in life.
And you have no right to someone else's hard work while ignoring the terms under which they're offering it to you.
In addition I want the concept of ad revenue generated content to die.
What color unicorn ponies would like, to go with your new information economy that does everything for you for free? Or are you just expecting people to run datacenters for free, so that it doesn't cost your favorite content people anything (except their own time, and the cost to produce the content you want) to host the servers you want to access? Do you really want every web site that isn't being run by a foundation (which you're hoping OTHER people will fund), someone's tax dollars (not yours, obviously), and high-overhead subscription transactions, to go away? How about this: since you don't care about those web sites, you don't have to visit them and the whole issue goes away. I'm sure you can find an army of like-minded people who produce and fund the delivery of everything you want at no cost to you. Have fun with that.
"Your autonomy" isn't what pays the hosting bills for that web site content or forum you want to have magically for free. You're not forced to watch ads. Because you're not forced to connect your browser to somebody else's server in order to amuse or inform yourself.
Have you ever studied the 10 plagues visited against the Egyptians for their slavery of the Jewish people?
You mean the fable? The fantastical mythological, supernatural narrative spun by religious authorities in support of their world view? Yeah, that's hard to miss.
Especially the slaughter of every first-born Egyptian child?
What about it? Are you saying that because a tyrant slaughtered a bunch of kids thousands of years ago, that therefore a crazy Islamist and his brother might be excused for blowing the guts out a kid standing next to one of their planted bombs?
The list goes on and on. I'm afraid that slaughtering children for religious sacrifice, even innocent children to teach their parents a lesson, as a long cultural history.
So does hunting down rival tribe members, killing, cooking, and eating them, in some ancient cultures. So?
That doesn't make it "rational", but it's certainly historically well founded.
Well founded? The moral foundation for that sort of stuff couldn't be shakier. It's based on magical thinking routed in ignorance.
Slashdot Mirror
Those V-22s are doing well helping out in Nepal after the earthquake. The seem to have the bugs worked out.
They also used them in the recent Delta Force raid in Syria that. They seem to have performed very well.
Instead of blaming it on the "subcultures", blame the greater society in which these subcultures were born.
Why? The "greater society" regularly produces clear-thinking, educated, hard working people for whom minimum wage is a distant memory by the time they're still young but on to their second, better job. The problem actually is constrained to sub-sections of the society. Places where the government spends more per student on education, positions endless arrays of social services, and heaps money in program after program designed to provide the entitled equal outcomes you think should occur. But it doesn't work. Why? Because it's not about how much money is thrown into such programs, or whether the mom and pop store on the corner is suddenly force by the government to pay $15/hour to the kid who comes by for a couple hours a day after school to unload a truck or whatever.
What it's about is what happens when that kid goes home. Do his parents speak English? Do they get involved in his homework? Do they stay away from street crime and other influences that wreck households? Are they giving the kid the huge, proven advantage of having given birth to him in a family that will actually bother to have two parents pooling their time and resources to give the kid a decent start in life?
Should "the greater society" step in and force uninterested, absent parents to spend the 18 years of daily hours needed to raise a productive human being?
For a country that are smart about so many things their social structure is just broken.
You're confusing the structure of the society with the impact of certain cultures within that society.
I'm always amazed that Americans are so poorly paid, and have terrible work conditions
And I'm always amazed that people think the condition of one American is the condition of all Americans. I have it on good authority that there is homeless street person in Berlin. I'm amazed that Germans have no homes and live in the street! Right? Right.
... adults with very poor prospects.
... yeah, it doesn't go well. So, Mr. Foreigner Who Comes From A Place Without Any Such Problems, what do you propose? Criminalize crappy parenting and toxic social influences?
What you should be amazed by is that there are subcultures in the US that still haven't figured out that treating school like a chore to be avoided, and one's own children like an annoying stray dog to be left outside do its own devices results in
Entry-level, minimum wage jobs aren't supposed to be careers. It's the sort of thing a high school kid or college freshman should be holding while getting ready for a real life. When some poor kid is born into an uneducated household with only one parent sticking around, and attends (for a little while) a school where the kids all agree that learning to do things like communicate clearly and think critically is for chumps, and the real local power structure is a spectrum of street gangs and thugs
Net Neutrality says that no service can be prioritized over another (Netflix over Hulu for example).
Which is why some idiot will find a way to complain that using a shorter/faster path to overwhelmingly popular name servers (like Google's, as opposed to very sleepy servers run by smaller operations) will some how be Eeeevil, despite it greatly speeding up life for all sorts of people and services.
We'll know for certain when Texas executes a corporation.
Like Enron? Or Arthur Anderson?
Stock valuations are based not only on actual assets, but future growth and earnings potential. If I buy company X, it's because I think company X has a good product, business plan, and management and is going to be able to grow faster than inflation and faster than their competitors. I certainly don't want them to liquidate their current assets and give me my money back.
You've missed an important detail. They're not comparing the stock valuation to the assets alone. They're comparing the stock valuation to what the company would sell for if purchased. When you sell a company, you're also selling the "good will" and other value inertia things like brand familiarity, the value that will come from having the company in the future, etc.
The Breitbart bits at the end of TFS politicize what would have otherwise been a mediocre Sunday Slashdot submission.
So the fact that she actually did those things makes talking about them political? Or does pretending she didn't do them and talking around them make the conversation political? Hillary-centric submissions that wish away her behavior are the politicized ones.
And if I don't? If I find it's a far simpler business model to just let everyone wander up, and use (or ignore) web content without having to handle account management and transaction fees (and fraud, etc) per visitor, and just deal instead with a much smaller universe of ad agencies to fund the site ... so? All you have to do is walk away. You don't have to see it. You don't have to care about it, and you don't have to wish that it would die. You can just stick with the web sites you prefer. Still not clear on what your problem is with that.
So, it appears that you are just one link in the chain intended to bind "consumers" into acting as you wish them to act - that is, to provide you with ever more money.
Since you don't actually do anything for a living, how do you bind other people into being your slaves and giving you food, housing, and the rest? Genuinely curious. Please be specific.
... but if everyone did it for themselves (exactly the same thing, and paid for it in having less time to do other things, instead), then that would be noble, and OK with you? Right.
In the meantime, what is your specific problem with someone playing the roll of tending to the hosting environment that supports other people's web sites? You seem to think it's sinister to charge people for the professional service of managing that part of their IT landscape
So - shut up and get to work. BTW - WTF have you produced that I might be interested in? Anything? Gimme a link, and I'll tell you what I think it is worth.
If I thought you were part of my audience, or (more importantly, for me) the audience that my clients' customers intend to cultivate, and you weren't already aware of their content, products, or services, then I'd have something to think about. This isn't the venue for that, even if you were the slightest bit sincere.
Your attitude need not be passed on. YOU are the one with a sense of entitlement.
What? I'm the who foots the bill if I want something, want to risk resources to make something, or make poor choices. The people with whom I'm debating here want what I and/or my clients do for free, but also think that the source of money that provides it to them should be cut off, all because they think - among other things - that it costs "$5 to run a web site." It's possible you don't actually know what "entitled" means, especially in this context.
Funny, I run my own business.
Hilarious.
Just with other things on which you're commenting, it's clear you've never actually been party to any sort of actual, real business activity.
If you feel that I'm violating your rights by skipping ads, I guess I'll see you in court.
Not worth the trouble. But it is worth pointing out that you're a whiny leech. In my experience, people who conduct themselves that way in one area do so in other areas, as well. Which is why this sort of thing especially matters. People with a sense of entitlement tend to want others to do everything for them, not just create and host web content. I can tell you're one of those people.
What the hell are you talking about? The mutual decision by Pepsi and the web site's operator to include some of Pepsi's material doesn't obligate you in any way to buy Pepsi products. If Pepsi does, or doesn't sell some more of their products because of their ad, that's a matter for their internal marketing people to weigh and live with. But the person who runs the ad-carrying web site has already completed their business with Pepsi. Not that you don't already understand this (surely), and you're just trolling. Not sure who you think you're fooling, really.
Setting up a web site and typing some shit isn't all that complicated or expensive.
Really. That's what you think is involved in running a business? In producing enough content for the people who do so to actually earn a living? Nobody's entitled to a living, but that doesn't mean you should deliberately kid yourself that the overhead involved in running a high profile web presence is ... $5.
You can just run a web site on any old PC, too.
Really? I run web sites. For a living. One of them involves two rack cabinets full of equipment, and more that's mirrored a thousand miles away. There are about 40 servers involved (some physical, some virtual), redundant storage, physical security, substantial redundant power and network operations, and people involved who absolutely do not want the back end databases to live on "the cloud" or operate in a massive multi-tenant platform like AWS or Azure. Let me guess ... you think that all probably costs something really high, like $20 a month, right?
And no, a browser/server protocol like HTTP doesn't trump copyright considerations, trademarks, or other terms of use. Just like the protocol for opening the door to a retail store ("push, with hand, walk in") doesn't grant you license to walk out with whatever you like once you've done so.
So arrest me.
Just pointing out that you're a whiny douchebag leach, and a hypocrite. You're the one who has to live with yourself. Everyone else just has to work a little harder to make up for your sense of entitlement, that's all. Please don't vote or reproduce. Thanks.
I was happy with the internet before ads and would welcome the return of an ads-free internet. The only commercial sites that I have any use for, are vendor sites whose products I already use and therefore need support.
Which means you don't even visit web sites that rely on advertising to cover the content creation and hosting costs. Which means you really have nothing to complain about, right? Right.
When did "customer" become "consumer"?
It didn't. You're just oddly confused (or pretending to be) over who is consuming a web site's content, and who is writing checks to the web site's operator. If you just visit and slurp up content, you're consuming that content. If you're doing business with that web site's operator (say, buying some ad space from them), you're a customer. You know, the one who foots the bill for the service you in turn get.
Keep calling me a consumer and I'll keep blocking your ads
So you're not consuming their content? If you're their "customer" instead, are you writing them a check every month to help defray their hosting and content creation costs? No. Their customers are the people who pay them (advertisers), and you are a consumer of the content that's presented.
I have no problem paying for a subscription (or forums account) for sites which matter to me. All of the truly important information I have found on the Internet has come from small enthusiast-run sites with no advertising, so I'm not too fussed if a majority of ad-sponsored sites either go subscription-only or simply die out.
Shockingly, a whole lot of people are more engaged than you with the wider world, and with subject matter that might newly interest them - perhaps even by the hour - because they aren't laser-focused on one or two topics in life.
There is no right to make a profit.
And you have no right to someone else's hard work while ignoring the terms under which they're offering it to you.
In addition I want the concept of ad revenue generated content to die.
What color unicorn ponies would like, to go with your new information economy that does everything for you for free? Or are you just expecting people to run datacenters for free, so that it doesn't cost your favorite content people anything (except their own time, and the cost to produce the content you want) to host the servers you want to access? Do you really want every web site that isn't being run by a foundation (which you're hoping OTHER people will fund), someone's tax dollars (not yours, obviously), and high-overhead subscription transactions, to go away? How about this: since you don't care about those web sites, you don't have to visit them and the whole issue goes away. I'm sure you can find an army of like-minded people who produce and fund the delivery of everything you want at no cost to you. Have fun with that.
outweighs your autonomy
"Your autonomy" isn't what pays the hosting bills for that web site content or forum you want to have magically for free. You're not forced to watch ads. Because you're not forced to connect your browser to somebody else's server in order to amuse or inform yourself.
Have you ever studied the 10 plagues visited against the Egyptians for their slavery of the Jewish people?
You mean the fable? The fantastical mythological, supernatural narrative spun by religious authorities in support of their world view? Yeah, that's hard to miss.
Especially the slaughter of every first-born Egyptian child?
What about it? Are you saying that because a tyrant slaughtered a bunch of kids thousands of years ago, that therefore a crazy Islamist and his brother might be excused for blowing the guts out a kid standing next to one of their planted bombs?
The list goes on and on. I'm afraid that slaughtering children for religious sacrifice, even innocent children to teach their parents a lesson, as a long cultural history.
So does hunting down rival tribe members, killing, cooking, and eating them, in some ancient cultures. So?
That doesn't make it "rational", but it's certainly historically well founded.
Well founded? The moral foundation for that sort of stuff couldn't be shakier. It's based on magical thinking routed in ignorance.
So revenge is the motivation?
Hey, I don't mind. I'm cool with that, as long as people are willing to call a spade a spade and not pretend it has anything to do with justice.
The two aren't mutually exclusive.