This is not about just the 'Kenny Everett Video Show' (Whoever he is). This is about a manipulative group of corporations working in concert to tell us what our culture is and then making us pay dearly to be part of that culture and then proceed to lord that over us for perpetuity.
This is a fight for the ownership and ability to produce cultural works that outlast ourselves. Every previous generation has built on those that came before it and we are no exception, but it is getting progressively harder to do that due to who owns those works. In the not so distant past a work joined the public domain after a decade or two, now few things ever return to public domain and can be used as the ground work for yet more works. That is a crime to society that the media cartels are not being held accountable for, while every 'transgression' by the public is. This imbalance must be corrected.
Actually it's a common issue talked about in higher education. While not currently being updated http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/whyboysfail/ covers the issues. And btw most people don't want the opposite, they want rough equality.
It becomes a problem when educated women don't usually 'marry down' and get hitched to unmarried men... But have no problem having sex with the uneducated men... If you don't mind more single parent families with no male voice, then sure go ahead and believe campuses that are 70:30 female to male isn't an issue...
Part of that is our near complete lack of mass transit outside a few select cities... Few drunk people want to walk the last couple miles home after that last bus stop or worse walk the whole way because the buses stopped at 9 pm...
I taught my ex how to drive and we went out into the the more rural areas so she didn't have to deal with as much traffic... However traveling between where we were doing her empty road driving and the town my parents live afterwards (when she was still driving), an off duty cop ended up behind us and flagged her as a potential dangerous driver. Mostly because she couldn't yet seem to drive a straight line on the road so she would swerve form side to side, yet stayed within the lines. He had the cop on duty in the town my parents live out looking for my car and when he found it at my parents house where we were we had to explain that she was a new driver and she had to prove she hadn't been drinking...
If doctors not listening to a word you say and writing out painkillers for you without doing any tests beyond blood work,when you have a diseased gallbladder that is causing you crippling pain, is 'best of breed' then the world is in deep shit.
If you can't guess that was a recent experience of mine and when I finally went through over a half dozen doctors to get someone who could explain week long bouts of crippling abdominal in my right side... I find out I've actually had the condition for over a decade... and no doctor had ever noticed until the damage was so great it had to be removed immediately...
The Chinese and Japanese hate each other... The Chinese for Japan siding against them and with the western powers during the US civil war era and then later for WWII. The Japanese for much more complex reasons, part of which is active racism (most asian sub-groups don't see themselves as the same race). They also hold opposite takes on Taiwan and have active territorial water disputes...
It would take a massive external threat for the two to see eye to eye.
I think he also meant that it is awfully hard to find a significant other, be in a relationship, or get married when you spend a handful of hours at home each night and most of those are spent sleeping. I know If I went without seeing my girlfriend for a few weeks or a month it is highly likely we would be done.
Not that I want to get in this, but he has _Not_ be charged of anything. He could be, but hasn't officially. Currently all they want are 'questions', but they refuse to do this anywhere except in a police station in Sweden.
Since I happen to live in an area with Mennonites... I'll point out that different communities go to different lengths about 'living simple lives'. Some local groups own cars, tvs, and other things that have a utility purpose. I would bet those ones have cell phones as well.
Other groups are much more Amish (who also live in this area) like and avoid even utility items when something simpler works (radio instead of tv or horse instead of car). Usually the best way to tell an Amish person from a Mennonite is actually clothes. The Amish make their own clothes in the same style they have for generation and their is effectively no customization. Mennonites usually have no issue buying clothes from a store and you can even see them shopping for clothes regularly, though they are unlikely to throw away old clothes that can be repaired.
All that said... Even the Amish are changing in some places... It used to be Amish didn't go to school past 3rd grade, but more recently I've seen Amish teenagers going to high school. Those kids even look more like Mennonites as they will wear modern clothes while away from the farm.
Um... maybe it's just me... but my copy of the hobbit is just shy of 600 pages... my copies of the different lotr books are about 350 each... how exactly does that make Hobbit 'shorter'...?
It's nice you live close to an apple store... My closest apple store is over 2 hours away. It may still be worth it to drive 2 hours both ways to get a problem fixed in a timely manner, but not usually...
That doesn't work so well when areas like mine can easily get to -20F in winter and 115F in summer with a winter average of 15F and a summer average of 90F. The humidity being 30%+ at all times of the year doesn't really help either.
If you didn't get my point from the example their are not that many places that don't get fairly hot during the summer even in what are relatively 'cold' climates. Heck I went to college a long time ago in a place that would average 35F in winter and 110F in summer. Not having A/C was seen as incredibly strange there.
When I first went to college it was in the late 90's (96 into 2000). I had loans through at least 5 places, but no one would offer me enough to go for my final half year at the college, I could only get about 90% of what I needed and the school insisted I either give up and go home or pony up the extra 10% some way outside of loans (which they had already maxed). After leaving the school I had at least 7 different bills (including the government at state and federal levels) coming in from various places for my education that was aborted. I had to consolidate them because in total they wanted more than I earned in a month as separate loans. Consolidated they were about 1/4 of my income at the time, though it was spread out over 20 years and was like paying off a housing loan for a 100k house. That doesn't include the plus loan my parents took out for me or the credit cards taken out in my name to pay for books (as my loans would not cover them).
The school I went to the first time was a private college and they have zero interest in charging less. Their only concern is to meet the costs to stay in business plus a profit of some size (and in some states that size is fixed). Reducing the loan amount possible for people to get would not even cause them to bat an eye, they would just start asking the students (or more likely their parents to pony up more money) regardless of the merits of being able to afford it. Don't want to or can't pay those rates? Well go somewhere else, we don't care plenty of other people want to come here and they can or simply will pay to do so. I stared that demon directly in the face, so I know exactly how unflexible they are.
So far these things seem vastly under reported and if what I've read is correct I could still be asked to pay this tax even though I'm low income (under 20k last year). In fact two years ago I qualified for state medical assistance, but that was right before they suspended any new additions and so I've been in medical limbo ever since. The state did offer me 'low cost' medical insurance starting at a low low '$250/month'. Roughly 1/4th of everything I earn is not 'low'. And what I've read suggests I could expect the 'subsidized' health insurance to look.
My employer doesn't provide health insurance to me because at 30 hours per week they can chose to consider me part time and so not need to offer me benefits. The job market sucks enough here right now that I cannot move or find anything better (lots and lots of places offering jobs, doing interviews, and then deciding everyone 'looks to expensive' and they put it back out without offering the job to anyone).
I'm one of the lucky ones in that I at least still have a job in my field. Some of the other older guys these days that lost their jobs can't find work outside retail.
One of my favorites of that 99% had a contract with a major label and after releasing 3 of 4 albums in their contract the music execs decided they didn't like their next set of music. This happened multiple times because the execs decided they didn't want anything more from them... Yet they were still under contract and couldn't perform any longer as a band. They had to break up and can no longer play any of their old music because the labels of course own it. Zero insensitive to make jack shit now.
They were hardly the only groups I've heard of this tactic from. The bloody archaic system is an utter fail at helping any of those 99% long term and the sooner it dies the better.
Lol, as someone who has actually been told they can't finish their degree program because they cannot currently be loaned any more money (and so having gone 3.5 years and been in my senior year when told this)... I can tell you that their is no such thing as " ALL of their students have access to ANY AMOUNT of money". Their are caps and god forbid you ever hit one. It gave me a massive detour in life and now a decade later I'm still working on fixing it.... By having to go to college again. Which I can do only because I had paid on my loans (& refinanced them) and so I can be lent money again...
I don't know where people get this myth of 'unlimited' funds via loans, but it is just that.
At my state funded university that I work for, the state has cut back the general fund of the school year after year for more than four years now. On the other hand they have increased the funds exclusively budgeted to 'grounds & facilities improvements', which is a separate money stream from the state. So they have tons of money that can only be built for new something on campus... Not one dime of student money goes into those projects, but failure to use the funds given isn't an option either (the state doesn't 'get' not using budgeted funds, this is true in all levels of government that I've ever seen). So instead we get silly marble statues & near constant destruction of the roads on campus as they do one update after another... Which we as taxpayers in my state finance rather than actually providing for the education of students. It's actually gotten to the point that maintenance (part of the general fund) cannot even maintain the sheer number of buildings and works on campus and we will have to start tearing things down because in some distorted sense of reality it is apparently cheaper (or just more politically correct) to provide us nice looking facilities than to educate students.
lol, so everyone magically makes more (providing they are sober?) than minimum wage in three months huh? So all those people forced to live on minimum wage where I live because companies no longer pay raises (going on four years now) are supposed to have magically gotten raises right? I mean they are generally sober (certainly at work, not so much outside it for some) and so they get this automagically correct?
So your desktop screen is 5120x2880? That's what you seem to be suggesting... I think we've covered the 'the larger the screen size the harder it is to increase pixel density' before and so this argument is silly. Though I'll take that 51120x2880 monitor if it existed (and was affordable)...
I'd argue that maybe it's 'new' homes that are being built at 2094 sq feet on average. I'd bet you average house is not 2094 sq feet. That said a 1200 foot home where I live goes for around $100k and a bit farther out of the city is as low as $70k. Though outside the city 1500 and 1600 sq feet are more common.
My Asus Transformer Prime (though it applies to the earlier transformer as well) has a 1st party made keyboard, which even doubles battery life and adds a trackpad. They don't include it in the package at the moment, but to say MS is doing something that has been lacking is sort of false.
I blame not even the libraries (MS did actually pay Japanese developers to design JRPGs for them and I own some of those), but very deep nationalism in the Japanese market. They tend to buy 'Japanese' designed products form Japanese companies much more than anything from overseas. They may have a certain love of things foreign, but it does not seem to cover electronics. If the same habits existed in the US most products we bought in areas like electronics would come from US companies and not Sony, Asus, Fujitsu, etc.
On the other hand, I have an xbox 360 Elite that has never had any issues and I don't know anyone on their '4th or 5th' 360. Go personal experience!
Actually to me " more importantly what is your moral justification for killing them if you don't know why they are doing what they are doing?" Actually seems like it should reasonably describe the terrorists in most cases.
Oh sure they get our media (which even we would often like to avoid as it doesn't represent us or our interests well) and crap we want to sell them... But what do they really know about us? Oh sure they get lots of crap from our government (which much like our media lots of us would love to see change) and our companies which have often run rough-shod over them... But it does that to us as well... Few if any of them really know what it is like to live in our nations... Yet they have no problem trying to kill us from time to time.
Understanding and empathy are easy solutions to lots of the worlds problems. However we tend to be self-important and myopic on issues, so this rarely happens. 'Live and let live' is just not something many people seem to be able to do.
It's ugly as hell and far more like XP with a windows for Workgroups color scheme than WIndows 7 even with Aero turned off. I'm so glad I have no reason to use Windows 8 and work feels the same.
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This is not about just the 'Kenny Everett Video Show' (Whoever he is). This is about a manipulative group of corporations working in concert to tell us what our culture is and then making us pay dearly to be part of that culture and then proceed to lord that over us for perpetuity.
This is a fight for the ownership and ability to produce cultural works that outlast ourselves. Every previous generation has built on those that came before it and we are no exception, but it is getting progressively harder to do that due to who owns those works. In the not so distant past a work joined the public domain after a decade or two, now few things ever return to public domain and can be used as the ground work for yet more works. That is a crime to society that the media cartels are not being held accountable for, while every 'transgression' by the public is. This imbalance must be corrected.
Actually it's a common issue talked about in higher education. While not currently being updated http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/whyboysfail/ covers the issues. And btw most people don't want the opposite, they want rough equality.
It becomes a problem when educated women don't usually 'marry down' and get hitched to unmarried men... But have no problem having sex with the uneducated men... If you don't mind more single parent families with no male voice, then sure go ahead and believe campuses that are 70:30 female to male isn't an issue...
Part of that is our near complete lack of mass transit outside a few select cities... Few drunk people want to walk the last couple miles home after that last bus stop or worse walk the whole way because the buses stopped at 9 pm...
I taught my ex how to drive and we went out into the the more rural areas so she didn't have to deal with as much traffic... However traveling between where we were doing her empty road driving and the town my parents live afterwards (when she was still driving), an off duty cop ended up behind us and flagged her as a potential dangerous driver. Mostly because she couldn't yet seem to drive a straight line on the road so she would swerve form side to side, yet stayed within the lines. He had the cop on duty in the town my parents live out looking for my car and when he found it at my parents house where we were we had to explain that she was a new driver and she had to prove she hadn't been drinking...
If doctors not listening to a word you say and writing out painkillers for you without doing any tests beyond blood work,when you have a diseased gallbladder that is causing you crippling pain, is 'best of breed' then the world is in deep shit.
If you can't guess that was a recent experience of mine and when I finally went through over a half dozen doctors to get someone who could explain week long bouts of crippling abdominal in my right side... I find out I've actually had the condition for over a decade... and no doctor had ever noticed until the damage was so great it had to be removed immediately...
Mark me not impressed with US healthcare....
The Chinese and Japanese hate each other... The Chinese for Japan siding against them and with the western powers during the US civil war era and then later for WWII. The Japanese for much more complex reasons, part of which is active racism (most asian sub-groups don't see themselves as the same race). They also hold opposite takes on Taiwan and have active territorial water disputes...
It would take a massive external threat for the two to see eye to eye.
I think he also meant that it is awfully hard to find a significant other, be in a relationship, or get married when you spend a handful of hours at home each night and most of those are spent sleeping. I know If I went without seeing my girlfriend for a few weeks or a month it is highly likely we would be done.
Not that I want to get in this, but he has _Not_ be charged of anything. He could be, but hasn't officially. Currently all they want are 'questions', but they refuse to do this anywhere except in a police station in Sweden.
Since I happen to live in an area with Mennonites... I'll point out that different communities go to different lengths about 'living simple lives'. Some local groups own cars, tvs, and other things that have a utility purpose. I would bet those ones have cell phones as well.
Other groups are much more Amish (who also live in this area) like and avoid even utility items when something simpler works (radio instead of tv or horse instead of car). Usually the best way to tell an Amish person from a Mennonite is actually clothes. The Amish make their own clothes in the same style they have for generation and their is effectively no customization. Mennonites usually have no issue buying clothes from a store and you can even see them shopping for clothes regularly, though they are unlikely to throw away old clothes that can be repaired.
All that said... Even the Amish are changing in some places... It used to be Amish didn't go to school past 3rd grade, but more recently I've seen Amish teenagers going to high school. Those kids even look more like Mennonites as they will wear modern clothes while away from the farm.
Um... maybe it's just me... but my copy of the hobbit is just shy of 600 pages... my copies of the different lotr books are about 350 each... how exactly does that make Hobbit 'shorter'...?
It's nice you live close to an apple store... My closest apple store is over 2 hours away. It may still be worth it to drive 2 hours both ways to get a problem fixed in a timely manner, but not usually...
That doesn't work so well when areas like mine can easily get to -20F in winter and 115F in summer with a winter average of 15F and a summer average of 90F. The humidity being 30%+ at all times of the year doesn't really help either.
If you didn't get my point from the example their are not that many places that don't get fairly hot during the summer even in what are relatively 'cold' climates. Heck I went to college a long time ago in a place that would average 35F in winter and 110F in summer. Not having A/C was seen as incredibly strange there.
When I first went to college it was in the late 90's (96 into 2000). I had loans through at least 5 places, but no one would offer me enough to go for my final half year at the college, I could only get about 90% of what I needed and the school insisted I either give up and go home or pony up the extra 10% some way outside of loans (which they had already maxed). After leaving the school I had at least 7 different bills (including the government at state and federal levels) coming in from various places for my education that was aborted. I had to consolidate them because in total they wanted more than I earned in a month as separate loans. Consolidated they were about 1/4 of my income at the time, though it was spread out over 20 years and was like paying off a housing loan for a 100k house. That doesn't include the plus loan my parents took out for me or the credit cards taken out in my name to pay for books (as my loans would not cover them).
The school I went to the first time was a private college and they have zero interest in charging less. Their only concern is to meet the costs to stay in business plus a profit of some size (and in some states that size is fixed). Reducing the loan amount possible for people to get would not even cause them to bat an eye, they would just start asking the students (or more likely their parents to pony up more money) regardless of the merits of being able to afford it. Don't want to or can't pay those rates? Well go somewhere else, we don't care plenty of other people want to come here and they can or simply will pay to do so. I stared that demon directly in the face, so I know exactly how unflexible they are.
So far these things seem vastly under reported and if what I've read is correct I could still be asked to pay this tax even though I'm low income (under 20k last year). In fact two years ago I qualified for state medical assistance, but that was right before they suspended any new additions and so I've been in medical limbo ever since. The state did offer me 'low cost' medical insurance starting at a low low '$250/month'. Roughly 1/4th of everything I earn is not 'low'. And what I've read suggests I could expect the 'subsidized' health insurance to look.
My employer doesn't provide health insurance to me because at 30 hours per week they can chose to consider me part time and so not need to offer me benefits. The job market sucks enough here right now that I cannot move or find anything better (lots and lots of places offering jobs, doing interviews, and then deciding everyone 'looks to expensive' and they put it back out without offering the job to anyone).
I'm one of the lucky ones in that I at least still have a job in my field. Some of the other older guys these days that lost their jobs can't find work outside retail.
One of my favorites of that 99% had a contract with a major label and after releasing 3 of 4 albums in their contract the music execs decided they didn't like their next set of music. This happened multiple times because the execs decided they didn't want anything more from them... Yet they were still under contract and couldn't perform any longer as a band. They had to break up and can no longer play any of their old music because the labels of course own it. Zero insensitive to make jack shit now.
They were hardly the only groups I've heard of this tactic from. The bloody archaic system is an utter fail at helping any of those 99% long term and the sooner it dies the better.
Lol, as someone who has actually been told they can't finish their degree program because they cannot currently be loaned any more money (and so having gone 3.5 years and been in my senior year when told this)... I can tell you that their is no such thing as " ALL of their students have access to ANY AMOUNT of money". Their are caps and god forbid you ever hit one. It gave me a massive detour in life and now a decade later I'm still working on fixing it.... By having to go to college again. Which I can do only because I had paid on my loans (& refinanced them) and so I can be lent money again...
I don't know where people get this myth of 'unlimited' funds via loans, but it is just that.
At my state funded university that I work for, the state has cut back the general fund of the school year after year for more than four years now. On the other hand they have increased the funds exclusively budgeted to 'grounds & facilities improvements', which is a separate money stream from the state. So they have tons of money that can only be built for new something on campus... Not one dime of student money goes into those projects, but failure to use the funds given isn't an option either (the state doesn't 'get' not using budgeted funds, this is true in all levels of government that I've ever seen). So instead we get silly marble statues & near constant destruction of the roads on campus as they do one update after another... Which we as taxpayers in my state finance rather than actually providing for the education of students. It's actually gotten to the point that maintenance (part of the general fund) cannot even maintain the sheer number of buildings and works on campus and we will have to start tearing things down because in some distorted sense of reality it is apparently cheaper (or just more politically correct) to provide us nice looking facilities than to educate students.
lol, so everyone magically makes more (providing they are sober?) than minimum wage in three months huh? So all those people forced to live on minimum wage where I live because companies no longer pay raises (going on four years now) are supposed to have magically gotten raises right? I mean they are generally sober (certainly at work, not so much outside it for some) and so they get this automagically correct?
So your desktop screen is 5120x2880? That's what you seem to be suggesting... I think we've covered the 'the larger the screen size the harder it is to increase pixel density' before and so this argument is silly. Though I'll take that 51120x2880 monitor if it existed (and was affordable)...
I'd argue that maybe it's 'new' homes that are being built at 2094 sq feet on average. I'd bet you average house is not 2094 sq feet. That said a 1200 foot home where I live goes for around $100k and a bit farther out of the city is as low as $70k. Though outside the city 1500 and 1600 sq feet are more common.
My Asus Transformer Prime (though it applies to the earlier transformer as well) has a 1st party made keyboard, which even doubles battery life and adds a trackpad. They don't include it in the package at the moment, but to say MS is doing something that has been lacking is sort of false.
I blame not even the libraries (MS did actually pay Japanese developers to design JRPGs for them and I own some of those), but very deep nationalism in the Japanese market. They tend to buy 'Japanese' designed products form Japanese companies much more than anything from overseas. They may have a certain love of things foreign, but it does not seem to cover electronics. If the same habits existed in the US most products we bought in areas like electronics would come from US companies and not Sony, Asus, Fujitsu, etc.
On the other hand, I have an xbox 360 Elite that has never had any issues and I don't know anyone on their '4th or 5th' 360. Go personal experience!
Actually to me " more importantly what is your moral justification for killing them if you don't know why they are doing what they are doing?" Actually seems like it should reasonably describe the terrorists in most cases.
Oh sure they get our media (which even we would often like to avoid as it doesn't represent us or our interests well) and crap we want to sell them... But what do they really know about us? Oh sure they get lots of crap from our government (which much like our media lots of us would love to see change) and our companies which have often run rough-shod over them... But it does that to us as well... Few if any of them really know what it is like to live in our nations... Yet they have no problem trying to kill us from time to time.
Understanding and empathy are easy solutions to lots of the worlds problems. However we tend to be self-important and myopic on issues, so this rarely happens. 'Live and let live' is just not something many people seem to be able to do.
It's ugly as hell and far more like XP with a windows for Workgroups color scheme than WIndows 7 even with Aero turned off. I'm so glad I have no reason to use Windows 8 and work feels the same.