I think it's hilarious that you used a coal miner "working his ass off to put food in his children's mouths" as your example of how someone might accumulate enough wealth to even be relevant to a discussion of inherited luxury. Nice try though.
Those lessons you learned about hard work probably do make you an excellent employee. I doubt they got you into "Skull and Bones" or an invitation to sit on a companies board of directors or even an internship on the CEO track. Consequently you probably make a respectable living, but will never have real power and influence. There is mobility between working and middle class, but the top tier is quite a bit more stratified.
I'm a native born American, and I'm here to tell you that we have much less social mobility then we like to pretend we do. There was a recent report done on social mobility in industrialized western nations. The U.S. ranks well below Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany and Spain in terms of societal mobility. Sorry to burst your American Dream bubble, but we do have an aristocracy. While they willingly absorb the occasional genius commoner, they have a social network that keeps the established positions of power and influence for those within the aristocracy. That's why over 2/3rds of congress are millionaires.
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/2/7/45002641.pdf
It is to your benefit to pirate rather than deal with DRM nightmares. And corporate America is more focused on punishing their customers than trying to attract new ones
About 20% of the Blue Ray disks I get from Netflix don't work on my PC because of DRM. Not much better then pirated files. In fact TPB is what I use to so that I can still watch the movie I paid Netflix for.
No benefit?!? It's great! Internet warfare between commercial entities is so cyber-punk that I can practically smell a dystopian future bubbling into existence around me. That's awesome, except for the small problem of cyber-punk dystopian futures being horrible places to live for 99% of the population.
Those who think of false reviews as "jokes" are just boors with a limited world view. It exactly the same mentality that thinks "tagging" a building or park bench is cool. Juvenile minds have no respect for the value of a good, well tended community resource. To the small minded, the limited benefit they receive by defacing the commons is not over weighed by the damage done, because they are unable to understand the damage or value of what they are defacing.
Black Hat, yellow belly.
As soon as Black Hat became big enough to have something to lose, it ceased to be the underground anti-authority thing it poses as.
The air-purifying concrete contains titanium dioxide, a photocatalytic material that removes the nitrogen oxides from the air and converts them into harmless nitrate with the aid of sunlight. The nitrate is then rinsed away by rain.
So we are going to add fertilizer to the rainwater runoff. I can't see how that could go wrong...
A government is an organization that is there to serve the people. When it is all said and done, a government is judged upon how well it has served the people.
That is the line sold to the people, but it's wrong. A government is an organization to consolidate and maintain power. Look at ancient Rome, it had millions of slaves, it had near constant wars, it had public torture and execution. But we regard it historically as a great civilization.
Apparently you have never been to a frat party. Getting 17-20 year olds to pass out where you want them too is as easy as buying a keg and some weed.
The vast majority of abused children (sexual or otherwise) are attacked by people they know well, parents or neighbors, so the stranger with a van idea is just bad Hollywood.
The bits/bytes confusion is rather close to deceptive advertising. As data storage and transfer have grown so much in the past two decades that "bits" have ceased to be a useful unit of measure. The word "bits" has basically become an arcane term outside of the various computer and telecommunication industries. Advertising internet speeds in bits is close to selling gasoline for $0.25 per gill.
massive civilian casualties are not acceptable in any war situation
That almost exactly wrong. When you get down to it, War is about the subjugation of one culture by another. Through out most of human history this has been accomplished by killing large percentages of the culture to be subjugated. That's why War is horrible. It's erroneous to think that war is some how "clean" when only soldiers are killed. They are just as human as everyone else. The soldiers that do all the dieing are almost never the people who started or propagate the war. If there was to ever be a "clean" war it would consist only of a few dozen politicians and speech makers from each country, people who's rhetoric and demands would change quite suddenly if they ever had to personally do the killing and dieing. Maybe that's the same reason that civilians abhor "civilian casualties" so much more then soldiers deaths, it's much harder to believe a war is "worth the price" if you actually risk deaths for your unwavering ideals.
The manned missions are popular because the embody a "Buck Rodgers" dream. I for one, would like to see NASA persueing a new dream. Call it a "DS9" dream. Make the ISS a real space station instead of a repository of shoebox experiments. Put a (large) greenhouse on the ISS and see how much air and waste can be recycled. Put some housing sections on 1000' tethers and spin up some artificial gravity. This is basic stuff that was obvious to people two generations ago. Man-on-the-Moon is an old challenge (that was accomplished more then once), it's time to sell a new dream.
The justification for the gas tax is that your tax is proportional to your usage of the infrastructure. The point of the gas tax is to raise funds for the State government. Private roads only disrupt the justification of the gas tax, not it's function.
However the creation of an extensive toll system to tax mileage will undoubtedly make for a nice fat contract to be awarded to a private contractor somewhere in Oregon, and there can be the additional claim of "jobs created". Simply raising the existing gas tax would be far too efficient.
It's been said here before, but Courtney Love explains "artist compensation" best:
This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my "funny" math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I'm positive it's better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide.
What happens to that million dollars?
They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager.
That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there's $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person.
That's $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released.
The record is a big hit and sells a million copies. (How a bidding-war band sells a million copies of its debut record is another rant entirely, but it's based on any basic civics-class knowledge that any of us have about cartels. Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service.)
So, this band releases two singles and makes two videos. The two videos cost a million dollars to make and 50 percent of the video production costs are recouped out of the band's royalties.
The band gets $200,000 in tour support, which is 100 percent recoupable.
The record company spends $300,000 on independent radio promotion. You have to pay independent promotion to get your song on the radio; independent promotion is a system where the record companies use middlemen so they can pretend not to know that radio stations -- the unified broadcast system -- are getting paid to play their records.
All of those independent promotion costs are charged to the band.
Since the original million-dollar advance is also recoupable, the band owes $2 million to the record company.
If all of the million records are sold at full price with no discounts or record clubs, the band earns $2 million in royalties, since their 20 percent royalty works out to $2 a record.
Two million dollars in royalties minus $2 million in recoupable expenses equals... zero!
How much does the record company make?
They grossed $11 million.
And teh best way for us to not tolerate it, is to exploit it to laughable extremes. Have everyone copy the license plate of Governor Martin O'Malley and let him get multiple speeding tickets in different parts of his state at the same time, the law will change much faster that way as compared to waiting for the legislature to actually give a shit about bad law.
Between the two major candidates there's just not enough difference between them to effect my vote.
True there is not much difference, but there is some difference, and that is actually important. Large amounts of change can happen in two ways: We can slowly, incrementally progress towards the desired changes, carefully redirecting our society's momentum in a long slow curve. This is how our two party system has slowly evolved the government throughout history. We did manage to get out of McCarthyism and Prohibition, so all of our evolution is not doom and gloom, and has been fairly peaceful within the country. The second way is to make a drastic change quickly, with the very real possibility that society will spin out of control. The Civil War is an example of what happens with a large change that comes about faster than it can be assimilated by our society. The violence surrounding so much of the Equal Rights movement indicates that those changes were pushing the limits of our culture's maneuverability. Those were good and necessary changes in our society, but the speed of change came with a price.
If you want to end the War on Drugs, look at which of the two viable options is more likely to end pointless ego wars and vote accordingly. You won't be able to buy or sell marijuana legally anytime in the next four years, but the choice America makes in this election will have a strong influence on legalized marijuana in the next twenty years.
It doesn't matter how many people like the Royalty there. In fact, I would call that blind nationalism--not at all a good thing.
If the royalty there--and I know someone is going to bring it up--is so good, then why are they allowing/accepting this nonsense to be put into law? Nobody honorable anywhere allows censorship to go on in their name.
I would think that any "anti-insult" law would only serve to render any compliments pointless. It's parallel to the everyone-gets-a-trophy kind of parenting that is all too common these days. When everything must be a compliment and a cause for applause, then it becomes impossible to reward exceptional deeds. Now the fact Thailand thinks they need to coddle their king the way a helicopter mother coddles her child, I find to be the worst insult of all.
To The King of Thailand: You should be greatly insulted that your lawmakers think that you are so delicate, that you must be shelter from insults by a law. Do your lawmakers think that you are a frail child that cannot speak or stand up for yourself? Show your people your strength and confidence, repeal the law concerning insults against you and show that you have no fear of your critics and that your people truly love their king.
" companies are represented by large law firms with substantial resources,' while it is futile for self-represented defendants to resist. " ..." lawyers turned around and sued the very people they represented because they wanted a bigger share of the blood money."
It's a symptom of a broken legal system when self representation is "futile" and legal fees become "blood money". Yes, some might argue that lawyers are expert, trained professionals, so it only stands to reason that it would be futile for an untrained citizen to stand against them in court. That argument would make perfect sense if you were talking about pros vs joes in a different venue like sports or some industry specific contest. But the purpose of a court room isn't to determine the best performance or find a winner and a loser. A courtroom is a place to find the truth in a legal or civil dispute. Now is some of the participants are unskilled at the labyrinthine dance of courtroom etiquette, then the process should merely become less efficient at determining the truth, not less accurate. That this is not the case show a onerous flaw in our system. A flaw which has allowed lawyers to become a elite class within our supposedly egalitarian society, just look at their pay scale and tendency to become government officials.
I realize that I am idealizing what our courtroom and legal system should be, but we have to pursue idealism in our societal systems to minimize the damage done by the imperfect humans that take part in those systems.
They used to be the vanguard of freedom and liberties! Now, they seem to be degrading into a spiral of power-hungry stupid obtuseness!!!
It's been a long time since anglo-saxon people held leaders accountable. To the modern elites, having to make a public apology or receive an official censure is meaningless. Even if they are forced to leave the job where they betrayed the people trust, they get installed in a less public power position, like a corporate board of directors or high powered lobbyist position. If the betrayers of freedom and liberties were executed for treason, instead of slapped on the wrist, we would not have this problem. If white collar criminals did their time in the same cell blocks as the violent criminals, we would have never had the Enron problem. The powerful will always seek to extend and tweak their power, and there are very few who will stop willingly at the current limits of the law. Most will change the law, or find a loophole in the law, or just deny that the law applies to them. Only fear will be a primal enough motivator to counter-balance their desire for expanding power. Modern first world governments are of lawyers, by lawyers, and for lawyers. Legal action, or even actions that are legal will not be enough to instill a fear of the public in the government. Large angry mobs burning down houses are going to be the only way to reverse this trend. But the progress of riot control techniques is out pacing the build up toward a critical mass of public dissatisfaction. Without a significant portion of the population publicly participating in an action against the betrayal by their government, any such violent actions would just be terrorism and provide an excuse for further government power grabs. I don't think we will see a change in this power hungry trend until a first world western country erupts into civil war, igniting a call for direct action in other such countries.
Avoiding that downward spiral is the "Hope" that gives Obama such an attraction.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's hilarious that you used a coal miner "working his ass off to put food in his children's mouths" as your example of how someone might accumulate enough wealth to even be relevant to a discussion of inherited luxury. Nice try though.
If only holograms work, then we will just watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTXO7KGHtjI&feature=player_embedded What really works about 3-D is that people will pay $20 for a movie ticket.
Those lessons you learned about hard work probably do make you an excellent employee. I doubt they got you into "Skull and Bones" or an invitation to sit on a companies board of directors or even an internship on the CEO track. Consequently you probably make a respectable living, but will never have real power and influence. There is mobility between working and middle class, but the top tier is quite a bit more stratified.
I'm a native born American, and I'm here to tell you that we have much less social mobility then we like to pretend we do. There was a recent report done on social mobility in industrialized western nations. The U.S. ranks well below Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany and Spain in terms of societal mobility. Sorry to burst your American Dream bubble, but we do have an aristocracy. While they willingly absorb the occasional genius commoner, they have a social network that keeps the established positions of power and influence for those within the aristocracy. That's why over 2/3rds of congress are millionaires. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/2/7/45002641.pdf
It is to your benefit to pirate rather than deal with DRM nightmares. And corporate America is more focused on punishing their customers than trying to attract new ones
About 20% of the Blue Ray disks I get from Netflix don't work on my PC because of DRM. Not much better then pirated files. In fact TPB is what I use to so that I can still watch the movie I paid Netflix for.
No benefit?!? It's great! Internet warfare between commercial entities is so cyber-punk that I can practically smell a dystopian future bubbling into existence around me. That's awesome, except for the small problem of cyber-punk dystopian futures being horrible places to live for 99% of the population.
Those who think of false reviews as "jokes" are just boors with a limited world view. It exactly the same mentality that thinks "tagging" a building or park bench is cool. Juvenile minds have no respect for the value of a good, well tended community resource. To the small minded, the limited benefit they receive by defacing the commons is not over weighed by the damage done, because they are unable to understand the damage or value of what they are defacing.
Black Hat, yellow belly. As soon as Black Hat became big enough to have something to lose, it ceased to be the underground anti-authority thing it poses as.
What is the purpose of life? To procreate with the highest genetic value partner(s) possible. That is the purpose, but what is the meaning of life?
So we are going to add fertilizer to the rainwater runoff. I can't see how that could go wrong...
That is the line sold to the people, but it's wrong. A government is an organization to consolidate and maintain power. Look at ancient Rome, it had millions of slaves, it had near constant wars, it had public torture and execution. But we regard it historically as a great civilization.
Apparently you have never been to a frat party. Getting 17-20 year olds to pass out where you want them too is as easy as buying a keg and some weed.
The vast majority of abused children (sexual or otherwise) are attacked by people they know well, parents or neighbors, so the stranger with a van idea is just bad Hollywood.
The bits/bytes confusion is rather close to deceptive advertising. As data storage and transfer have grown so much in the past two decades that "bits" have ceased to be a useful unit of measure. The word "bits" has basically become an arcane term outside of the various computer and telecommunication industries. Advertising internet speeds in bits is close to selling gasoline for $0.25 per gill.
massive civilian casualties are not acceptable in any war situation
That almost exactly wrong. When you get down to it, War is about the subjugation of one culture by another. Through out most of human history this has been accomplished by killing large percentages of the culture to be subjugated.
That's why War is horrible.
It's erroneous to think that war is some how "clean" when only soldiers are killed. They are just as human as everyone else. The soldiers that do all the dieing are almost never the people who started or propagate the war. If there was to ever be a "clean" war it would consist only of a few dozen politicians and speech makers from each country, people who's rhetoric and demands would change quite suddenly if they ever had to personally do the killing and dieing. Maybe that's the same reason that civilians abhor "civilian casualties" so much more then soldiers deaths, it's much harder to believe a war is "worth the price" if you actually risk deaths for your unwavering ideals.
How's that war on actual facts going?
Sadly in some parts of this country, it's going very very well.
Wasn't building the ISS, the driving force behind the shuttle's size? The shuttle is basically a pickup truck. The Soyuz is an ISS commuter compact.
The manned missions are popular because the embody a "Buck Rodgers" dream. I for one, would like to see NASA persueing a new dream. Call it a "DS9" dream. Make the ISS a real space station instead of a repository of shoebox experiments. Put a (large) greenhouse on the ISS and see how much air and waste can be recycled. Put some housing sections on 1000' tethers and spin up some artificial gravity. This is basic stuff that was obvious to people two generations ago. Man-on-the-Moon is an old challenge (that was accomplished more then once), it's time to sell a new dream.
The justification for the gas tax is that your tax is proportional to your usage of the infrastructure. The point of the gas tax is to raise funds for the State government. Private roads only disrupt the justification of the gas tax, not it's function.
However the creation of an extensive toll system to tax mileage will undoubtedly make for a nice fat contract to be awarded to a private contractor somewhere in Oregon, and there can be the additional claim of "jobs created". Simply raising the existing gas tax would be far too efficient.
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/index.html
And teh best way for us to not tolerate it, is to exploit it to laughable extremes. Have everyone copy the license plate of Governor Martin O'Malley and let him get multiple speeding tickets in different parts of his state at the same time, the law will change much faster that way as compared to waiting for the legislature to actually give a shit about bad law.
If noise is that big an issue, try getting rid of the fans entirely and submerging the heat producing parts of you computer in an oil bath.
Between the two major candidates there's just not enough difference between them to effect my vote.
True there is not much difference, but there is some difference, and that is actually important. Large amounts of change can happen in two ways:
We can slowly, incrementally progress towards the desired changes, carefully redirecting our society's momentum in a long slow curve. This is how our two party system has slowly evolved the government throughout history. We did manage to get out of McCarthyism and Prohibition, so all of our evolution is not doom and gloom, and has been fairly peaceful within the country.
The second way is to make a drastic change quickly, with the very real possibility that society will spin out of control. The Civil War is an example of what happens with a large change that comes about faster than it can be assimilated by our society. The violence surrounding so much of the Equal Rights movement indicates that those changes were pushing the limits of our culture's maneuverability. Those were good and necessary changes in our society, but the speed of change came with a price.
If you want to end the War on Drugs, look at which of the two viable options is more likely to end pointless ego wars and vote accordingly. You won't be able to buy or sell marijuana legally anytime in the next four years, but the choice America makes in this election will have a strong influence on legalized marijuana in the next twenty years.
It doesn't matter how many people like the Royalty there. In fact, I would call that blind nationalism--not at all a good thing. If the royalty there--and I know someone is going to bring it up--is so good, then why are they allowing/accepting this nonsense to be put into law? Nobody honorable anywhere allows censorship to go on in their name.
I would think that any "anti-insult" law would only serve to render any compliments pointless. It's parallel to the everyone-gets-a-trophy kind of parenting that is all too common these days. When everything must be a compliment and a cause for applause, then it becomes impossible to reward exceptional deeds. Now the fact Thailand thinks they need to coddle their king the way a helicopter mother coddles her child, I find to be the worst insult of all.
To The King of Thailand: You should be greatly insulted that your lawmakers think that you are so delicate, that you must be shelter from insults by a law. Do your lawmakers think that you are a frail child that cannot speak or stand up for yourself? Show your people your strength and confidence, repeal the law concerning insults against you and show that you have no fear of your critics and that your people truly love their king.
" companies are represented by large law firms with substantial resources,' while it is futile for self-represented defendants to resist. "
..." lawyers turned around and sued the very people they represented because they wanted a bigger share of the blood money."
It's a symptom of a broken legal system when self representation is "futile" and legal fees become "blood money". Yes, some might argue that lawyers are expert, trained professionals, so it only stands to reason that it would be futile for an untrained citizen to stand against them in court. That argument would make perfect sense if you were talking about pros vs joes in a different venue like sports or some industry specific contest. But the purpose of a court room isn't to determine the best performance or find a winner and a loser. A courtroom is a place to find the truth in a legal or civil dispute. Now is some of the participants are unskilled at the labyrinthine dance of courtroom etiquette, then the process should merely become less efficient at determining the truth, not less accurate. That this is not the case show a onerous flaw in our system. A flaw which has allowed lawyers to become a elite class within our supposedly egalitarian society, just look at their pay scale and tendency to become government officials.
I realize that I am idealizing what our courtroom and legal system should be, but we have to pursue idealism in our societal systems to minimize the damage done by the imperfect humans that take part in those systems.
They used to be the vanguard of freedom and liberties! Now, they seem to be degrading into a spiral of power-hungry stupid obtuseness!!!
It's been a long time since anglo-saxon people held leaders accountable. To the modern elites, having to make a public apology or receive an official censure is meaningless. Even if they are forced to leave the job where they betrayed the people trust, they get installed in a less public power position, like a corporate board of directors or high powered lobbyist position. If the betrayers of freedom and liberties were executed for treason, instead of slapped on the wrist, we would not have this problem. If white collar criminals did their time in the same cell blocks as the violent criminals, we would have never had the Enron problem. The powerful will always seek to extend and tweak their power, and there are very few who will stop willingly at the current limits of the law. Most will change the law, or find a loophole in the law, or just deny that the law applies to them. Only fear will be a primal enough motivator to counter-balance their desire for expanding power. Modern first world governments are of lawyers, by lawyers, and for lawyers. Legal action, or even actions that are legal will not be enough to instill a fear of the public in the government. Large angry mobs burning down houses are going to be the only way to reverse this trend. But the progress of riot control techniques is out pacing the build up toward a critical mass of public dissatisfaction. Without a significant portion of the population publicly participating in an action against the betrayal by their government, any such violent actions would just be terrorism and provide an excuse for further government power grabs. I don't think we will see a change in this power hungry trend until a first world western country erupts into civil war, igniting a call for direct action in other such countries.
Avoiding that downward spiral is the "Hope" that gives Obama such an attraction.