When one of my kids had some massive medical bills a few years ago (and yes, I had insurance) I cancelled cable TV, along with many other non-essentials, but kept internet since I needed it for work. Netflix was only $8/mo so I went with that. Well, I got caught up with finances and just recently signed up for cable again. To my shock and horror I find that the History Channel now only airs "reality" TV shows about rednecks and used junk. I live in Texas, so I just have to look over my neighbor's fence if I want to be entertained with that kind of "reality". There used to be so many channels on cable that had such well produced, informative, and interesting documentary type programs. Where are they now?
There are many manufacturers that keep their schematics unpublished and proprietary for the exact reasons that you want them. When schematics are published it is usually for larger appliances like refrigerators, but the components are not (usually) soldered to a PCB. In some of these cases the arrangement of the components in the schematic is "low tech", and everybody in the industry uses the same approach, so there is no real risk of losing intellectual property. Maybe one day you'll be able to get an OScar and you'll have access to all the schematics, drawings, and firmware code you need www.theoscarproject.org.
Don't worry, if millions of workers are no longer valued for their work output some corporation somewhere will value them for their organs, tissue, and meat. You can't just let people meander around with nothing to do. You've got to make use of them somehow. It's time to put "resource" back into "Human Resources".
I live in Texas, and we have fewer restrictions than most states further north. Anybody can start a contractor business, do roof repairs, even build houses from the ground up with no license. But plumbing, electrical, and HVAC are heavily regulated and you must be licensed. Homeowners are allowed an exemption, but only for their own principal residence - so if you're a landlord you cannot even replace a light fixture or a fix a leaky faucet.
In Texas permits and inspections are the responsibility of the cities. Some cities, more likely in rural areas, do not have such requirements. Here's an example from the City of Dallas:
Electrical work must be performed by a licensed electrician unless the homeowner can prove to the Chief Electrical Inspector that they have the knowledge and expertise to perform the electrical work on their own home. Permits, unless exempted by Chapter 52 of the Dallas Building Code, are required for electrical work.
Under the Texas Homestead Act, Texas Plumbing License Law and Texas Mechanical License Law, a person who owns, occupies and has homesteaded the home where the work is to be performed is exempted from the requirement of having a licensed person do the work and may do any kind of plumbing or mechanical work on his/her homestead themselves. The work performed by a homeowner requires a permit (when required by Chapter 52 of the Dallas Building Code) and inspection (if required). If no permit or inspection is required, the homeowner is required to comply with the plumbing/mechanical code.
A homeowner may perform general building work on their own property after obtaining all of the proper permits.
Compliance with the Dallas codes is required on all types of work as well as obtaining the appropriate inspections.
I think it makes sense to specialize, especially for our day jobs, but I think there can be horrible consequences for overspecialization. To put it bluntly there are some industries where the market price to do the job is not reflective of the amount of time and skill required. For instance, I always do my own taxes - in the past with tax software, but now I just use "Free Fillable Forms" - which is just the standard IRS form with some automated calculations built in. So last year my cost to file my taxes was near zilch. The amount of time required was not much more than when I used to use tax software. If I had gone to a paid professional I could have spent hundreds of dollars and wasted more time for the "convenience" of letting someone else do the typing. I frequently read books and articles on financial matters, including tax issues, so for someone like me I don't see much benefit to outsourcing my tax filing. From most of what I understand about the industry, most paid tax preparers, unless they are CPAs or EAs, don't know much more about tax law than a typical educated consumer.
The caveat here is "educated" consumer. Most of the people that I see going to H&R block to get their taxes done tend to fall under the "less than educated" end of the consumer spectrum. But the tax preparers are earning between $15 and $30 dollars per hour at a job that does not even require a high school diploma, prior experience, or any other credentials, even in neighborhoods where the median income is less than $20k.
Plumbing is another good example. I have repaired several leaking faucets for under $10 in materials (total, not per faucet). It's not even that difficult to do, and with the internet and youtube.com it is easy to learn even if you have no plumbing experience. Yet I know people who are struggling financially but pay $300.00 for a plumber to come out and fix just one leaky faucet. The more that people lose the skills to do basic maintenance and repairs on their own, the more they are going to get screwed by a system where the price of service is dependent on how much money you have and how bad you need the service (not unlike the bills for an average emergency room visit). But just as the medical industry is heavily regulated and you can't practice medicine without a license, the more requirements we see that work be performed by licensed contractors the higher the prices are going to become, since the consumers may lose the right to do their own work.
Between the proliferation of heavy regulation and licensing and the increasing lack of basic hands-on competence among the population, it now seems clear why an experienced, licensed tradesman can make over $100k per year while an engineer with a Masters degree and the same years of experience may be making less.
Maybe it's not so much about having a specific skill, but rather enough general experience working on a variety of hands-on projects so that in a bind, on a deserted road, or in a crisis, the average person can improvise and carry through. I can't tell you how often I've been stuck in a situation with some guy who's never taken two steps away from his Mac or his I-Phone to solve a real world problem.
Reminds me of my parents who were children during the Great Depression. In the early part of the 19th century Americans left their family farms to get better paying city jobs. But in time those city jobs felt more like sweat shops. Things still seemed to be getting better though in the 1920's, but after the stock market crash everybody soon began to feel the economic affects. My mother lived in the city during the depression and even when people could find work there still wasn't very much food on the table. My father on the other hand grew up on the family farm. They were not untouched by the Depression but they could always choose to eat first, and then sell the rest. He had no memories of ever being hungry. The skills and resources to be self reliant are like life insurance - you hope you never need it, but sooner or later the odds are that they will be needed eventually.
Cheers, fellow heirloom gardener! I agree, and I would add that the skills that get you your day job are not the skills that will free humanity from the deathgrip of the 1% who currently control most of the world's wealth. Nor will those day-job skills free our planet from pollution, deforestation, the depletion of our energy reserves, and global warming. But the day job does provide seed money to pursue an effort that could bring this kind of liberation. There is no incentive for corporations to make the world a better place, only individuals can make that choice, and the individuals who are trying to find ways to live sustainably are making discoveries, inventing new technologies, and conducting original research, most often without government or corporate financing. Between sustainable architecture, agriculture, permaculture, eco-friendly living, intentional communities, alternative energy, and the open-source "democratization" of technology, hardware, software, literature, music and other media, I don't know of any better way for people today to apply their efforts to learn new skills while contributing to the rapid advance of both "high tech" and "low tech" new methods and knowledge that will directly affect how people will probably have to live in the not-to-distant future. The rewards of this very open-ended hobby/movement/way-of-life can include affordable organic produce, affordable housing, being part of a fun and energetic community, food security (both in that you won't starve, AND you won't have to worry about GMO mutations, pesticides, herbicides, or industrial fertilizers), opportunities to pursue original research on your own terms, the satisfaction of building something new, different, and useful; helping others, making a difference, doing your part, having more autonomy over your own destiny, and the list goes on.
Heaven help you if you want powered model cars or airplanes, etc. When was the last time you saw a Chemistry Set? (Aside for any possible poison danger, when did you last see promotion of the mindset needed for a chemistry set?)
Why do you want powered model cars, airplanes, and a chemistry set? Are you building a bomb or something? At least I can sit here comfortably at my desk knowing that the department of homeland security is taking note every time somebody types "DIY", "airplane", and "chemistry" into their Google search box.
You have a cordless drill and a circular saw? Hell, that's more than what we had back in my day, and we sent man to the moon! Or to a really good Hollywood special effects studio - but dammit we knew how to work with our hands and that's a pretty good accomplishment, wherever it was we sent those space men to.
America is serious about securing uninterrupted and uninterpretable access to oil and gas, but what good does that do if America doesn't have the vehicles, industry, and infrastructure to make use of that oil and gas?
Exactly. Our next war will be to procure oil and resources to keep China's production on schedule. We're too dependent on the Chinese to allow them to fail, just like we were dependent on banks and bailed them out in 2008. Like North Korea, we'll just become another of China's attack dogs.
The Act keeps manufacturers from requiring that all service be performed at the dealership, but without receipts from a 3rd party service provider, a manufacturer could claim that the owner did not provide reasonable and necessary maintenance. Given the high cost and hassle of litigation, many companies are pushing the boundaries of what they can legally get away with, hoping that consumers won't understand their rights and won't have the time or money to pursue legal action.
No, large populations will be living like cattle, working at companies like Foxconn for 14 hours a day, seven days a week. After their shifts they will be allowed to sleep in on-site dormitories (again, kind of like cattle).
Income has gone up, time has gone down and things have got cheaper.
Please let me know when and where this happened? My father was a WWII vet, worked as an engineer, and put two kids through college while my mother took care of the domestic responsibilities on the homefront. My father was also very gifted working with his hands in his free time. As kids we always had enough money to go on vacation at least once each year, often times to distant locales such as Hawaii, Fiji, and Australia. The appliances they bought back in the 1950's and 60's are still working and I now own and still use them. I am now an engineer myself, my wife works full time, and we both bring our work home most nights. I have to travel for business several times each month, there's little time to prepare meals so our food bill is higher than my parents home cooked cuisine. The appliances and other products I buy are much cheaper today, but I have to replace almost everything I buy quite often because the quality and workmanship is crap. My kids play mostly with the toys I grew up with (that I didn't throw out) because the toys I buy my kids today are such cheap crap that they break and can't hold up to childhood play conditions. All the research and labor studies show that today Americans work more hours than any other nation and any other time since the Great Depression. So no, compared to 30 or 50 years ago, things are NOT better. Perhaps I have a higher income because my wife works, but there are no overseas vacations on our foreseeable horizon and I have serious concerns about how I'm going to pay my kid's college tuition.
Coming to a town near you. It is with much horror that I keep reading stories just like this, and I have heard much worse. There are many people who are enthusiastic about and advocate for sustainable architecture and alternative types of human habitat. Earthships, strawbale homes, yurts, geodesic domes, monolithic domes, the small homes movement, etc. The list goes on, but the point is that in spite of the collapse in the housing market, there is still a shortage of affordable housing for many of the nation's poor and working class. Even for the middle-class and well-to-do, there are many of us who would prefer to build our own homes to our own preferences, requirements, and objectives - such as living sustainably or being more self reliant (as in not worrying that the utility bill could increase 300% in three months). By providing their own labor, there are alternative dwellings that cost less than $20k to build, using materials that are either recycled (straw bales, car tires, etc.) or made on site (cob, stone, log, rammed earth, adobe, etc.). But most often these alternative dwellings cannot be built according to standard building codes, not because they are any bit less safe or structurally sound, but because the code is written by the same industry that supplies the high-priced standardized lumber, brick, and hardware. In addition to complying with an arbitrary code that many say is feeding the depletion of the earth's natural resources, contributing to global warming, and redistributing wealth from working class families to the world richest 1%, the home builders also have to pony up arbitrary fees for permits, inspections, drawings, approvals, etc. that end up costing more than the total materials.
Many of these alternative dwellings are designed to take advantage of passive heating and cooling techniques as well as collecting rain water into cisterns, draining greywater into gardens, sometimes even processing blackwater, and also generating power on-site, such as with wind turbines, micro-hydro-turbines (creek power), and solar. Efficient hand made ovens that burn biomass grown in the backyard provide more than enough heat for comfort, cooking, and other applications. But even when these dwellings are completely self reliant, most municipalities REQUIRE these homes to have and pay for utility connections such as gas and electricity.
What is ridiculous is that many of the rules have silly loopholes. The codes that apply to my home no longer apply if I build my home on a chassis trailer. While I might be required to hire an electrician to wire my house, I can do my own low-voltage wiring (say 24V for indoor and outdoor lighting). I might not be allowed to install my own solar panels, but I could build a fold-out solar power plant on a trailer chassis without any questions - even add a backup generator, transformers, and a battery bank to boot without raising any eyebrows from the regulators. I can't install a new plumbing fixture in my kitchen without paying for a permit, hiring a plumber, and paying for an inspection, but I can use a pre-installed connection and use a portable dishwasher and a portable sink and relocate them in my kitchen any way I choose. But if my sink was built into the counter then I wouldn't be able to even fix a dripping faucet in some municipalities.
With already such a division between the haves and have-nots in our country, as these regulations tighten, the ability to fall back on self reliance or subsistence farming like our forefathers only one century ago has all by already been taken away. The poor and working middle class will still be blamed for their own socio-economic lot in life, they won't get sympathy or aid from the well-to-do, but they won't be allowed the basic means to provide for their own necessities. Living homeless on the street will continue to be legal, as long as you don't erect a tent or an elaborate cardboard box for shelter. Welcome to Metropolis - workers, please proceed to the depths.
And often the furniture at Walmart isn't even made from crappy particle board, it is literally made out of cardboard! I found this out the hard way when I bought an ottoman that soon crumpled after my kids played on it a little bit. The incident lead me to a moment of reflection where I now realize that people are better off building their own things at a slightly higher cost but end up with a product that is their own design, meets their own needs, and since they designed and built it they almost intrinsically know how to maintain and repair it.
After my parents passed away I ended up with some 1950's and 60's era appliances, like a blender made out of glass and steel. Most of the other appliances were made out of durable materials, such as ceramic instead of plastic. I've been using these now for several years, whereas almost every Walmart-type of appliance has made its way to the dumpster. My plan is to keep these appliances running and if they ever break I'll try to fix myself, even if a replacement component costs more than a brand new Walmart (disposable) appliance.
I have friends who chose to buy cars that are 20 years old and they tell me that not only is the purchase price less, but as long as the car wasn't horribly neglected, they can work on these cars and repair most problems in their driveway whereas the modern era vehicles have too much "technology" crammed into such a tiny space, and unlike cars from the bygone era, many of today's cars are simply not designed to be worked on regularly, and even at the auto repair shop the time it takes for simple repairs has cost me a lot of money. Hell, I was going to change a headlamp on my car, but when I opened the user manual it said to take it to a dealer - what BS! Now, myself, I haven't been able to give up on modern vehicles, but I have decided to trade my P.O.S. sedan for a Toyota Tacoma. There is not as much incentive to cram components so tightly with the trucks, so I expect that in the future I really can replace parts myself. My new rule is if I can't pop the hood and get instant access to the battery, spark plugs, and alternator, then I'm not buying it. And while the Tacoma burns more gas than my old car, it isn't as much as you would think. Lately I've also started changing my own oil, and while the cost savings are not amazing, I get the sense that I am a bit more independent and more self reliant now that just a few years ago.
One of the obstacles, though, for the DIYer is that since most manufacturing is done overseas the local market for raw material stock is shrinking, forcing prices higher. Not too mention that most of today's mass-produced throw-away products have "no user serviceable parts". The manufacturers see consumers servicing their products as a liability, because they could get hurt doing something stupid and sue the manufacturer, or they could make adjustments or modifications and possibly sell their modifications or publish how to modify the products. Many products sold today with different features at different prices are all identical, it's just that one product might have different firmware installed, or the circuitry is already on the board but just needs a jumper to unlock the new feature. So users tinkering with their products is something they don't want.
The saddest thing for me though is that electronics today are almost nothing but a compact touch screen, a Li-ion battery, and a system-on-a-chip. You used to be able to buy dozens of cheap little parts, assemble them on a "breadboard" or make your own PCB, and have a lot of fun making, designing, improving, modifying, etc. But the SMT ball-grid-array single chip that does everything kind of takes the fun out of what we used to do with perf-board and through-hole IC's. Not to mention that there was a time when digital controls and analog signal processing where the domain of the electronics engineer, but now it is the embedded software engineer that is programming these functions. Now electronics still exist as a hobby today, such as
1. Companies don't just have the option of defending their trademarks, they have the DUTY to defend their trademarks or lose the right to those trademarks. Of course nobody is going to presume that a book is a bottle of Jack Daniels, but the design of the cover is clearly recognizable as the Jack Daniels design, even referencing "40% ALC. BY VOL." Having your trademark used by other people and companies could set a track record of not defending your trademark, which would mean that more people could use your trademark and with so many examples of others being allowed to do it you might not be able to stop anybody from using in the future. So if someone used the trademark and wrote a book that advocated giving alcohol to children it could become a real liability for Jack Daniels, both in the court of law and the court of public opinion, which could really affect a companies ability to sell and market their product.
2. Jack Daniels also does license their trademarks to other companies, such a Friday's restaurants that serve the Jack Daniel's grilled meals, and there are also cookbooks that have agreements with Jack Daniels to use the trademark. So sub-licensing their own trademark is a profitable side business, and a business that is hard to continue when anybody can just use their trademark for free without paying for it.
If you don't like trademark law then do something to change it, but don't disparage Jack Daniels for playing by the rules and conducting themselves in a manner that goes above and beyond what the law requires and above what is commonly accepted practice.
The answer to "why" is he was probably crazy. He might have been crazy and voting Republican, but most Republicans I know don't do this sort of thing. And crazy people do weird stuff. But they most often also have serious deficiencies that prevent them from more effectively carrying out their objectives. They tend to imitate crimes committed by others or something they saw on TV or a video game.
I support gun rights for intelligent, sane, law abiding citizens. I'm not sure how this person got their weapons, but if there were more requirements that gun owners limit other people's access to their firearms (not just children), and persons had to be screened to determine if they were mentally competent to have a gun then fewer crazies would be able to carry out such attacks. Yes, guns are available on the black market. But how is a crazy, right-wing, Caucasian guy with limited social skills going to make his way down to the ghetto, chill with the homeboys, and walk off with some gangsta's tool?
While a flat-out ban on guns, or most guns (allowing only rifles, shotguns, and revolvers - no more high-capacity, fast-changing preloaded magazines), would not stop street gangs and drug cartels, over time it would slow down the frequency of mass shootings such as these are more dangerous types of guns become more difficult to come by. Ironically, Mexico has some of the most strict gun laws in the world, but the cartels smuggle their guns in from the US, where they are often purchased legally. If the US and Mexico could get on the same page with their gun laws then perhaps there could be some progress for both countries.
Politically, the greatest obstacle to further limits on who can buy guns and what type of guns they can buy is the "slippery slope" theory, that once you start down a path of restricting rights, more and more rights will be stripped until there are none left. While I agree that the "slippery slope" is a genuine risk to liberties, I think the consequences for gun owners in the future may be even worse, such as an all-out ban in response to a series of violent attacks involving guns. Most Americans today do not own a gun and even many of those who may own a shotgun for sport or hunting would welcome a ban on assault rifles and pistols. Revolvers are much harder to reload and you usually only get five or six shots before reloading again, so the odds that you can shoot 50 people in a crowded theater are rather limited. Yet such a revolver could be suitable for defending one's home from an intruder. The hoarding instinct could actually further limit the availability of firearms on the black market, again keeping guns out of the hands of lone-wolf crazy types. Gangs and cartels would not likely be immediately affected, but citizens who could still legally carry a revolver for personal defense would limit any sudden rise in street crime of well-armed thugs against an unarmed society.
The key issues for implementing moderate gun control would be: - Better screening to decide who should have access to firearms. - Rules to limit private sale of such arms only to qualified buyers. - Consider the possibility of illegal weapons being smuggled in from neighboring states. For example, Mexico's strict gun laws don't help as much because the cartels can smuggle guns that are easy to procure in the US. - Phase out dangerous weapons gradually. Begin with guns that have high rates of fire, quick-change high capacity magazines, and high caliper rounds, but leave citizens with access to traditional sport and hunting rifles, shotguns, and revolvers for personal defense.
Implement these changes and you would see a major reduction in mass shootings, and some reduction in act-of-rage shootings of one to three people (like school shootings, etc. where the shooter shouldn't have unlimited access to handguns).
To be fair, I think there is something to be said for the old pro-gun slogan "better to be tried by 12 than carried by 6". There is an odd chance that a citizen who pulls his licensed concealed weapon to shoot at the attacker in a mass shooting could miss and hit innocents or the others in the room could think he is also an attacker (in which case, they probably would have been firing at the original attacker if they had a gun themselves). So if they mistook the citizen with a gun for the attacker, at worst they might try to tackle him, but with a 2nd gunman in the room, if you presume they are working together, you'd be more likely to wrestle the gun from the citizen to take out the original attacker. So in all but a highly unlikely set of circumstances the armed citizen responding to an attack is not likely to suffer worse repercussions than if he was unarmed.
If an off-duty or undercover cop was in the theater and took out the gunman with his concealed weapon, wouldn't he be taking the exact same risks? I have read of many cases where a lawfully armed citizen or off duty officer used his weapon to end the violent actions of a would-be murderer or mass murderer, but I don't recall ever hearing about some horrible tragedy where another citizen or cop made matters much worse during the confusion of the event. Even if it did happen, siting a single example would not negate the value of citizens and off-duty officers carrying concealed weapons given the many other cases where they have been used to stop further violence.
One party tends to be pro-war while the other tends to be anti-war. I'm sure there are crazies on both sides, but which side's crazies would be more likely to burst into a room shooting at random? But even still, the actions of the crazies, on either side, do not prove or disprove the theories proposed by the main stream leaders of their movements. Even though MLK espoused peaceful marches he could not prevent the violent actions of a few who would claim they were on his side.
Your argument is also logically flawed, because you are assuming how a rational person would carry out an irrational act. Of course the handgun is the less effective way to kill a crowd of people. But considering that most mass murders are carried out with firearms, I think it is reasonable to conclude that the mentally ill people who commit these acts derive personal satisfaction from using the firearm. Given that small arms like pistols and shotguns are the most often depicted weapons in movies and video games, I think that the perpetrators of these types of attacks prefer to use them to satisfy their own fantasies.
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When one of my kids had some massive medical bills a few years ago (and yes, I had insurance) I cancelled cable TV, along with many other non-essentials, but kept internet since I needed it for work. Netflix was only $8/mo so I went with that. Well, I got caught up with finances and just recently signed up for cable again. To my shock and horror I find that the History Channel now only airs "reality" TV shows about rednecks and used junk. I live in Texas, so I just have to look over my neighbor's fence if I want to be entertained with that kind of "reality". There used to be so many channels on cable that had such well produced, informative, and interesting documentary type programs. Where are they now?
There are many manufacturers that keep their schematics unpublished and proprietary for the exact reasons that you want them. When schematics are published it is usually for larger appliances like refrigerators, but the components are not (usually) soldered to a PCB. In some of these cases the arrangement of the components in the schematic is "low tech", and everybody in the industry uses the same approach, so there is no real risk of losing intellectual property. Maybe one day you'll be able to get an OScar and you'll have access to all the schematics, drawings, and firmware code you need www.theoscarproject.org.
Don't worry, if millions of workers are no longer valued for their work output some corporation somewhere will value them for their organs, tissue, and meat. You can't just let people meander around with nothing to do. You've got to make use of them somehow. It's time to put "resource" back into "Human Resources".
I live in Texas, and we have fewer restrictions than most states further north. Anybody can start a contractor business, do roof repairs, even build houses from the ground up with no license. But plumbing, electrical, and HVAC are heavily regulated and you must be licensed. Homeowners are allowed an exemption, but only for their own principal residence - so if you're a landlord you cannot even replace a light fixture or a fix a leaky faucet.
In Texas permits and inspections are the responsibility of the cities. Some cities, more likely in rural areas, do not have such requirements. Here's an example from the City of Dallas:
http://www.dallascityhall.com/building_inspection/building_inspection_faqs.html
What kind of work can I do on my own home?
Electrical work must be performed by a licensed electrician unless the homeowner can prove to the Chief Electrical Inspector that they have the knowledge and expertise to perform the electrical work on their own home. Permits, unless exempted by Chapter 52 of the Dallas Building Code, are required for electrical work.
Under the Texas Homestead Act, Texas Plumbing License Law and Texas Mechanical License Law, a person who owns, occupies and has homesteaded the home where the work is to be performed is exempted from the requirement of having a licensed person do the work and may do any kind of plumbing or mechanical work on his/her homestead themselves. The work performed by a homeowner requires a permit (when required by Chapter 52 of the Dallas Building Code) and inspection (if required). If no permit or inspection is required, the homeowner is required to comply with the plumbing/mechanical code.
A homeowner may perform general building work on their own property after obtaining all of the proper permits.
Compliance with the Dallas codes is required on all types of work as well as obtaining the appropriate inspections.
I think it makes sense to specialize, especially for our day jobs, but I think there can be horrible consequences for overspecialization. To put it bluntly there are some industries where the market price to do the job is not reflective of the amount of time and skill required. For instance, I always do my own taxes - in the past with tax software, but now I just use "Free Fillable Forms" - which is just the standard IRS form with some automated calculations built in. So last year my cost to file my taxes was near zilch. The amount of time required was not much more than when I used to use tax software. If I had gone to a paid professional I could have spent hundreds of dollars and wasted more time for the "convenience" of letting someone else do the typing. I frequently read books and articles on financial matters, including tax issues, so for someone like me I don't see much benefit to outsourcing my tax filing. From most of what I understand about the industry, most paid tax preparers, unless they are CPAs or EAs, don't know much more about tax law than a typical educated consumer.
The caveat here is "educated" consumer. Most of the people that I see going to H&R block to get their taxes done tend to fall under the "less than educated" end of the consumer spectrum. But the tax preparers are earning between $15 and $30 dollars per hour at a job that does not even require a high school diploma, prior experience, or any other credentials, even in neighborhoods where the median income is less than $20k.
Plumbing is another good example. I have repaired several leaking faucets for under $10 in materials (total, not per faucet). It's not even that difficult to do, and with the internet and youtube.com it is easy to learn even if you have no plumbing experience. Yet I know people who are struggling financially but pay $300.00 for a plumber to come out and fix just one leaky faucet. The more that people lose the skills to do basic maintenance and repairs on their own, the more they are going to get screwed by a system where the price of service is dependent on how much money you have and how bad you need the service (not unlike the bills for an average emergency room visit). But just as the medical industry is heavily regulated and you can't practice medicine without a license, the more requirements we see that work be performed by licensed contractors the higher the prices are going to become, since the consumers may lose the right to do their own work.
Between the proliferation of heavy regulation and licensing and the increasing lack of basic hands-on competence among the population, it now seems clear why an experienced, licensed tradesman can make over $100k per year while an engineer with a Masters degree and the same years of experience may be making less.
Maybe it's not so much about having a specific skill, but rather enough general experience working on a variety of hands-on projects so that in a bind, on a deserted road, or in a crisis, the average person can improvise and carry through. I can't tell you how often I've been stuck in a situation with some guy who's never taken two steps away from his Mac or his I-Phone to solve a real world problem.
Reminds me of my parents who were children during the Great Depression. In the early part of the 19th century Americans left their family farms to get better paying city jobs. But in time those city jobs felt more like sweat shops. Things still seemed to be getting better though in the 1920's, but after the stock market crash everybody soon began to feel the economic affects. My mother lived in the city during the depression and even when people could find work there still wasn't very much food on the table. My father on the other hand grew up on the family farm. They were not untouched by the Depression but they could always choose to eat first, and then sell the rest. He had no memories of ever being hungry. The skills and resources to be self reliant are like life insurance - you hope you never need it, but sooner or later the odds are that they will be needed eventually.
Unfortunately this sort of bureaucracy and regulation is growing and spreading. Coming to a municipality near you.
Cheers, fellow heirloom gardener! I agree, and I would add that the skills that get you your day job are not the skills that will free humanity from the deathgrip of the 1% who currently control most of the world's wealth. Nor will those day-job skills free our planet from pollution, deforestation, the depletion of our energy reserves, and global warming. But the day job does provide seed money to pursue an effort that could bring this kind of liberation. There is no incentive for corporations to make the world a better place, only individuals can make that choice, and the individuals who are trying to find ways to live sustainably are making discoveries, inventing new technologies, and conducting original research, most often without government or corporate financing. Between sustainable architecture, agriculture, permaculture, eco-friendly living, intentional communities, alternative energy, and the open-source "democratization" of technology, hardware, software, literature, music and other media, I don't know of any better way for people today to apply their efforts to learn new skills while contributing to the rapid advance of both "high tech" and "low tech" new methods and knowledge that will directly affect how people will probably have to live in the not-to-distant future. The rewards of this very open-ended hobby/movement/way-of-life can include affordable organic produce, affordable housing, being part of a fun and energetic community, food security (both in that you won't starve, AND you won't have to worry about GMO mutations, pesticides, herbicides, or industrial fertilizers), opportunities to pursue original research on your own terms, the satisfaction of building something new, different, and useful; helping others, making a difference, doing your part, having more autonomy over your own destiny, and the list goes on.
Heaven help you if you want powered model cars or airplanes, etc. When was the last time you saw a Chemistry Set? (Aside for any possible poison danger, when did you last see promotion of the mindset needed for a chemistry set?)
Why do you want powered model cars, airplanes, and a chemistry set? Are you building a bomb or something? At least I can sit here comfortably at my desk knowing that the department of homeland security is taking note every time somebody types "DIY", "airplane", and "chemistry" into their Google search box.
You have a cordless drill and a circular saw? Hell, that's more than what we had back in my day, and we sent man to the moon! Or to a really good Hollywood special effects studio - but dammit we knew how to work with our hands and that's a pretty good accomplishment, wherever it was we sent those space men to.
America is serious about securing uninterrupted and uninterpretable access to oil and gas, but what good does that do if America doesn't have the vehicles, industry, and infrastructure to make use of that oil and gas?
Exactly. Our next war will be to procure oil and resources to keep China's production on schedule. We're too dependent on the Chinese to allow them to fail, just like we were dependent on banks and bailed them out in 2008. Like North Korea, we'll just become another of China's attack dogs.
The Act keeps manufacturers from requiring that all service be performed at the dealership, but without receipts from a 3rd party service provider, a manufacturer could claim that the owner did not provide reasonable and necessary maintenance. Given the high cost and hassle of litigation, many companies are pushing the boundaries of what they can legally get away with, hoping that consumers won't understand their rights and won't have the time or money to pursue legal action.
No, large populations will be living like cattle, working at companies like Foxconn for 14 hours a day, seven days a week. After their shifts they will be allowed to sleep in on-site dormitories (again, kind of like cattle).
Income has gone up, time has gone down and things have got cheaper.
Please let me know when and where this happened? My father was a WWII vet, worked as an engineer, and put two kids through college while my mother took care of the domestic responsibilities on the homefront. My father was also very gifted working with his hands in his free time. As kids we always had enough money to go on vacation at least once each year, often times to distant locales such as Hawaii, Fiji, and Australia. The appliances they bought back in the 1950's and 60's are still working and I now own and still use them. I am now an engineer myself, my wife works full time, and we both bring our work home most nights. I have to travel for business several times each month, there's little time to prepare meals so our food bill is higher than my parents home cooked cuisine. The appliances and other products I buy are much cheaper today, but I have to replace almost everything I buy quite often because the quality and workmanship is crap. My kids play mostly with the toys I grew up with (that I didn't throw out) because the toys I buy my kids today are such cheap crap that they break and can't hold up to childhood play conditions. All the research and labor studies show that today Americans work more hours than any other nation and any other time since the Great Depression. So no, compared to 30 or 50 years ago, things are NOT better. Perhaps I have a higher income because my wife works, but there are no overseas vacations on our foreseeable horizon and I have serious concerns about how I'm going to pay my kid's college tuition.
Coming to a town near you. It is with much horror that I keep reading stories just like this, and I have heard much worse. There are many people who are enthusiastic about and advocate for sustainable architecture and alternative types of human habitat. Earthships, strawbale homes, yurts, geodesic domes, monolithic domes, the small homes movement, etc. The list goes on, but the point is that in spite of the collapse in the housing market, there is still a shortage of affordable housing for many of the nation's poor and working class. Even for the middle-class and well-to-do, there are many of us who would prefer to build our own homes to our own preferences, requirements, and objectives - such as living sustainably or being more self reliant (as in not worrying that the utility bill could increase 300% in three months). By providing their own labor, there are alternative dwellings that cost less than $20k to build, using materials that are either recycled (straw bales, car tires, etc.) or made on site (cob, stone, log, rammed earth, adobe, etc.). But most often these alternative dwellings cannot be built according to standard building codes, not because they are any bit less safe or structurally sound, but because the code is written by the same industry that supplies the high-priced standardized lumber, brick, and hardware. In addition to complying with an arbitrary code that many say is feeding the depletion of the earth's natural resources, contributing to global warming, and redistributing wealth from working class families to the world richest 1%, the home builders also have to pony up arbitrary fees for permits, inspections, drawings, approvals, etc. that end up costing more than the total materials.
Many of these alternative dwellings are designed to take advantage of passive heating and cooling techniques as well as collecting rain water into cisterns, draining greywater into gardens, sometimes even processing blackwater, and also generating power on-site, such as with wind turbines, micro-hydro-turbines (creek power), and solar. Efficient hand made ovens that burn biomass grown in the backyard provide more than enough heat for comfort, cooking, and other applications. But even when these dwellings are completely self reliant, most municipalities REQUIRE these homes to have and pay for utility connections such as gas and electricity.
What is ridiculous is that many of the rules have silly loopholes. The codes that apply to my home no longer apply if I build my home on a chassis trailer. While I might be required to hire an electrician to wire my house, I can do my own low-voltage wiring (say 24V for indoor and outdoor lighting). I might not be allowed to install my own solar panels, but I could build a fold-out solar power plant on a trailer chassis without any questions - even add a backup generator, transformers, and a battery bank to boot without raising any eyebrows from the regulators. I can't install a new plumbing fixture in my kitchen without paying for a permit, hiring a plumber, and paying for an inspection, but I can use a pre-installed connection and use a portable dishwasher and a portable sink and relocate them in my kitchen any way I choose. But if my sink was built into the counter then I wouldn't be able to even fix a dripping faucet in some municipalities.
With already such a division between the haves and have-nots in our country, as these regulations tighten, the ability to fall back on self reliance or subsistence farming like our forefathers only one century ago has all by already been taken away. The poor and working middle class will still be blamed for their own socio-economic lot in life, they won't get sympathy or aid from the well-to-do, but they won't be allowed the basic means to provide for their own necessities. Living homeless on the street will continue to be legal, as long as you don't erect a tent or an elaborate cardboard box for shelter. Welcome to Metropolis - workers, please proceed to the depths.
And often the furniture at Walmart isn't even made from crappy particle board, it is literally made out of cardboard! I found this out the hard way when I bought an ottoman that soon crumpled after my kids played on it a little bit. The incident lead me to a moment of reflection where I now realize that people are better off building their own things at a slightly higher cost but end up with a product that is their own design, meets their own needs, and since they designed and built it they almost intrinsically know how to maintain and repair it.
After my parents passed away I ended up with some 1950's and 60's era appliances, like a blender made out of glass and steel. Most of the other appliances were made out of durable materials, such as ceramic instead of plastic. I've been using these now for several years, whereas almost every Walmart-type of appliance has made its way to the dumpster. My plan is to keep these appliances running and if they ever break I'll try to fix myself, even if a replacement component costs more than a brand new Walmart (disposable) appliance.
I have friends who chose to buy cars that are 20 years old and they tell me that not only is the purchase price less, but as long as the car wasn't horribly neglected, they can work on these cars and repair most problems in their driveway whereas the modern era vehicles have too much "technology" crammed into such a tiny space, and unlike cars from the bygone era, many of today's cars are simply not designed to be worked on regularly, and even at the auto repair shop the time it takes for simple repairs has cost me a lot of money. Hell, I was going to change a headlamp on my car, but when I opened the user manual it said to take it to a dealer - what BS! Now, myself, I haven't been able to give up on modern vehicles, but I have decided to trade my P.O.S. sedan for a Toyota Tacoma. There is not as much incentive to cram components so tightly with the trucks, so I expect that in the future I really can replace parts myself. My new rule is if I can't pop the hood and get instant access to the battery, spark plugs, and alternator, then I'm not buying it. And while the Tacoma burns more gas than my old car, it isn't as much as you would think. Lately I've also started changing my own oil, and while the cost savings are not amazing, I get the sense that I am a bit more independent and more self reliant now that just a few years ago.
One of the obstacles, though, for the DIYer is that since most manufacturing is done overseas the local market for raw material stock is shrinking, forcing prices higher. Not too mention that most of today's mass-produced throw-away products have "no user serviceable parts". The manufacturers see consumers servicing their products as a liability, because they could get hurt doing something stupid and sue the manufacturer, or they could make adjustments or modifications and possibly sell their modifications or publish how to modify the products. Many products sold today with different features at different prices are all identical, it's just that one product might have different firmware installed, or the circuitry is already on the board but just needs a jumper to unlock the new feature. So users tinkering with their products is something they don't want.
The saddest thing for me though is that electronics today are almost nothing but a compact touch screen, a Li-ion battery, and a system-on-a-chip. You used to be able to buy dozens of cheap little parts, assemble them on a "breadboard" or make your own PCB, and have a lot of fun making, designing, improving, modifying, etc. But the SMT ball-grid-array single chip that does everything kind of takes the fun out of what we used to do with perf-board and through-hole IC's. Not to mention that there was a time when digital controls and analog signal processing where the domain of the electronics engineer, but now it is the embedded software engineer that is programming these functions. Now electronics still exist as a hobby today, such as
Again, you also need to see my response to Hatta above.
Slurred speech quickly translates to slurred grammar when you're a corporate lawyer who consumes every free sample of your company's product.
You need to see my reply to Hatta above.
1. Companies don't just have the option of defending their trademarks, they have the DUTY to defend their trademarks or lose the right to those trademarks. Of course nobody is going to presume that a book is a bottle of Jack Daniels, but the design of the cover is clearly recognizable as the Jack Daniels design, even referencing "40% ALC. BY VOL." Having your trademark used by other people and companies could set a track record of not defending your trademark, which would mean that more people could use your trademark and with so many examples of others being allowed to do it you might not be able to stop anybody from using in the future. So if someone used the trademark and wrote a book that advocated giving alcohol to children it could become a real liability for Jack Daniels, both in the court of law and the court of public opinion, which could really affect a companies ability to sell and market their product.
2. Jack Daniels also does license their trademarks to other companies, such a Friday's restaurants that serve the Jack Daniel's grilled meals, and there are also cookbooks that have agreements with Jack Daniels to use the trademark. So sub-licensing their own trademark is a profitable side business, and a business that is hard to continue when anybody can just use their trademark for free without paying for it.
If you don't like trademark law then do something to change it, but don't disparage Jack Daniels for playing by the rules and conducting themselves in a manner that goes above and beyond what the law requires and above what is commonly accepted practice.
The answer to "why" is he was probably crazy. He might have been crazy and voting Republican, but most Republicans I know don't do this sort of thing. And crazy people do weird stuff. But they most often also have serious deficiencies that prevent them from more effectively carrying out their objectives. They tend to imitate crimes committed by others or something they saw on TV or a video game.
I support gun rights for intelligent, sane, law abiding citizens. I'm not sure how this person got their weapons, but if there were more requirements that gun owners limit other people's access to their firearms (not just children), and persons had to be screened to determine if they were mentally competent to have a gun then fewer crazies would be able to carry out such attacks. Yes, guns are available on the black market. But how is a crazy, right-wing, Caucasian guy with limited social skills going to make his way down to the ghetto, chill with the homeboys, and walk off with some gangsta's tool?
While a flat-out ban on guns, or most guns (allowing only rifles, shotguns, and revolvers - no more high-capacity, fast-changing preloaded magazines), would not stop street gangs and drug cartels, over time it would slow down the frequency of mass shootings such as these are more dangerous types of guns become more difficult to come by. Ironically, Mexico has some of the most strict gun laws in the world, but the cartels smuggle their guns in from the US, where they are often purchased legally. If the US and Mexico could get on the same page with their gun laws then perhaps there could be some progress for both countries.
Politically, the greatest obstacle to further limits on who can buy guns and what type of guns they can buy is the "slippery slope" theory, that once you start down a path of restricting rights, more and more rights will be stripped until there are none left. While I agree that the "slippery slope" is a genuine risk to liberties, I think the consequences for gun owners in the future may be even worse, such as an all-out ban in response to a series of violent attacks involving guns. Most Americans today do not own a gun and even many of those who may own a shotgun for sport or hunting would welcome a ban on assault rifles and pistols. Revolvers are much harder to reload and you usually only get five or six shots before reloading again, so the odds that you can shoot 50 people in a crowded theater are rather limited. Yet such a revolver could be suitable for defending one's home from an intruder. The hoarding instinct could actually further limit the availability of firearms on the black market, again keeping guns out of the hands of lone-wolf crazy types. Gangs and cartels would not likely be immediately affected, but citizens who could still legally carry a revolver for personal defense would limit any sudden rise in street crime of well-armed thugs against an unarmed society.
The key issues for implementing moderate gun control would be:
- Better screening to decide who should have access to firearms.
- Rules to limit private sale of such arms only to qualified buyers.
- Consider the possibility of illegal weapons being smuggled in from neighboring states. For example, Mexico's strict gun laws don't help as much because the cartels can smuggle guns that are easy to procure in the US.
- Phase out dangerous weapons gradually. Begin with guns that have high rates of fire, quick-change high capacity magazines, and high caliper rounds, but leave citizens with access to traditional sport and hunting rifles, shotguns, and revolvers for personal defense.
Implement these changes and you would see a major reduction in mass shootings, and some reduction in act-of-rage shootings of one to three people (like school shootings, etc. where the shooter shouldn't have unlimited access to handguns).
To be fair, I think there is something to be said for the old pro-gun slogan "better to be tried by 12 than carried by 6". There is an odd chance that a citizen who pulls his licensed concealed weapon to shoot at the attacker in a mass shooting could miss and hit innocents or the others in the room could think he is also an attacker (in which case, they probably would have been firing at the original attacker if they had a gun themselves). So if they mistook the citizen with a gun for the attacker, at worst they might try to tackle him, but with a 2nd gunman in the room, if you presume they are working together, you'd be more likely to wrestle the gun from the citizen to take out the original attacker. So in all but a highly unlikely set of circumstances the armed citizen responding to an attack is not likely to suffer worse repercussions than if he was unarmed.
If an off-duty or undercover cop was in the theater and took out the gunman with his concealed weapon, wouldn't he be taking the exact same risks? I have read of many cases where a lawfully armed citizen or off duty officer used his weapon to end the violent actions of a would-be murderer or mass murderer, but I don't recall ever hearing about some horrible tragedy where another citizen or cop made matters much worse during the confusion of the event. Even if it did happen, siting a single example would not negate the value of citizens and off-duty officers carrying concealed weapons given the many other cases where they have been used to stop further violence.
One party tends to be pro-war while the other tends to be anti-war. I'm sure there are crazies on both sides, but which side's crazies would be more likely to burst into a room shooting at random? But even still, the actions of the crazies, on either side, do not prove or disprove the theories proposed by the main stream leaders of their movements. Even though MLK espoused peaceful marches he could not prevent the violent actions of a few who would claim they were on his side.
Your argument is also logically flawed, because you are assuming how a rational person would carry out an irrational act. Of course the handgun is the less effective way to kill a crowd of people. But considering that most mass murders are carried out with firearms, I think it is reasonable to conclude that the mentally ill people who commit these acts derive personal satisfaction from using the firearm. Given that small arms like pistols and shotguns are the most often depicted weapons in movies and video games, I think that the perpetrators of these types of attacks prefer to use them to satisfy their own fantasies.