I am not saying Tesla is this or that but history of at least relatively modern economy shows that every major breakthrough failed economically. This happened to both great canals in Egypt and in Panama and with few other endeavors - railways in few places did that i.e.burning the investors' money, too. Whether this is going to be a great success or not is still in the future. The guy sis a genius whether he succeeds or not. At least he is trying which is the only known method of getting things done.
If it at all reduces power of the state (which I doubt) then it increases the power of the corporation not the customer. I find the tax mess in US quite interesting. I guess it is just life in its highest form - increasing complexity till it falls under its own weight.
As for other arguments about sales tax here and there - if all is done remotely and corporate entity can move its taxable income anywhere there will at he end be only few places where corporate entities let themselves be taxed. This will most likely increase the size of corporations and decrease their number making entering business difficult. It is in principle the same as with everything else - in old times the state and its power had to be limited because it was the biggest power existing at the time. Now the corps have more power than the state or are at least so powerful that we need state to regulate them and sometimes not even the state can. Marx was right after all - no matter what the capital accumulates.
The fact that goldmansachs thinks these lousy few billions earned (after all the costs) is not worth it if it does not come yearly, shows where the problem is. The solution to it could be a license for crooking (lawyers and finance magicians) as above attached to a yearly decimation lottery so you can abuse general public as usual but once a year you have to go through the thrill of being selected to feed the lion etc.
You televise or stream it and have revenue to cover costs of lions.
I feel sorry for Skripals but you can get to feel powers of any state if you tease them too much and he did tease some mighty people. What we do not know of course is who he teased besides FSB and Russian generals.
Who we are to believe? These days we not only only have Russian but all media channels seem to have deteriorated into some form of propaganda. I admit I did not think this trough when communism ended for me but I kind of implicitly expected no propaganda. That was silly.
Could this be that with size grows structure and thus complexity? Seems like a nature's own law?
Suddenly you have external constrains that you did not have before. The growing size does seem to force hierarchic organizations all on its own. One way of dealing with it is practical i.e. do what is needed and the other ideological - do what is is in a book. Besides - naturally even if there are some individuals that are well fitting in the agile model there are also others that don't and work better in strict hierarchies. To each its own they used to say. Accepting reality is core to agile I thought but then ideology can disturb perception so much that there is no way you can act on facts. This is seen in so many different areas of human life that the q. why would it not infiltrate agile model does not even need be asked. A the end the only q. is: do we do our project in efficient enough way? But the IT seems so reach body for all the ideologies today then better not ask too many questions. You may be slapped in the head with new 'no ideology' ideology and that can be painful.
I dont like luxuray car producers like tesla I also think the whole idea of electric car is a bad direction. Yet there are other companies that produce epic fails: there were broken ignition keys, self accelerating cars and least we forget a company that tried to fulfill silly regulation by nasty nasty and failing in covering its tracks. There were many more. If Tesla sinks it is not because it failed to inspect the bolts.
While this is true there are of course people forced to prostitution by poverty or coercion. There is probably a better way of allowing free people selling whatever they have including temporary access to their private parts while preventing that minors and grownups are forced to do that when they do not want to. Sadly none of the asshats in the parliament (actually any of the Western ones I had a chance to look at closer) is bothered enough to do something in the proper direction.
So at the end we use a word for something we do not really understand. It can be soul of consciousness. The discussion about its localness is based on fear of death mostly and hope it can be avoided and fails so far on this little thing that we know all these soules and consciousnesses need i.e. HW on which they run.
Yes it is Vladi. Putting him in prison, however possible, may be delayed. It probably server better democracy and respect for the rule of law of the country concerned i.e. US to actually cleanse the political class. It does not help long term but clearly these people are in a state of deep rot.
most of the youngsters do not even know who this keyser soze was. The way things stand today the will never have a chance to know as the workings including the name of keyser soze have been cleansed 1984 style. In fact I have troubles pinning the name to any actual memory of mine.
anybody could have done the false flag. We just do not know. The rage now is understandable - the democrats have the chance to kick but and there is nothing that republicans can do. Providing exact evidence when not always possible and easy is not in their interest. The bigger issues are these: 1. how is that possible that few however powerful trolls could influence elections of such a big state like US are? and 2. related: the involvement of the data mining companies over FB to influence electorate in most efficient way. First is kind of silly but I can believe Ruskis did it. We do that too. I think everybody on this planet is trying to affect elections of the neighbours and opponents to ain some advantage. Healthy rate of transparency and ability to discuss in civil way with respect for the other side (in case we win this pays off usually) helps here better than anything else. Well educated and intelligent population taking active part in public discussions is however not only unwelcome but also impossible to get in a country of any size except Switzerland it appears, The second thing is I think a lost case but it affects elections much more than anything else could (even Putin is a small boy comparing with possible effectiveness of these tools). Trump was helped this way (or so we are told). Marcon did that too. Obama did that I hear. The bottom line is this - these measures are making the little guy breaking in into the system possible only if they can gain a said company behind them. In principle the issues are not important anymore and instead the way to manipulate key points in electorate are.
And why is this marked as troll? I observe this a lot lately - before trolls were bad language garbage spitters. Now you have a view and you are handed a troll badge. Either a 50c army or the youth of today is half way brain dead - not because of trump or clinton but because they cannot handle normal conversation and argument exchange.
Same here although I am still holding on and the company seems to value few remaining greybeards enough to put them in 'unaffected' departments during layoffs so that there is no misunderstanding as to who is wanted to leave and who is not protected species. They tolerate my no PC comments only because I do not care enough about my health to dig in and deliver no matter what. I am not afraid because I am so old I do not give a f. and on top of that I am still better that the monkeys I am training - most of them are intelligent but not willing to dig or not capable of digging. The air is getting thinner here too.
1% can do what they do only because we let them. This is of course oversimplification - the 1% is a group in normal sense of the word exactly as much as we i.e. the rest 99% are. It seems to me that competitive systems are what nature has in store for us. Most of them suck at being just to old folks. This his dire consequences for me and you only if we are silly enough to work for living. This was always like this and chances, quite big ones in fact, are that this will prevail in the future.
Throughout eons the systems that were broken enough for folks to be fired for age on large scale (or left to die of starvation in far enough in the past times) were from time to time suffering either from internal turmoil, revolutions etc or from war with external enemies.
I agree in big part of your post. Yet I have a problem with an item there. Do you think if it was say Germany or Luxemburg or say Bulgaria instead of Russia would it still be not ok to do what C.A. company did and what FB allowed?
I would be surprised if last 10y there were a party that went to elections w/o support of a Cambrige Analytica like company. The extreme polarized and little educated society in the West does not accept this as a general problem. Every important enough problem in modern world splits society into gender neutral, open to the world (no borders to whatever number and type people and business) islam friendly, metoo, good people and nazis. There is no pardon, no mercy and no possibility you have made a mistake. In other words whether Cambridge Analytica is good or bad for democracy is less relevant than the fact it supported Trump. What company did Obama use? What about H. Clinton? Marcon? Do you think these methods are good or bad for democracy? Do you think we have democracy in the West? Why would you think we do (or not)? Humans in huge enough group start to reveal properties of a gas in a tank. This is something that individualist culture in the West does not like to realize even if this characteristic is used for ages to control and steer groups of people. Modern technology allows for much more efficient control of 'the gas in the tank', even if these all are blunt measures they are still more effective than what the powers that be had been for their disposal before.
When I lived under commies we had these sessions with vodka on the table and discussion about how to improve the world. The were no think barriers or PC. Back then we used to say that if a written law of the country has an adjective around the word democracy it simply means there is no democracy. The representative democracy is just an illusion of it. It works well when going is good. Not sure if that is the case now but I clearly see that most of Western so called democracies do not allow people to make even the most important decisions - even if there is time. What was the last time good people of US for instance could decide if War On Drugs shall continue as it does? In my own country there is a law allowing referendum. It is never used. Our Western neighbour does have a law forcing government to act on the answer of a referendum. Last time they tried (few years back) the government did not act on it. In fact it the gov temporarily allowed the law people just rejected to be deployed. We live in relative prosperity and have no major worries. The Russian dissidents have to worry about consuming too much polonium. This said I wonder where is Snowden or what happened to number of whistleblowers in US administration? Well at least they are alive or? There are differences between us and Ruskis. I am afraid they are not as huge as some of us would like them to be. We certainly do not have moral high ground. Just industrial and military. We also do not kill all prisoners - they are more effective ways to deal with them as those that wanted to read in KUBARK manuals. What is really sad is that US was built on a set of rules meant to overcome weakness in human societies in the West of Europe. Yet we came to rich and powerful oligarchy. I guess that is how it has to be (this is said w/o irony).
Admittedly we have been socializing with not very friendly so called moderate rebels. They were less murderous than Assad regime but not because of the lack of will - they just did not have enough people and HW. This is different subject really but maybe, just maybe, we should be looking at the way our 'democracy introduction measures' influence the countries where we introduce 'democracy'. How does that look like statistically - all is well, prosperity etc or mayhem and rivers of blood? Come to think of it we are not much better than Ruskis. We are just on our side and they are on theirs. As for all the FB nonsense: If Putin can influence elections in US then anybody else can and did. Or are we bashing Cambridge Analitica because it is right wing not because it did something evil?
I think there was US General of the Marines sort called Smedley Butler. He had different view than you do. It can be that his views were informed because he actually took part in some campaigns related to getting some fruit lands....
Slashdot Mirror
I am not saying Tesla is this or that but history of at least relatively modern economy shows that every major breakthrough failed economically. This happened to both great canals in Egypt and in Panama and with few other endeavors - railways in few places did that i.e.burning the investors' money, too. Whether this is going to be a great success or not is still in the future. The guy sis a genius whether he succeeds or not. At least he is trying which is the only known method of getting things done.
If it at all reduces power of the state (which I doubt) then it increases the power of the corporation not the customer. I find the tax mess in US quite interesting. I guess it is just life in its highest form - increasing complexity till it falls under its own weight. As for other arguments about sales tax here and there - if all is done remotely and corporate entity can move its taxable income anywhere there will at he end be only few places where corporate entities let themselves be taxed. This will most likely increase the size of corporations and decrease their number making entering business difficult. It is in principle the same as with everything else - in old times the state and its power had to be limited because it was the biggest power existing at the time. Now the corps have more power than the state or are at least so powerful that we need state to regulate them and sometimes not even the state can. Marx was right after all - no matter what the capital accumulates.
No people are rarely upset about their taxes or rather they are rarely upset enough to take to the streets.
The fact that goldmansachs thinks these lousy few billions earned (after all the costs) is not worth it if it does not come yearly, shows where the problem is. The solution to it could be a license for crooking (lawyers and finance magicians) as above attached to a yearly decimation lottery so you can abuse general public as usual but once a year you have to go through the thrill of being selected to feed the lion etc. You televise or stream it and have revenue to cover costs of lions.
I feel sorry for Skripals but you can get to feel powers of any state if you tease them too much and he did tease some mighty people. What we do not know of course is who he teased besides FSB and Russian generals.
Who we are to believe? These days we not only only have Russian but all media channels seem to have deteriorated into some form of propaganda. I admit I did not think this trough when communism ended for me but I kind of implicitly expected no propaganda. That was silly.
Could this be that with size grows structure and thus complexity? Seems like a nature's own law? Suddenly you have external constrains that you did not have before. The growing size does seem to force hierarchic organizations all on its own. One way of dealing with it is practical i.e. do what is needed and the other ideological - do what is is in a book. Besides - naturally even if there are some individuals that are well fitting in the agile model there are also others that don't and work better in strict hierarchies. To each its own they used to say. Accepting reality is core to agile I thought but then ideology can disturb perception so much that there is no way you can act on facts. This is seen in so many different areas of human life that the q. why would it not infiltrate agile model does not even need be asked. A the end the only q. is: do we do our project in efficient enough way? But the IT seems so reach body for all the ideologies today then better not ask too many questions. You may be slapped in the head with new 'no ideology' ideology and that can be painful.
I dont like luxuray car producers like tesla I also think the whole idea of electric car is a bad direction. Yet there are other companies that produce epic fails: there were broken ignition keys, self accelerating cars and least we forget a company that tried to fulfill silly regulation by nasty nasty and failing in covering its tracks. There were many more. If Tesla sinks it is not because it failed to inspect the bolts.
based transportation is a goal.
may cause harm to your health and possibly even life. Use with appropriate does of caution. You have been warned.
While this is true there are of course people forced to prostitution by poverty or coercion. There is probably a better way of allowing free people selling whatever they have including temporary access to their private parts while preventing that minors and grownups are forced to do that when they do not want to. Sadly none of the asshats in the parliament (actually any of the Western ones I had a chance to look at closer) is bothered enough to do something in the proper direction.
Why is this marked as troll? Are we already pass the stage when we were allowed to laugh? Man 1984 is coming closed every day.
No they don't
So at the end we use a word for something we do not really understand. It can be soul of consciousness. The discussion about its localness is based on fear of death mostly and hope it can be avoided and fails so far on this little thing that we know all these soules and consciousnesses need i.e. HW on which they run.
Yes it is Vladi.
Putting him in prison, however possible, may be delayed. It probably server better democracy and respect for the rule of law of the country concerned i.e. US to actually cleanse the political class. It does not help long term but clearly these people are in a state of deep rot.
most of the youngsters do not even know who this keyser soze was. The way things stand today the will never have a chance to know as the workings including the name of keyser soze have been cleansed 1984 style. In fact I have troubles pinning the name to any actual memory of mine.
anybody could have done the false flag. We just do not know. The rage now is understandable - the democrats have the chance to kick but and there is nothing that republicans can do. Providing exact evidence when not always possible and easy is not in their interest. The bigger issues are these: 1. how is that possible that few however powerful trolls could influence elections of such a big state like US are? and 2. related: the involvement of the data mining companies over FB to influence electorate in most efficient way. First is kind of silly but I can believe Ruskis did it. We do that too. I think everybody on this planet is trying to affect elections of the neighbours and opponents to ain some advantage. Healthy rate of transparency and ability to discuss in civil way with respect for the other side (in case we win this pays off usually) helps here better than anything else. Well educated and intelligent population taking active part in public discussions is however not only unwelcome but also impossible to get in a country of any size except Switzerland it appears, The second thing is I think a lost case but it affects elections much more than anything else could (even Putin is a small boy comparing with possible effectiveness of these tools). Trump was helped this way (or so we are told). Marcon did that too. Obama did that I hear. The bottom line is this - these measures are making the little guy breaking in into the system possible only if they can gain a said company behind them. In principle the issues are not important anymore and instead the way to manipulate key points in electorate are.
And why is this marked as troll? I observe this a lot lately - before trolls were bad language garbage spitters. Now you have a view and you are handed a troll badge. Either a 50c army or the youth of today is half way brain dead - not because of trump or clinton but because they cannot handle normal conversation and argument exchange.
Same here although I am still holding on and the company seems to value few remaining greybeards enough to put them in 'unaffected' departments during layoffs so that there is no misunderstanding as to who is wanted to leave and who is not protected species. They tolerate my no PC comments only because I do not care enough about my health to dig in and deliver no matter what. I am not afraid because I am so old I do not give a f. and on top of that I am still better that the monkeys I am training - most of them are intelligent but not willing to dig or not capable of digging. The air is getting thinner here too.
1% can do what they do only because we let them. This is of course oversimplification - the 1% is a group in normal sense of the word exactly as much as we i.e. the rest 99% are. It seems to me that competitive systems are what nature has in store for us. Most of them suck at being just to old folks. This his dire consequences for me and you only if we are silly enough to work for living. This was always like this and chances, quite big ones in fact, are that this will prevail in the future.
Throughout eons the systems that were broken enough for folks to be fired for age on large scale (or left to die of starvation in far enough in the past times) were from time to time suffering either from internal turmoil, revolutions etc or from war with external enemies.
I agree in big part of your post. Yet I have a problem with an item there. Do you think if it was say Germany or Luxemburg or say Bulgaria instead of Russia would it still be not ok to do what C.A. company did and what FB allowed?
I would be surprised if last 10y there were a party that went to elections w/o support of a Cambrige Analytica like company. The extreme polarized and little educated society in the West does not accept this as a general problem. Every important enough problem in modern world splits society into gender neutral, open to the world (no borders to whatever number and type people and business) islam friendly, metoo, good people and nazis. There is no pardon, no mercy and no possibility you have made a mistake.
In other words whether Cambridge Analytica is good or bad for democracy is less relevant than the fact it supported Trump. What company did Obama use? What about H. Clinton? Marcon? Do you think these methods are good or bad for democracy? Do you think we have democracy in the West? Why would you think we do (or not)?
Humans in huge enough group start to reveal properties of a gas in a tank. This is something that individualist culture in the West does not like to realize even if this characteristic is used for ages to control and steer groups of people. Modern technology allows for much more efficient control of 'the gas in the tank', even if these all are blunt measures they are still more effective than what the powers that be had been for their disposal before.
When I lived under commies we had these sessions with vodka on the table and discussion about how to improve the world. The were no think barriers or PC. Back then we used to say that if a written law of the country has an adjective around the word democracy it simply means there is no democracy. The representative democracy is just an illusion of it. It works well when going is good. Not sure if that is the case now but I clearly see that most of Western so called democracies do not allow people to make even the most important decisions - even if there is time. What was the last time good people of US for instance could decide if War On Drugs shall continue as it does? In my own country there is a law allowing referendum. It is never used. Our Western neighbour does have a law forcing government to act on the answer of a referendum. Last time they tried (few years back) the government did not act on it. In fact it the gov temporarily allowed the law people just rejected to be deployed. We live in relative prosperity and have no major worries. The Russian dissidents have to worry about consuming too much polonium. This said I wonder where is Snowden or what happened to number of whistleblowers in US administration? Well at least they are alive or? There are differences between us and Ruskis. I am afraid they are not as huge as some of us would like them to be. We certainly do not have moral high ground. Just industrial and military. We also do not kill all prisoners - they are more effective ways to deal with them as those that wanted to read in KUBARK manuals. What is really sad is that US was built on a set of rules meant to overcome weakness in human societies in the West of Europe. Yet we came to rich and powerful oligarchy. I guess that is how it has to be (this is said w/o irony).
Admittedly we have been socializing with not very friendly so called moderate rebels. They were less murderous than Assad regime but not because of the lack of will - they just did not have enough people and HW. This is different subject really but maybe, just maybe, we should be looking at the way our 'democracy introduction measures' influence the countries where we introduce 'democracy'. How does that look like statistically - all is well, prosperity etc or mayhem and rivers of blood? Come to think of it we are not much better than Ruskis. We are just on our side and they are on theirs. As for all the FB nonsense: If Putin can influence elections in US then anybody else can and did. Or are we bashing Cambridge Analitica because it is right wing not because it did something evil?
I think there was US General of the Marines sort called Smedley Butler. He had different view than you do. It can be that his views were informed because he actually took part in some campaigns related to getting some fruit lands....
What about the cobalt mines in Africa ?