I just decided you don't need your car. Could you have it boxed up and shipped over to me? Thanks.
793 karma · joined December 8, 2013
I assume this suggestion was made "A Modest Proposal"-style, right?
Those are the policies we've been following, and they cause great harm. It's already nearly impossible to buy a home in many American cities if you're not upper middle class at a minimum, and even then you're paying an unsustainable portion of your income. Restricting construction further and subsidizing mortgages (so that home prices simply float up to their current value + subsidy) will put homes even farther out of reach.
It kind of looks like in this case the operators of the community are going to cut out the middleman.
Sure, and what I'm saying is that it's not a good point for the reasons I've stated already. I'll add that if you deliberately wanted to turn people against redistribution of wealth, you could hardly do better than to associate it with the intrusive web advertising that everyone hates!
Talk about fallacies! Based on that kind of argument, you can defend any awful, destructive policy if it benefits someone, somewhere.
> as someone who lives in a country where credit cards are rare and the average wage is under $15k/y, it's not as abstract to me.
I'm sorry, but I can't seem to find the contract I signed where I agreed to be tracked by giant corporations and choke all my devices to the point of nonfunctionality with malware and ads just so a stranger wouldn't have to pay for content. Maybe you have a copy?
If you wanted to redistribute wealth to the global poor, forcing everyone (poor and not-poor alike) to download massive, useless megabytes of untargeted advertising, malware, and phishing scams is not the most efficient way to do it. This is defending the current broken and destructive ad regime on the basis of a distant third-order effect.
And...?
Industries where "person who pays for product" is separated from "person who consumes product" tend to have enormous problems because of that. They are inefficient because the consumer doesn't care about price, and they provide bad product because the person paying doesn't care about quality. Perhaps it is indeed time to consider crazy, wacky, out-there alternatives such as paying for content.
> What you call reality, I call a house of cards.
If the "house of cards" that is online journalism does finally collapse once and for all, ad blockers will have done a massive service for humanity.
Who makes that determination?
We already have: unfortunately, massive and pervasive scientific illiteracy, often abetted by the same people complaining about population growth and carbon-based energy, has prevented us from making full use of nuclear power. If you'd like to fix the energy problem as quickly as possible, without waiting for breakthroughs in solar or battery storage or fusion, it's Greenpeace you need to talk to.
Anti-GG have in fact called in bomb threats against pro-GG meetings multiple times, so that doesn't follow.
Look, it's clear you feel strongly about this, but when you dismiss the misdeeds of people on your "side" you are doing exactly the same thing you're condemning on the other "side." It's better to take a civil attitude towards everyone. Discussion is good, threats and hyperbole are not. Gaming would be better off without the trolls and frothers on both sides of this mess.
That doesn't really follow from the facts as a reason to be concerned about violence. Austin's crime rate is lower than that of most other major American cities, including ones such as Chicago which have heavy gun control. (As per Wikipedia, Chicago's murder rate for 2014 was 15.1, Austin's 3.5.)
And if the riot was 10,000 km closer to you and your family -- if you were the "entitled" person in the restaurant who didn't think they'd done anything wrong, but good luck telling the angry mob that -- I suspect your view would change very, very rapidly.
Quite possibly, but irrelevant to the original poster's point. If rioters are physically endangering your home or your family or the place you work, you're not going to be in any mood then or afterwards to thoughtfully consider it from ten thousand feet.
Lots of enormous corporations are desperately incompetent at various things; that doesn't mean it's unreasonable to ask for competence. In this case, perhaps Best Buy was very good at selling electronics before the Web became a primary way to shop for products, and never managed to make the transition effectively. It happens all the times.
Now, it is true that it requires more effort to find the foods you're interested in. That's because most people aren't interested in the same foods you are. There's no way to "fix" this problem beyond heavy-handed government intervention, and in a socialist society I can guarantee you that -- unless the Supreme Leader is also keen on foods without refined sugar -- you're going to find it even harder to locate anything which isn't preferred by the mass market.
With regards to women's suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the constitution after extensive public debate, overwhelming approval by Congress, and approval of a supermajority of state legislatures, exactly as spelled out in the Constitution; it also had support among the public. That was the epitome of a change effected in the proper democratic fashion.
Because that's about the most anti-democratic thing imaginable. In a democratic society it is absolutely, unconditionally wrong for the government to do such a thing. The government serves at the pleasure of the people, not the other way around!
Corporations are amoral. The activists found a weak point in the death penalty system -- namely, the companies which make the drugs (which is a small market to start with) and are terrified of even the remotest smidgen of public criticism.
I wouldn't hold my breath expecting, say, MSNBC to give extensive sympathetic coverage to domestic "insurgents" who don't share their political views. The vast majority of the Tea Party did nothing more than yell at congressmen and hold rallies where they got all the official permits and cleaned up after themselves, and yet they were uniformly regarded in the news media as the second coming of Timothy McVeigh. Imagine how the media would treat them if they did anything more with their guns than the occasional dumb open carry stunt in Texas.
Citation needed? There was a study a while back purporting to state that most bankruptcies in the United States were due to medical costs, but that turned out to not be the case upon further examination.