Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Yeah but they keep trying to form unions (Score 1) 15

And they keep demanding better working conditions. And yeah we can use the police to beat the hell out of them when they do but then every now and then somebody films the police when they do.

So the real problem with Farm labor is going to be that nobody is going to want to pay people enough to have people who want to live on a farm if you're not picking up refugees from war-torn countries. And a lot of people don't want those refugees anymore for a variety of reasons.

Otherwise you've got to pay people a premium because they are living out in the middle of nowhere and it's backbreaking work.

And then there's all those little social issues nobody wants to deal with like I mentioned above with the unionization and needing to treat people decently.

Now given that a modern civilization needs about 2% of its workforce farming there's no particular reason we couldn't do all that but if you're a billionaire you just don't want to. Frankly at this point the billionaires have had enough of employees and consumers and capitalism in general. They have never been big fans of capitalism preferring monopolies and oligarchy to competition and free markets.

So it's no surprise that there's a automation push here too.

Comment Re:People that are otherwise rational (Score 1) 65

Also, our ancestors have been eating meat for thousands of years with no effect on the weather

That's a really big claim. You have not done the research or looked at the evidence to back it up. It's something you pulled out of your ass. Don't do that.

It is possible that our ancestors eating meat had an effect on the weather.

Comment Both capitalism and socialism have failed (Score 1) 49

Billionaires and autocrats have sabotaged both systems. We are going to have to figure out a third way or we are going to descend into techno feudalism and that is going to suck for everybody but about 5000 people on the entire planet .

if you are reading this you are not one of those 5,000

Comment What part of Venezuela's situation (Score 1) 49

Is socialism? Almost the entire world is against them except Russia that uses them occasionally as a thorn in the side of the United States.

America's gearing up for war with them. Prior to that we had cut them out of the rest of the world and all of the global markets.

So I don't think Venezuela which is under active attack by every capitalist nation in the world is a fair representative of alternatives to capitalism.

I do think we live in the real world though and we can't pretend that socialism works even if the only reason it doesn't work is that billionaires, who are themselves vehemently opposed to capitalism, will sabotage it making it impossible to properly implement.

The important thing to remember is billionaires do not support capitalism either. So capitalism is going to get sabotaged by billionaires too and therefore capitalism is not an alternative to billionaires.

We are going to have to figure out a third way. Because both capitalism and socialism have failed us.

Comment So you've been conditioned to believe (Score -1, Troll) 65

There is no fix besides austerity and suffering.

That's because rich people don't want to have to spend the money to solve problems that are mostly your problem and not theirs.

You need to get out of the habit, a habit let's remember you were conditioned into by the wealthy, of assuming that nothing can ever get better and that good things aren't possible anymore.

That habit is an extreme and toxic form of conservativism.

Comment Vpns will be criminalized next (Score 0) 86

Technically they can't ban them but they can't throw you in prison for using one. And they can throw people in prison for running them of course.

This is the ultra wealthy and the ruling elite moving the take over the last form of media where regular people can access information without their consent.

But hey, the girl who hands you your coffee says Merry Christmas now so that's a fair trade right?

And if you don't understand what that means that's the problem.

Comment I can see the point. (Score 4, Insightful) 86

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

Comment Read my post again (Score 3, Informative) 136

We were actively hiding the cost of college by giving colleges direct Cash subsidies from state and federal governments. They were passing those cash subsidies onto the students in the form of lower tuition. I do not know how much simpler I can explain this to you.

If you look at the actual operating expenses of colleges they have not increased substantially in the last 40 years. You will find some increases because there is more technology. Yes 70 years ago colleges did not need computers or advanced medical equipment to train doctors on. They also didn't need staff to keep all those computers and all that equipment running. So there is some increase due to do technology.

But that increase is relatively small. And can easily be accounted for by the new technology.

Meanwhile all of those subsidies are gone.

Suppose what we should have done is when you went to college we should have handed you a check and had you walk it to the finance office so that you would understand what the cost of college actually was instead of hiding that from you.

The reason we didn't do that is we were fighting a war with people who pretended to be socialists. So you needed to get socialism because that made America stronger country that could actually stand up to those enemies but we didn't want you to get comfortable with socialism so we hid socialism from you.

We did the same thing with the housing market where trillions of dollars were spent on infrastructure to subsidize baby boomer houses so that they could actually afford to buy houses. We also heavily subsidized the loans they got for those houses.

But if you really want to piss off somebody over 50 try explaining to them that they received a massive amount of benefit from socialism.

Comment It's not that everything is gambling (Score 3, Interesting) 49

Everything is a grift. Capitalism is breaking down, or rather it's being broken down by monopolies and billionaires. So people have to try to find money any way they can and since you can't do it the traditional way of competing in a free market, because there is no free market anymore, you have to try to grift your way to a living.

Comment College was always this expensive (Score 2, Informative) 136

we just used to subsidize it more. When we were kids the government paid 70% of tuition, most of it was money given directly to the colleges who passed that money on to you and me via lower cost tuition.

In the early 2000s Bush Jr and the Republican party slashed those subsidies, which is why the cost shot up. It's got nothing to do with administrative costs or fancy dorms (the dorms literally are paid for by rent paid by students, I know, I put my kid in one of the prison style dorms in college because the nice ones were too pricey).

As usual we're all being lied to.

Comment This was better covered (Score 4, Insightful) 75

by the greatest rap channel in YouTube history

These are canaries in the coal mine for the collapsing economy. There's a ton of money in Wall Street chasing meme stocks and trying to extract value without offering it. But they can only survive while the economy at large does and can absorb their losses.

When the broader economy collapses various ponzi schemes go with it. Usually we prosecute the crooks and clean things up a bit, but I don't think anyone is expecting that this cycle.

Comment You're being flippant and dismissive (Score 1) 136

A six-figure income today is enough to rent a decent apartment and maintain a okayish car.

I can tell you're an old man because you say six figure income when six figures isn't a lot of money.

I saw a joke that has really stuck with me, it's a wonderful Life is a timeless movie because it has the the line "do you know how long it takes a man to save $5,000"

Basically we have been screwing over the kids and they're feeling it. Pretty soon they're going to take away old people healthcare and social security. If only out of spite

Slashdot Top Deals

"Inquiry is fatal to certainty." -- Will Durant

Working...