- On 20 May 2013
in
Makers And Stars Of Porn Being Turned Away By Some Banks,
zzyzzx said:
The bank should charge them $12.00 for a can of Bud light, and see how they like it.
I agree.
- On 20 May 2013
in
The crushing of the American Dream = Debt of all kinds,
zzyzzx said:
We should cut off federal support for these for-profit schools when they fail to graduate students, who don’t get jobs and then default on their loans.
We should cut off funding to state schools that do the same thing.
- On 20 May 2013
in
The crushing of the American Dream = Debt of all kinds,
zzyzzx said:
Bankers encourage people to borrow beyond their means, preying especially on those who are financially unsophisticated.
You can't fix stupid.
- On 20 May 2013
in
Makers And Stars Of Porn Being Turned Away By Some Banks,
zzyzzx said:
In the porn movies where I have seen people try to get loans at banks, they can usually work something out.
- On 20 May 2013
in
Bloomberg Refused Second Slice of Pizza at Local Restaurant,
zzyzzx said:
Anyone bother to check the source? It's satire! The whole dailycurrant.com website is! I was expecting one of you to figure this out long ago! Some funny stuff there. The Bloomberg article is very funny, but totally false (although I wish it were true).
- On 20 May 2013
in
CDC Report: Nearly One Third of All Young People Are Fucked In the Head,
zzyzzx said:
When I saw the thread title, I was expecting this thread to be about oral sex.
- On 20 May 2013
in
IRS approved liberal groups while Tea Party in limbo,
zzyzzx said:
It's all Obama's fault!!!
- On 20 May 2013
in
Venezuela is running out of toilet paper,
zzyzzx said:
How do you know?
Hidden camera in the bathroom???
- On 20 May 2013
in
Robots/AI future, we need a full blown welfare state but not state socialism,
zzyzzx said:
And given the 5-6K of present-time flying drones, with some ~10% having some expert systems guidance, I'd say that we're not too far away from a Skynet future in that dept either.
I will have to rewatch that movie. I think I have the first one on DVD. I really do not recall it from the first Terminator movie.
But it's on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_%28Terminator%29Skynet is a fictional, self-aware artificial intelligence system which features centrally in the Terminator franchise and serves as the franchise's main antagonist. Scarcely depicted visually in any of the Terminator media, Skynet's operations are almost exclusively performed by war-machines, cyborgs (usually a Terminator), and other computer systems, with its ultimate goal the extinction of the human race.
- On 17 May 2013
in
Robots/AI future, we need a full blown welfare state but not state socialism,
zzyzzx said:
o, this time around, the 'bots will be creating 'bots and then, will service them. This is the beginning of the end.
You will never live to see it.
I agree. Rin has been watching too many episodes of Battlestar Galactica.
- On 17 May 2013
in
Detroit Beyond Repair; Next Stop: Cannibal Anarchy,
zzyzzx said:
22K for a vacation for 4 people. That's $5500 per person for a vacation.
How many of you spend that?
My idea of a vacation is overnight mid-week in Atlantic City when it's cheap (under $100/night for a room on the boardwalk casino hotel).
- On 17 May 2013
in
Reagan was Great president.,
zzyzzx said:
In addition to causing 99% of the American population to lose the dream of their kids doing better than they did,
I'm pretty sure that had already happened before Reagan took office.
- On 17 May 2013
in
Detroit Beyond Repair; Next Stop: Cannibal Anarchy,
zzyzzx said:
They still had the money to send some city employees on a "business trip" to Hawaii:
Detroit's pension boards pay $22K to send 4 trustees to Hawaii
Four trustees of Detroit’s two public pension funds are heading to a Hawaiian beach resort this weekend with their $22,000 tab paid for by the funds, which are mired in claims of mismanagement and said to be at least $600 million underfunded.
Trustees say the conference provides the education they need to manage complex investments for the funds’ retirees and beneficiaries. But other major public pension systems, including the Los Angeles Fire and Police Pensions, avoided sending their officials to Hawaii because of concerns the exotic locale sends the wrong message at a time when pensions nationwide are contemplating or implementing reduced benefits to cope with rising retirement costs and shaky investment returns.
Records obtained by the Free Press under the Freedom of Information Act show the expenses cover airfare — including a first-class flight for one trustee — lodging at the Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki Beach Resort in Honolulu, registration fees, meals and a per diem for miscellaneous expenses.
The city’s two public pension funds — the General Retirement System and the Police and Fire Retirement System — each are sending two trustees to the six-day National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems (NCPERS) conference, which starts Saturday. The retirement systems, which are funded by contributions from workers and the city, have combined assets valued at more than $5 billion and provide benefits to about 20,000 retirees and beneficiaries.
Stanford University professor Joe Nation, who specializes in public employee pensions, criticized the trip.
“Trustees don’t need to go to Waikiki to learn about best practices,” he told the Free Press. “Everyone knows they go there and they don’t work very hard. That’s just the nature of it.”
Ray Ciranna, interim general manager of the Los Angeles Fire and Police Pensions, said the fund urged its delegates not to attend the Hawaii conference — and none are attending — because it tries to keep administrative costs low on behalf of beneficiaries.
“Because of this standard, the system looks for prudent and economical training opportunities for staff development, as it is important for staff to maintain their skill set,” Ciranna said in an e-mail.
Detroit pension officials say the conference is no vacation, even though the 22-acre oceanfront resort boasts Waikiki’s widest stretch of beach and plentiful swimming pools and water slides.
“That just happens to be where the conference is this year,” said General Retirement System Trustee John Riehl, who will be attending. “We have to stay on top. We have to know what we’re doing.”
Detroit General Retirement System Trustee Riehl’s expenses are $5,245:a $1,278 flight, $2,967 for his hotel stay and $1,000 in registration fees. He’ll be joined by General Retirement System Trustee Cedric Cook, whose expenses total $3,874: $719 for a plane ticket, $2,505 for hotel stay and $650 in registration fees. Cook’s registration fees are smaller because he’s not attending all of the conference’s programs.
From the Police and Fire Retirement System, Honolulu expenses for Trustee Edsel Jenkins, a deputy fire commissioner, are $5,957: a $1,138 plane ticket, $2,769 for lodging, $1,000 in registration fees, $900 for meals and $150 for miscellaneous expenses. PFRS Trustee Angela James’ expenses total 6,871: a first-class plane ticket for $2,052, lodging costs of $2,769, registration fees of $1,000, $900 for meals and $150 for miscellaneous costs.
Bruce Babiarz of Bloomfield Hills public relations firm BAB Associates spoke on James’ behalf and said her first-class airfare is covered under the board’s travel policy. It states “business class or its equivalent on flights having a scheduled flight time of six hours or more” is covered.
- On 17 May 2013
in
SF Bay Area median housing sale price $510,000,
zzyzzx said:
At the top of the market, the median price was $665k at 7% interest rate. At the bottom of the market, the median price was at $375k at 4.75%. Now we're at $510k at 3.5%.
Had you bought at the bottom of the market and put 20% down, your $75k deposit would have given you $135k in equity gain. If you refinance now, you can pull out all your down payment and more, and transfer all the risk onto the lender.
Real estate is about control and leverage. How can you control the most properties using OPM.
If I could time the market, I'd be retired by now.
- On 17 May 2013
in
Venezuela is running out of toilet paper,
zzyzzx said:
"Paperless toilets rolled out in Britain." These have long been preferred in Japan.
Awesome find. I especially like the part about the toilets with the built in MP3 player (I would not want one like that though).
I was also thinking that, at least at home, one could wash off in the shower after taking a dump to save on toilet paper.
- On 17 May 2013
in
Labor shortages threaten to derail economy,
zzyzzx said:
Of course, if workers ever accepted that diminished level of pay, corporations will then "want to" pay them half of that. Corporate greed knows no bounds.
Pay should be based on what you produce, not your bargaining position. That's the fundamental flaw of capitalism and why its days are numbered. There's no way we can continue using such an asinine economic system a century from now. It's too damn wasteful.
Perhaps you should move to North Korea, where they practice what you preach.
- On 17 May 2013
in
Robots/AI future, we need a full blown welfare state but not state socialism,
zzyzzx said:
Many didn't survive without welfare in the past. They died, usually from disease that took advantage of their emaciated states and wiped them out. Many went to work houses where they were worked to death for nothing but rotten food and rat infested living conditions. Some died of exposure or starvation outright, but that was the exception. You may like to return to this Darwinian nightmare. I'd prefer a social safety net.
I need proof. In fact the only examples I can think of off hand in the modern, but pre-welfare society where a machine replaced people was when the cotton gin was invented. And that resulted in increased demand for labor! Presumably nobody starved to death because if the invention of the cotton gin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin
Prior to the introduction of the mechanical cotton gin, cotton had required considerable labor to clean and separate the fibers from the seeds.[11] With Eli Whitney’s introduction of “teeth” in his cotton gin to comb out the cotton and separate the seeds, cotton became a tremendously profitable business, creating many fortunes in the Antebellum South. New Orleans, Mobile, Charleston and Galveston became major shipping ports, deriving substantial economic benefit from cotton raised throughout the South. Additionally, the greatly expanded supply of cotton created strong demand for textile machinery and improved machine designs that replaced wooden parts with metal. This led to the invention of many machine tools in the early 19th century.[12]The invention of the cotton gin caused massive growth in the production of cotton in the United States, concentrated mostly in the South. Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850. As a result, the South became even more dependent on plantations and slavery, with plantation agriculture becoming the largest sector of the Southern economy.[13] While it took a single slave about ten hours to separate a single pound of fiber from the seeds, a team of two or three slaves using a cotton gin could produce around fifty pounds of cotton in just one day.[14] The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850.[15] By 1860, the Southern states were providing two-thirds of the world’s supply of cotton, and up to 80% of the crucial British market.[16] The cotton gin thus “transformed cotton as a crop and the American South into the globe's first agricultural powerhouse, and – according to many historians – was the start of the Industrial Revolution"
When the assembly line was, it also potentially put people out of work. But when I research that I see this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_line
The gains in productivity allowed Ford to increase worker pay from $1.50 per day to $5.00 per day once employees reached three years of service on the assembly line. Ford continued on to reduce the hourly work week while continuously lowering the Model T price.Doesn't seem to me that creating an assembly line there resulted in lower employment levels either, since he dramatically increased wages.
OK, so I picked probably the two most famous examples of machines putting people out of work in the pre-welfare society, and I have no evidence of it causing unemployment and starvation. But with an open mind, I research further, because, you know, it just had to happen someplace, right? So I go back to wikipedia and research the Industrial Revolution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_revolution
The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes that occurred in the period from about 1760 to some time between 1820 and 1840. This transition included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, improved efficiency of water power, the increasing use of steam power and development of machine tools. The transition also included the change from wood and other bio-fuels to coal. The Industrial revolution began in Britain and within a few decades spread to Western Europe and the United States.
The Industrial Revolution marks a major turning point in history; almost every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way. Most notably, average income and population began to exhibit unprecedented sustained growth. In the words of Nobel Prize winner Robert E. Lucas, Jr., "For the first time in history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth ... Nothing remotely like this economic behavior is mentioned by the classical economists, even as a theoretical possibility.
As I read further down:
Food and nutrition
Chronic hunger and malnutrition were the norm for the majority of the population of the world including Britain and France, until the latter part of the 19th century. Until about 1750, in large part due to malnutrition, life expectancy in France was about 35 years, and only slightly higher in Britain. The U.S. population of the time was adequately fed, were much taller and had life expectancy of 45–50 years.[67]
In Britain and the Netherlands food supply had been increasing and prices falling before the Industrial Revolution due to better agricultural practices; however, population was increasing as well, as noted by Thomas Malthus.[68][69][70][71] Prior to the Industrial Revolution, advances in agriculture or technology soon led to an increase in population, which again strained food and other resources, limiting increases in per capita income. This condition is called the Malthusian trap, and it was finally overcome by industrialization.[72]
Transportation improvements, such as canals and improved roads, also lowered food costs. Railroads were introduced near the end of the Industrial Revolution.
So far I am only finding examples where machines taking the place of people increases their standard of living.
- On 17 May 2013
in
Chinese counterfeit condom repackaging operation shut down!,
zzyzzx said:
Lord knows how many got knocked up or how many folks got STDs from using this fake condoms.
Article did not mention anything about the quality of the cheap counterfeit condoms.
- On 16 May 2013
in
Venezuela is running out of toilet paper,
zzyzzx said:
- On 16 May 2013
in
the need for affordable law care,
zzyzzx said:
I think the problem is that we have way too many people in jail. There is something wrong with our system if such a huge percentage of our population is in prisons.
If elected dictator, I would execute almost all people currently in prison.
- On 16 May 2013
in
Labor shortages threaten to derail economy,
zzyzzx said:
What a joke. Labor shortages, my ass!!!
- On 16 May 2013
in
Bitches can't keep their hands off other people's money!,
zzyzzx said:
Earlier this year, small-town treasurer Rita Crundwell was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison for embezzling $53 million.
I bet she spent most of it on shoes.
- On 16 May 2013
in
Beautiful Plus-sized (aka normal) Model,
zzyzzx said:
This thread is useless without pics:
- On 16 May 2013
in
Would shorter amortizations make the housing market safer?,
zzyzzx said:
Housing takes about 30 years of "working" to obtain.
I paid less than 1/4 my gross annual income to buy my house free and clear. A house shouldn't take 30 years of working to obtain.
- On 16 May 2013
in
Please Accost: '1 percent moms who hire disabled guides to cut lines at Disney,
zzyzzx said:
I suspect that Disney's real problem with this is that the scammers are undercutting them. Nobody likes the competition!