I'm not completely sure you can get progress without some negative side effects. So if that's the cost, I guess it comes down to a moral judgement as to if it's worth it? Sure, green energy will put a bunch of coal miners out of business, and everyone involved with the production of oil will be looking over their shoulders. While the advancement will create new jobs too, there will undoubtedly be a lot of people worse off for it. It's the price of progress. In my opinion, the price is worth it. But I think that's for every person to decide on their own.
Disrupter is a pretty "Silicon Valley" term... and it implies investment and reward. That shit doesn't make money when it comes to keeping people sane and protecting them from the Facebook's of the world. Things like universal basic income... that's kind of where things are going. That, and forcing big companies to pay enough for someone to have some basic quality of life without social assistance. Instead, you fuckers have a President who's bringing back Clean Coal and taxing clean energy while rolling back EPA laws to benefit the manufacturers and spending billions on building a fucking wall. Until the mind-set changes from "make more money" to "look after society as a whole, not just those that can afford it", you're not going to improve. Capitalism is making the US great, but it's also causing it to eat itself from the inside out. This weird fear of "socialism" is not doing you any favours.
I agree with you on that but see a different issue with it. Progress and innovation are good and yes there may be a loss of jobs in one industry but new ones are created in fields we never would have been able to imagine 10-15 years ago. I don't think that should ever stop. (It will speak to my politics and all but my thoughts on that can be summed up pretty well by a quote from The West Wing "'Cause it's next. 'Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what's next.") I think we should seek progress for progress sake and figure out the rest as we go, but we have to make a conscious effort to "figure out the rest", it won't just happen on its own. Tying it back into the political portion of this thread this is why I see the need for things like universal healthcare. In fifty years will we have the need for unskilled labor? How many hundreds of thousands or millions of jobs can be eliminated by automation? Like I said, I think we should continue to seek progress in that, but I don't see how it works if we don't do it collectively as a society. I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't think it's something for every person to decide on their own, because it will effect everyone. And I know we've made it this far in society, but the rate at which technology moves forward now and how much faster it will surely move in the future doesn't allow for society to catch up the way it was able to. Or maybe I've just read one too many dystopian novels.
Because everything in this country is about how a topic can be spun to serve ones own purpose and rile up a base group. Socialism is such a dirty word because conservative groups make you think that as soon as something is government controlled, we turn into Venezuela. It won’t happen. Venezuela’s economy is 94% oil. When prices fell, so did their main source of income. Doesn’t help they’ve had nothing but dictators and oligarchs there either. When social services are expanded, the hardliners want you to only imagine welfare queens and ghetto black women with 6 kids, missing fathers and drug use. These people exist but not at the numbers you think. But as long as you can convince one group to completely hate the other, you can slide through legislation that only truly benefits to super rich.
That's the attitude right now, though. I've tried explaining the inevitability of universal basic income to a few different people, and they looked at me like I suggested killing every male firstborn child. People are willing to vote against progress to keep jobs, because God forbid someone might get some money without busting their ass for it. I guess another option would be implementing a 1 child law to try to curb population growth, but we know how well that would go over in this country.
UBI is a really interesting idea. And I think the proposal is that it would replace much of the welfare system in the country. People under a certain annual income would qualify for a certain amount and the more you make, the less you get up to a certain point where you would no longer qualify for it. I think if you could remove some of the crazy stress that keeps people from being able to make ends meet, they might have the ability to go back to school without wondering how they would feed their kids. Would some people abuse their money? Sure. But that’s all they get, so fuck em. If they wanna blow it, there isn’t another safety net. Some people will see the opportunity in having some financial relief, others will just see the free money and do nothing at all.
Well him and a legislature that largely would argue against gravity if they got enough campaign donations to do so.
Totally agree. I honestly think that your health care would get sorted out pretty fast if it was mandated that all serving politicians only had access to the health care afforded to the poorest members of their constituency.
That face when you start a trade war with China over their intellectual property theft and realize that the most effective weapon would have been a Pacific trade deal that boxed China in with strong intellectual property protections.
But I thought your president was a “businessman”. Hope he doesn’t fuck up thise talks with Japan too much, because soon there will be no country —where the acting president doesn’t wear camo fatigues and ride around in an open Jeep— that will want to listen to the ignorant retardation dripping out of his piehole.
What kind of dotard decides to start a trade war with a country that has some of the lowest worker/environmental standards in the world? Not to mention their natural resources. We’re going to get owned.
Trump's attorney just had his offices raided. http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/raid-office-trump-personal-lawyer-michael-cohen-1.4611781
Only this president could be taken down by a porn star. Seized privileged conversation records. That’s asshole puckering I don’t care who you are.
Is this REALLY taking him down, though? Or will it get pawned off in another week from now like the 600 other things that make him look like shit? I’ll believe it when I see it happen. Until then he’s still getting limped to the barn while lighting the world on fire. Eventually Pence is president so.....hooray?
I don't know, having the FBI raid your lawyers office really kicks up the notch on what had a nothing burger for the most part. If Cohen paid her off in a way that violated campaign finance law, and they find out Trump knew or was behind it? If he was behind it that's a helluva lot more than Clinton's perjury charge.
Also, hasn't Cohen been his main lawyer for YEARS? That means a ton of his personal business dealings would have gone through that office. I really wonder what would happen to anything they happen to run across during their investigation... would it be admissible?
Mueller’s gotta take his time and be on point with his scope or the Trump tards are going to call it a bipartisan witch hunt. Luckily for Mueller, Trump is like a bull in a china shop. How Trump, or any of his associates, thought him running for office was a good idea is beyond me. Ego> common sense
And yet somehow he still (as of a few minutes ago) thinks firing Mueller is potentially a good idea. If he was smart, he'd cut his losses, admit to everything, and let the trumpers go "see he's honest!!! Nothing to see here!!" If all the skeletons come out in a court of law, then trump is fucked in a way I could only hope for.
I won't believe Trump is done until I feel the body to prove it's cold, but this really looks like the end for Cohen. I don't know what he did, but it was enough for a judge to sign off on a warrant for the privileged communications of the POTUS. Whatever was in that affidavit has to have Cohen absolutely dead to rights.
Don't forget, this isn't Meuller doing these raids... he just tipped them off with some info that the feds then acted on. This is the US Attorney's office that had the feds do the raid due to the sensitive nature of the relationship between the lawyer, and, you know, the president of the country. This is like something out of Billions. I can only imagine Paul Giamatti going after Trump, and Trump is no Bobby Axelrod. (great show, by the way).