I'm suddenly feeling very chaotic neutral.
First of all, in America no one gets welfare checks. Contrary to popular belief, welfare in America is dead and has been since the Clinton years. Second, the amount of people who are "taking advantage of the social contract" are tiny. I read a government report recently that said that over 90% of people who are getting any government assistance (which is almost never cash but usually food stamps) leave to program before their benefits are used up. What that means is that the programs are getting people back on their feet. There will always be a small minority of people that will want to take advantage of a program, but that is no reason to throw the vast majority of responsible people who just need help under the bus.
Just because you might know some lazy people doesn't mean that there are potential bums lurking around every corner. As for Thorkel's "village drunk" comment, most homeless people are mentally ill or have some kind of physical illness. The idea that there are legions of lazy people just waiting to leach off the state is complete nonsense that has been propagated by the upper classes to justify the harshest form of capitalism. These kinds of conservative claims are never back up with numbers. Anecdotal evidence and supposed common sense are not proof of anything.
I agree. The problem is, and the above replies make this very clear, people function only on assumptions. "Well, I know this lazy guy who won't get a job, so capitalism is the only system that will work because it trims the fat." I also hate the "it isn't perfect but it works" philosophy. We've been trying free-market capitalism for hundreds of years and its never really worked well.
Look, let me start this out by saying that I am a socialist and am a very active member of a large American socialist organization. I am also a huge advocate of advancing technology and science.
That being said, I hate when people assume socialism is the opposite of capitalism. It isn't. I agree with the author that, under capitalism, advancing technology will kill jobs and crush the system. That's because the system is flawed. The capitalist labor model is idiotic. Technology takes over the shit jobs for the most part. These are the jobs left to supposedly unskilled people. They are unskilled because they didn't have the time and resources to develop "skills" (which under capitalism always equal a marketable way to make money). Remove the market from the equation, and what is counted as a skill changes drastically.
And because I know some Ayn Rand troll is dying to bring it up, this has nothing to do with the USSR. They weren't socialists, they weren't even really communists. They were a centrally planned authoritarian dictatorship. Also don't throw the "some people are lazy and don't try" line at me. That's some propaganda created during the Reagan, racist-ass "welfare queen" days.
Eliminate the old American capitalism versus the USSR model because it is stupid, untrue, and counter productive.
I for one welcome our new robot over lords.
Holy hell. That looked like something from a Cronenberg movie.
The phrase "Celebrate Valentine's Day, Westeros-style" made me shudder a little.
I haven't touched a Lego in close to 15 years, but I want those LOTR sets.
Exactly. I thought that at the end of everyone of those TOS episodes. Because a whole planet of people who depended on a god-computer for everything will suddenly be able to leap frog over a few hundred thousand years of evolution and become totally self sustaining.
"but amidst the chaos of the crashing dollar, some gangs — such as the biker socialist Regulators — have eschewed money in favor of independent reputation economies."
Sounds awesome. Where do I sign up and do I get a bitchin' jacket?
Dear Hollywood,
Please stop. Stop everything you do. Stop existing and making movies. Forever.
And I hate you all.
Sincerely full of awful, bubbling hate,
Ryan
"Do not end your kung fu film with boob lasers." !?!?!?!?!?!?!!??!
"Always end your every film with boob lasers!"
Fixed it for you.
If I donated my skin for book binding, it would just be my luck that it would be used to bind a Reader's Digest condensed version of Eat Pray Love.
Zing!!!!!
The best/worst of those six page meal descriptions was the whole page description of the fermented and clotted mare's milk the Dothraki drink. Mmmmmm...
"exposing the testes of rats"
Don't get the chance to read a phrase like that everyday.
I was thinking the same thing. To day there looking for any excuse to cut NASA's budget.
I will certainly agree with you that the mood isn't there. The money could be if we restructured the tax code so that corporations and the richest of the rich paid their fair share. However, whether or not any candidate is going to do that or not, we can safely assume Gingrich won't. A moon base would be a hard sell right now. I just always like to call attention to the revenue rather than deficit problem the US is facing.
The deficit isn't really the problem. All through the major economic boom of the 50s and 60s, the US had a bigger deficit than we do know proportionally to GDP. The deficit hawks in congress have just used it as a rhetorical device to wage a top down form of class warfare, rich against poor. If we can spend one billion a day fighting two unjust wars we can certainly afford to invest in progressive science.
I'm not playing devil's advocate or being contrary, I actually enjoyed the soundtrack.
No, no stars in the galaxies that revolve around black holes will be sucked in. Like everything else, black holes have a finite mass which means they have a finite gravitational pull. So, stars that are currently outside of the black hole's event horizon (which is all of them) will not ever be pulled into the black hole. For example, if the sun suddenly turned into a black hole (which is impossible but we'll go with it for a rhetorical device) its gravitational pull would be unchanged.
