So what life lessons can we glean from from a Tech engineer amerced in algorithms and trying to filter the sewage? Lets begin with our presenter. An intelligent fellow who seems genuinely concerned for not just the future of social platforms but for our shared future and the way we are approaching it. Back in the bad old days of Ma Bell our phones connected us to one another, emphasis on the ONE. At 12 years of age I could pick up a phone dial a number and talk to ONE person, two if grandma wanted to say something and grabs the phone at the number I dialed. "Is someone else listening in on your end" preceded the conveyance of top secret info like where we are REALLY going this Saturday night. It would astonish the young among us to know how long America was wired for "Across the street or across the nation" phone communication before the first auto-dial phone spammers ever rang my bell. We used the phone for direct one to one communication between people who already knew each other well enough to know each others phone number. From say 14 years on till I left home I knew exactly three phone numbers. My two best friend's and my girl friend's who kept me "online" for hours! I never dreamed there were so many topics that I had zero interest in!! Such is Love or at lest lust. No one ever met anyone on the phone. We did not have to parse what was said or concern our selves with hidden motives of strangers. We didn't try to meet people with the hopes of marketing them. Those tendencies were present, but we met face to face. It was pretty hard to use someone without it eventually surfacing in one way or another. Those who had access to mass media were not always reliable as news sources or even as providers of entertainment. But they WERE accountable. We knew who they were and where they lived. This accountability was their meal ticket. They all made mistakes and they all made retractions to stop any misinformation they inadvertently created. This was not a Golden age. There were plenty of abuses. Especially in political ads. But those ads ran on TV. Everyone in a geological location got the same TV ads. No one made a machine to dig though my life for hints as to what I liked. They could annoy me with their ads But I as a person remained a mystery to them. They didn't even know the right lies to tell me to gain my money or my opinion. Communications in my youth didn't follow me around. Didn't tell others where I went. I had no value to the great and greedy and was left thankfully alone. Now communications have completely degenerated into an endless series of manipulations. We hardly ever simply inform, now we must persuade.To feel successful today, it seems to me, it is not enough for me to think my thoughts I must gathers together as many as I can and ask them to please share my thoughts with the world! We use to strive for a happy co-existence with our friends and neighbors. Now it seems all that matters it that I be famous and have many many "followers!" In my youth to call ones friends your "followers" might well have ended that relationship. It's just so god damned utilitarian! So we created a platform that expresses to the world every stupid thought I ever had. Have we forgotten that people use to spend a fair amount of time sitting alone thinking about what they wished to say in order to not put forth something stupid? Just saying... As I mentioned the news use to come in three forms. Print, TV and radio. All one way communication. How horrible! Only those with factual information in need of decimation are allowed to speak to the world at large on public platforms. Word of mouth use to be call here-say. It implied that there was no mental activity between the hear and the say. In short a mindless repetition of what was heard With out anyone stopping to ask "Is this true". So we can at last reach the point I wish to make. We have sacrificed a communication net work for a market place where anything can be bought and nothing is your own. I guess I just don't understand the need to have the whole world know who I am. The whole world is not my friend. my employer or my family. Only Artists and candidates for office have any real need to be known. The rest of us can let the work of out lives speak for us. If i had a friend who came to me insisting that I had buy something and just before my purchase I learned that my friend was going to benefit perhaps more than I from my purchase due to a hidden agreement.. I would not like that and would think less of my friend, would have to think less of one who just tried to sell me to someone. So back to our presenter. He seems as I said to be a knowledgeable and decent guy trying to help the world. But the world he is trying help has grown very entangled with conflicting interests. The man has to eat and pay his bills so a sponsor would seem a good thing to have. But he doesn't have that does he? He is working for a VRN company. He is their advertisement and a good one at that. This doesn't mitigated a single thing he had to teach me today. But it has to call into question everything he had to teach me today. So as I know little of these things under discussion I must take the word of an advertisement posing as a public service announcement.Mind you I really like the guy. But that's his job yes? To get me to like him and trust him. And buy his product. What I Like about him is that he recolonizes that the basic problem is that a sizeable number of humans are total shits. People we have no certainty about are posing as our friends to use us ruthlessly. He sees this as humanities central problem. Here's what I feel he should have done. Get an ad commitment from a food chain, a tire dealer, a newspaper boy. If you need to get a day job. Do anything that does not bring into question your independence of thought or the unbiased validity of your position. Either do public service or advertise trying for both diminishes both. I have tried, but I'm unsure there is much here to benefit my reader.
Very interesting. I wonder if some entity just laughs at VPN's? The free ones ain't worth a hoot, that's for certain.
Here are a couple of guides to free VPNs, so you have some idea of what is decent and what to stay away from: https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/top-really-free-vpn-services/ https://www.techradar.com/vpn/best-free-vpn
Here's something else. I've been a victim of this when I was younger without even really realizing it. I also didn't realize just how pervasive it is.
Maybe Dan was citing the fact that even a proposed $15 per hour minimum wage is far from what's needed in this wunnerful world. $20.00 bills spend like five dollar bills nowadays.
National minimum wage doesn't work, and can NEVER work. Here's why: $15/hour will cause someone to starve on the street in San Francisco. In Joplin Mo. $15/hour is a pretty decent wage. I could live pretty well on that if I were just supporting myself. I could even support a small family on that, with care. A $15/hour minimum wage would result in the loss of many jobs in this area, adversely impacting the lower income brackets and INCREASING the number of working poor. That's not scare-mongering, it's basic logic and statistics. It does have the advantage for Democrats that they can make the problem worse and get people to beg them for more solutions that don't work, so that's a plus, I guess. On the other side, the Republican response of 'let the market sort it out' doesn't seem to work any better, and we have historical evidence to back that up (anyone remember the early 20th century and child labor?). So how do we fix this? I don't really know. It seems like a policy more tailored to regional needs makes more sense, but that's not nearly as easy to implement, which means that a politician can't score political points with it, which means it will never happen.
Counterintuitively raising the minimum wage in Seattle resulted in more jobs being available. Municipal action is required to affect the minimum wage. The Republicans would prefer that the national minimum stay at $7.50. They want the world to slave for them and thank them for the privilege. Are all Republicans evil? Possibly not yet the more reasonable Republicans dropped out of the Partei many years ago. The problem is that all the Dems have been bought by the money machine. On the national stage they do NOTHING to help the man in the street. So they are the Partei too. Ein Partei Ein Reich. Guess I've seen too many Republicans close up. It's a shame that the so called Democratic party cares so much for money and so little about anything else. The Republicans are born with a very cruel streak, democrats quickly learn that you get along by going along with moneyed interests. Am I prejudiced? Sure. Do I love my country? Yes, but I love an ideal. One that used to hold sway but never will again.
When people can't live on what they are paid and their employers are racking up record profits and our tax laws are a crime against the average guy, then our wage structures are criminal in intention and practice. I just say you all should be better paid and better cared for as far as health insurance We have way to many poor folks and it's cause is simple. We have way to many billionaires..
I think it could be done in another way. establish a percentage of profits that should go to those creating the profits.Labor. When labor is replaced by automation, establish the percent of profit that should go to labor and add that percentage toa general labor fund for retraining r early retirement. Capitalism can and should work. But it should be controlled by the needs of labor not the greed of capitalists. Labor needs to be paid in part with shares in what ever enterprise that employs them. There are a thousand ways this can be done in fairness. We just need to decide we want to be fair.
It's not that simple (is it ever?). According to the most recent analysis that I've looked at in detail, the increase hurt minimum wage workers and jobs overall immediately following the 2016 wage hike. It was only almost a year later that any improvement was noted. Interestingly only those workers who were already working a substantial number of hours benefited. Workers who were working a more part-time schedule saw essentially no benefit, and workers who were looking to enter the Seattle work-force had a substantially lower success rate than those who were outside Seattle. So, yes, we helped those people who were already working hard, but at what price? Is it really our goal to hurt those at the bottom disproportionately? Source: https://www.nber.org/papers/w25182?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntwg20
This seems like a reasonable idea, which is the problem: it's reasonable. There's not a politician currently in office who would sign up for such a thing because it might actually solve the problem, or at least illuminate a better solution. You do, however, touch upon something that is causing me a great deal of angst: automation. Currently, around 15% of the population of the US has an IQ below 85. That means those people are essentially unemployable in a highly technological society. (NOTE: I did NOT say they are worthless; I simply said they can't be readily trained to do things that people are willing to pay a reasonable wage for). Around half the population has an IQ below 100 (by definition, since 100 is the average). What jobs are typically done by people with a 100 or below IQ? Fast Food Assembly Line Secretarial Accountant Paralegal Welder/Truckdriver/Transportation In short, jobs that are going to be automatable in another 15 or 20 years. As those jobs go away, new jobs will become available, as has always been the case with new technologies. But those new jobs will require greater technological sophistication. At some point, I fear we're going to dig ourselves a hole we can't dig ourselves out of without things getting bloody. That really concerns me, because it represents such an enormous waste of resources (human and otherwise). As an engineer, that just really grates my nerves.
A place to start.... As our national health has taught us we don't need Monsanto. we need farmers. Corporate farming has destroyed our soil and sickened our nation. Mono crops are killing the planet There is a shit load things you need to know to farm successfully.. None of them is particularly hard to learn. What is needed can't be taught except from early childhood. A farmer has to have a heart as big as the ocean he must love every inch of his farm. And be willing to nearly work himself to exhaustion. Farming isn't a thing of mind so much as a thing of heart Fishermen God love 'em live by experience and eternal hope. I once met a man who clocked in at around 100 or less judging from his entertainments, he liked cartoons, didn't have much liking for the world news. But he could pick up a piece of wood and ask you what you wanted it to be. pull out a small single blade folding pocket knife... I would think watching him..."God's lathe!" Labor... Men use to love labor. Take enormous pride in the work they could accomplish. Without realizing it (I was 4 at the time) I sat along side a deep hand dug trench and kick dirt down upon the laborers below. The were deeply tanned men Muscles defined, and shinning with sweat. They laughed and explained to me the error of my ways, we parted friends. "Those who can work with their minds, those who cannot labor with their bodies." What I'm trying to say I guess is that we don't really work for money. Those who give themselves to labor often love the physicality of their work. My experiences in the Martial Arts remain one of the better things I did with my time. Adjusting ones mind to hard labor is an a spiritual task. We don't think our way though it so much as feel our way to it. We achieved our goal when mind no longer complains that body is tired, Mind instead comforts body and guides it in the task at hand. I was never happier than when I stood in a pool of my own sweat. At the end of a hard work out we would stand upon a wresting mat in a line and then look to see whose feet stood deepest in sweat. it covered our toes! LOL I see things everyday that I might have enjoyed doing. We have to stop working to make others rich. We must relearn to work for our own inner enrichment. Our nations must learn to support us when we do. Far cry from today, but I can't see human happiness arriving in any other way.
If we were to give everyone a pay rise things might not turn out so well, the problem being that has an inflationary effect meaning it may be that no-one is any the better off, and some are actually worse off, e.g. pensioners who won't get a pay rise.
They would if we voted to give them a raise. None of this has to be theway it is. I've never needed a billionaire have you? I'm simply advocating trading in our billionaires for a contented and well housed well fed and medically well cared for general population.. It's a choice really. Which would you rather have?
