At least the sources I use aren't claiming that Trump is a vassal of Putin - they're claiming that Trump is Putin's pawn.

It's been apparent for years that Russia has been trying to pick a real fight with the US or the EU, the usual reason given being that Putin needs to distract a restless Russian population from local issues particularly corruption. Putin getting Trump elected is seemingly a big win if all these things are true - Trump certainly seems far more likely to get into a war with Russian than ... pretty much any other 2016 presidential candidate.

To sum: Trump is Putin's pawn, not a vassal. Putin is now manipulating his pawn into starting an armed conflict (or at least another cold war) with Russia.

Sorry to say you're missing an important part of reality/politics - politicians, rich people, leaders, etc., will in fact be immune. They have power, and even if they choose not to prevent change from happening, you can be damned sure they'll be insulated from any ill effects that change brings.

Some people (good people) will be working towards helping the rest of the population adapt to the changes, but they're getting drowned out by people yelling "everybody is bad! nobody can be trusted!" at the moment. (Gee, I wonder who benefits from that?)

You know I've started having similar thoughts as I've watched our society evolve over the last 3.5 decades. (Disclaimer: I am a seriously hard-core socialist.) It seems like we're heading towards Roman bread and circuses, specifically with talk about basic income. We already have the circuses (there's more cheap/free entertainment than ever, it's really mind-boggling), and now we're demanding bread (basic income).

A lot of people think basic income is a great idea and I think on balance I do too, but what will happen when 90% of people just don't contribute economically? Why bother educating them? That's where we were for most of our history - entrenched aristocracies ruling over the ignorant masses, typically with shocking abuses. How badly you prospered or how badly you suffered was a question of whose vagina you were lucky enough to be born out of.

We should be careful of what we wish for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

Dick.

Defeatism will definitely prevent anything from happening!

That said: good people working hard can limit greed and its ill effects, though obviously not eliminate it.

Greed in particular is a fucking "mortal sin". How the hell did we go from "mortal sin" to cheerleading it? WTF?

The current "media narrative" stories are probably the single most important issue of the day, underpinning pretty much everything else. Without a functioning media (and everybody agrees it's dysfunctional), we collectively and individually lack the data necessary to make good decisions, and the people as a whole lack the focus to support good decisions and decry bad ones. Good job Slashdot editors; GFY, konohitowa.

Hey did you use a site to get your numbers? If so, which? I've often worked out numbers like that myself, manually, to prove points - but it would be great if there was a more convenient option :)

So basically you're saying you're a gigantic gaping asshole? Gotcha :) (The guy was just making a joke, and a reasonable one - Trump portrays himself as a braying donkey of doom. And the real frothing-at-the-mouth liberals are just trying to help make the world a better place and can't understand why such a large proportion of the population are dicks like you - of course they get worked up :)

The idea that "all politicians are terrible and useless and evil" is almost certainly being deliberately spread by the worst politicians - they don't want us to figure out which ones good so we can support them to the hilt. I also believe they deliberately promote the attitude that "all politicians are equally bad" because when they do ultimately get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, people will just shrug their shoulders and move on rather than holding the guilty parties responsible (because, after all, they're all equally bad :).

It's way too soon for this. We're just not there yet. Consider the example in the original post; Australia spends $3 billion on its "CentreLink welfare system" (which I assume is what they spend on welfare). That works out to $130 per person per year, if everything was just distributed out as basic income. If we try it before when we're _obviously_ not ready for it, it'll just fail and it might even discredit the idea. (I wonder if that's a contributing factor to the really rather sudden appearance of these trials.)

Or, maybe, Europe has had its fill of radical fascist ring-wing asshats and the problems they cause (read: death, destruction, war, poverty, etc.), and this is one of the tools they use to keep a lid on it.

Some of us are tolerant of opposing opinions, when they're not outrageously harmful. Hopefully most of us are intolerant of misinformation and FUD, and I hope most of us aren't even tolerant of opposing opinions when they're both clearly wrong and actively harmful. At this point it's fairly apparent that anybody touting anti-global-warming "opposing views" are either pathologically misinformed, or astroturfing.

This kind of thing is why Slashdot can be awesome. (All credit to the author of course :)

"service that is another letter on top of that time syncing protocol"?