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Comment Re:Who are the fascists?? (Score 1) 500

I'm looking at examples of fascism that are actually, you know, examples. Aside from Italy, this also includes Spain and Portugal, and many South American countries at one point or another. All of them were the same in that regard.

What you call "corporatocracy", OTOH, is not fascism. It's something else entirely. There is a confusion there because Italian fascists were corporatists, and sometime later, people, esp. native English speakers, confused the meaning of the term "corporatism" with the meaning of the word "corporation" that they're familiar with (but which is not at all what fascist corporatism was all about).

Comment Re:In other words (Score 1) 318

NF had its peak right before the big flix-gate (lol) when they upped the price, removed streaming and changed plans on everyone.

at that point, I dropped them and never looked back.

vpn is $10 or less. torrents are free. there are NO ADS in torrents. no drm, and good compression yet still watchable.

I have not found a reason to resume paying for content. if an enlightened company gives me a good reason, I could consider it. but I'm not interested in resuming netflix and now that they are starting to SHOW the dark side of their corp mentality, yeah, they are a done-deal and I predict a decline in their customer levels over time.

Comment Re:RAND PAUL REVOLUTION (Score 1) 500

Why should the 1% slave to support the 99%? What would be their motivation?

If you have to ask this question, I have to surmise that you're not familiar with a joy of an interesting job well done. Don't worry about it. There are enough people who are willing to work for the sake of doing interesting things and/or killing boredom.

Why would they not join the majority or simply move someplace else where they can keep more of the value created by their labor?

There won't be anywhere where they can keep "more of the value". When you get into the situation where 99% are jobless because of automation, there are only two ways to go from there: either you have wealth redistribution, or you have a Luddite uprising that smashes the machines and rewinds the civilization back, and forces it to stay there to maintain social stability. The former option allows for further technological progress, the latter does not. If you personally had that choice, which one would you take?

On the other claw, it could also create tyrants from that 1% as they could demand compliance or cut off the tap, so to speak.

There's no way to demand compliance when there are literally hundreds of people lined up behind you willing to do the job that you're currently doing.

Like so many socialist style schemes, it requires humans to behave and act counter to basic human nature and without attempting to game the system. History has proven time and again that such schemes only work among a relatively small and culturally/politically homogenous population, and do not scale to multiple hundreds of millions of a culturally/politically diverse population.

History of past economic systems is generally not applicable to newer ones. If you tried to forecast the success of a capitalist system based on your personal experience in a feudal society, and the past historical track record in, say, Antique slave societies, you would have to conclude that it's an unrealistic utopia, because 90% of the population are needed just to grow the food for everyone else.

Thing is, as technology advances, it eventually accumulates enough changes to force a significant leap in how economics work. It's not really voluntary - the society either makes a leap (and this can also go smoothly or bloody, depending), or it falls off the progress bandwagon and gets stuck in past, and eventually gets conquered or otherwise pushed around by those who stayed on the track.

Capitalism is based on the notion of a workforce that has to work for a living, and on there actually being enough work necessary to satisfy the day-to-day demands that everyone has to do their parts. This assumption is not going to hold true for much longer. In fact, it wouldn't hold true in developed countries today already, if not for outsourcing - why bother with robots if Chinese ex-peasants are a dime a dozen? But those peasants will ride capitalism into middle class themselves, and then outsource to Africans; and then Africans will ride it, and then there's no-one to outsource to - and then it's robots anyway.

And just as feudalism couldn't survive and compete once agricultural techniques advanced to the point where the majority of the population didn't have to be involved in it, so capitalism won't survive once industrial production advances to the point where a single human is sufficient to control a factory that can supply the demands of an entire city.

Comment WARNING: WOT still flags SF as "Trusted" (Score 2) 384

This behavior should get SourceForge blacklisted as both cyber-squatters and adware, possibly malware vendor.

I agree 100%. 10 years ago sourceforge was a great site. Now it's basically a malware haven. Unfortunately, plugins like Web of Trust (WoT) seem to have been slow to catch up ... WoT is still marking sourceforge as green ("trusted"). Perhaps blackholing the site in DNS really is the best answer...

Comment Re:RAND PAUL REVOLUTION (Score 1) 500

Then you have not thought things through logically, I'm afraid.

That's all fine and good until you have a large portion of the population either receiving said 'mincome' or in retirement. Have you checked what direction the demographics are trending in the US? Ever-fewer workers are supporting an ever-increasing population dependent on government. It's unsustainable and quickly approaching collapse already.

Where's the money going to come from to pay collective Pauls when you run short of select Peters to rob?

All this is perfectly fine. Frankly, long-term our problem is going to be figuring out what to do with all the people out of jobs due to pervasive automation, and UBI is the obvious way to solve this. I fully expect us to end with an arrangement whereby the work of 1% (largely maintenance of automated systems that do all the "dirty work") will be sufficient to provide for the needs of the remaining 99%, and still have potential left. I also fully expect people to actually compete for the right to do that work.

Comment Re:Who are the fascists?? (Score 2) 500

Your definition of fascism is seriously weird, and not at all historical. Quite the opposite - most totalitarian regimes, including fascism (which, after all, what the word "totalitarian" was originally coined for - by Mussolini himself, no less!) have a huge, bureaucratized state apparatus with significant authority. Yes, that apparatus is used primarily to ensure that the few people on top of the pyramid stay on top, and that the rest are doing what those people on top want them to do, but that is not small government in any sense of the word, and is not at all what the Pauls are trying to sell.

Comment Re: RAND PAUL REVOLUTION (Score 1) 500

As the productivity grows, the amount of wealth that one person can produce can (in fact, already is) well in excess of what that same person needs to live fairly comfortably. Today, that excess amount goes mostly to make the very few live lavishly to the point of grotesque. But there's no reason why that same amount can't be spread around more evenly for UBC.

As for taxing everybody the same: good idea! Let's start by making the capital gains tax rate the same as that for the personal income tax, hmm?

Comment Re:RAND PAUL REVOLUTION (Score 1) 500

his stance on marriage??? you mean following the constitution and leaving it to the states????

And how does that work once people that are married in one state travel to a different state, or conduct any sort of activity that is affected by their marital status across state lines?

The only way this can work given the Full Faith & Credit clause is if every state is required to recognize marriages made in any other state. Which would make same-sex marriage bans in conservative states largely meaningless.

Comment Re: RAND PAUL REVOLUTION (Score 1) 500

We only have permanent bases in countries that have welcomed us, with open arms, to build those facilities.

The governments, perhaps. But not the people of those countries, in many cases. Especially since many of them aren't even democracies, and so don't represent their citizens even nominally.

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