Why should an old person learn to use (in rapid succession) CompuServe, AOL, Yahoo, LiveJournal, Myspace, Facebook, Flicker, Pinterest, Instagram (and so on and so on), instead of his relatives putting a little effort into hand written letters and face time?

Because those handwritten letters and face time are going to become a chore very soon, and chores have a tendency to be "forgotten", especially when they only exist in the first place because their benefactee is too lazy to invest into learning modern communication methods.

If you make it hard for other people to stay in contact, they probably won't bother.

It's just the "fuck you" attitude that gets to us. When users demand features, you are supposed to listen. But nope, this stock answer is trotted out every time as a way to avoid doing work.

But it's not work. The developers are free to listen to you, and they're also free to ignore you. You aren't their boss. Refusing to treat you like you were isn't "fuck you". You just took it that way because getting rejected is humiliating and you didn't want to admit you misunderstood the situation.

It's so much better when the commisar decides & comes in to take all your excess food, right komrade? Make everyone poor so that none can complain that any are poorer!

You know, if you feel the need to lie about your opponent to make yourself look good, then that usually means you are the bad guy.

Or was it your indoctrination speaking? Some old Cold Warrior reliving their youth? A kid who thinks Red Scare is fashionable? Inquiring minds want to know how you got from "I guess this explains why we still have beggars" to "Make everyone poor so that none can complain that any are poorer!"

If I work everyday to earn twenty dollars, and every day you ask for a dollar, eventually I'm going to get tired of supporting you when I have my own financial issues to worry about.

If your income is twenty times mine, and even that pittance is dependent on pleasing you, and you still have the nerve to play the victim, then it seems to me that my best option would be to start a revolution and put your head on a stick. I have nothing to lose but my chains, after all.

Even if the money was printed and then given to the IMF, the moment the money was printed, the value it has came from devaluing all of the other money in circulation.

This is only true in an economy that's already working at 100% capacity. That hasn't been the case for a long time now. In the current situation of idling economy some actor getting more money will likely simply activate idle production capacity, which will actually increase the size of the market and the value of existing money.

Of course, the whole idea that supply exceeding demand can cause a crisis speaks for the absurdity of the entire economic system. It might be best to focus efforts on coming up with its replacement.

But if he keeps asking for more I'll get pissed and stop giving.

I guess this explains why we still have beggars, even in countries that struggle to get rid of all their excess food: making people's survival depend on your goodwill gives you a way to keep them in their place.

And that about sums up EU as well.

The eurocrats are of course thugs, but limiting how much they'll shake down the rest of their subject citizens to subsidize Greece is not a great example of their thuggishness.

However, putting fiscal policy based on ideology and dreams of building a new gold standard over the wellbeing of people is. And will likely be the death of the entire EU at this rate.

Let's not get carried away here. You can always remove the head gear or turn-off the device. Although I can see some complaining anyway.

And because you can always remove the head gear or turn-off the device, of course actual rape victim simulators will spring up, just like zombie attack simulators have. We know they will, because they alrady do, even in text adventure form. Players will claim it's just a game rendered harmless by the player being in control, and could even have therapeutic use, while naysayers will claim it's effective propaganda for rape culture precisely because it renders rape "harmless", and both will be entirely right.

So yes, people will complain, and those complaints can't be just summarily dismissed. There are issues at stake here which are extremely relevant to the dawning Information Age: are progandists blameless for the results of their propaganda just because their propaganda has artistic or entertainment value? To what extent are people responsible for their internalized cultural values, or for being unaware of them? At what point does making other's suffering your entertainment make you a villain?

figuring out what went wrong is precisely your job

No, it isn't. My job is to produce the most value for the company within my assigned competencies.

In theory, companies care only about profits. In practice, corporations are made of living humans, are thus living things themselves, and as such care mostly about homeostasis. Profit only enters the picture as food, and like humans whose imaginations they live in, corporations too tend to ignore long-term consequences for immediate gratification, especially since the law gives their parasitic load - the shareholders - control over their actions.

So, as far as the company was concerned, you were carrying - and sticking to - dangerous ideas that could had resulted in changes to corporate culture - to homeostasis. You "tasted" wrong, so you were rejected. I wonder if the whole corporate world could be described in the terms of biology more accurate than in the terms of economics, and perhaps improved through its methods?

Anyway, your proud boast may one day discover that people do the funniest things.

Hmm...

1. Create a domain.
2. Have that domain host a single page saying "Nothing can take down this page."
3. Have that page and DNS server hosted in a datacenter in an enemy country.
4. Sit back and watch.

Weaponized hubris - what could possibly go wrong?

Because they distract people's time and effort from actually working on worker's rights, and always derail conversations about rights for all workers into how everyone else should unionize.

Actually working how? You can have all the conversations you want about what you'd like, but how are you going to get it without joining forces - which is the definition of a labour union?

Of course union reps would say that, it creates more jobs for union reps. But it's bullshit.

As I see it, it's the pro-corporate bullshitters who want to disband labour unions, precisely to put employees into even weaker position compared to employers. The whole anti-union meme is part of that attack on the working poor, a classic divide and conquer tactic. It preys on people's self-importance by making them think everyone will get what they deserve in such a situation (and of course they deserve more than Joe Average). But for the life of me I can't figure out why anyone would think such a situation would make worker in general better off, nor have you offered any concrete reasons.

Snort, sure it does, as long as "the powerful" are those that Assange has an axe to grind on. Why doesn't Assange have any dirt on Russia? China? France? No other countries in the entire world merit a little of the light he claims to be bringing to society?

And this is what it all comes down to. You're trying to turn attention from documents published by Assange to Assange himself (or to Russia, China or France). It's not going to work. Even if you manage to smash the mirror, it's still your image it showed, and you need to either live with it or change.

Or, I suppose, you could continue coming up with reasons why the mirror is immoral to distract from your image and keep your delusions. But that's unlikely to end well for you. Ignoring reality for self-adoring fantasy rarely does.

My point is that you may be paying $200 a month, but that isn't what the leasing company is receiving.

And with a regular car, the leasing company is allowed leave the externalities - such as climate change and health effects of exhaust - of their business to be paid collectively. Nothing is currently priced accordingly to its real cost, because "real cost" is impossible to measure.

That leaves two bad options: do nothing and let the markets decide based on incorrect information, or try to manipulate prices to what the government thinks (?) are the "real" ones. It doesn't help that almost everyone has a personal stake in both economy and environment, and is thus tempted to scew the results, but at least the latter option provides a possibility that various interests's concerns can be adressed.

Because this is the real problem with free-market capitalism: it assumes economic decisions are purely local, when in reality their consequences stretch to infinity. It's a necessary assumption, since otherwise every decision becomes intractable, but also means there absolutely needs to be some sort of overall coordinator correcting the relative prices of various options - for example via tax credits - to reflect distant costs, since otherwise we get a sub-optimal - possibly to the point of utter destruction - solution.

Actions have persistent consequences?

I didn't realize that.... I thought we were entitled to always get forgiveness or at least a do-over if we needed it, no matter what we did?

Signed,
All of modern culture.

Modern culture? Isn't that the core message of Christianity, which is around 2000 years old? And at least some parts of Judaism can also be interpreted that way - Jubilee, sacrifice to pay off sins, etc.

The Unions were a necessary phase in worker's rights, but now they are holding us back and they need to go away and be replaced by rights for all workers. If the Union leaders spent half as much effort to raise the minimum wage on a meaningful schedule as they do on padding their own pockets I might feel differently.

If unions are obsolete, what does it matter what they spend their time on? They aren't preventing you from lobbying for those rights, are they?