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Comment Re:they brought stuff with money they don't have.. (Score 1) 99

I remember seeing the same story in the 80s when credit cards became widely available to everyone. I guess it's a lesson each generation needs to learn anew.

Giving children a solid gambling addiction by age 16 via the sports card industry pimping "1 of 1" golden tickets to parents spending the mortgage chasing a cardboard dragon, with that effort only being financially worth it with the drunken gamble of spending hundreds of dollars to submit it for professional grading in which only a dice roll of a perfect PSA10 will avoid bankruptcy in a viral market begging for a recession that has fucking ruined card collecting.

Credit cards, weren't being marketed and sold to children before. BIG difference. This makes candy cigarette imprinting look like a fart in church by comparison.

Comment Re: sponsored videos (Score 1) 99

Indeed. People tend to brush off the disclaimer and believe the influencer anyway. It's like those drug commercials with the soft, droning voice telling you how many ways the drug can kill you, while the video shows pictures of people having fun together, jumping into the water, setting off fireworks, anything to make you not notice that droning voice. *This* is how we should regard reviews that contain these disclaimers. The disclaimer is there to distract us from the pleasing words surrounding the product, attempting to be "honest" while at the same time saying what the advertiser wants you to hear. Those influencers know full well that if they don't say things the advertiser wants them to say, the advertiser money will soon disappear.

Believe the "influencer"?

Oh yeah. I'm always worried about the impact on my axe throwing plans when I'm considering an anti-inflammatory to take after a skydive.

A North Korean soap opera about who won World War 3, has more authenticity.

Comment Re: sponsored videos (Score 1) 99

People who aren't you can tell the difference between an honest review and a shill using the same basic critical thinking skills they developed in primary school.

Even the best critical thinking skills are still ignorantly human. As AI marketing advances, you won't even know the bot on the other end scamming you, isn't real. Even when you're looking right at it.

30 years from now you won't be able to tell when it's walking right at you.

The real dipshits in society, are the ones who assume otherwise. PT Barnum would have been the first multi-trillionaire today.

Comment Both capitalism and socialism have failed (Score 1) 48

Billionaires and autocrats have sabotaged both systems. We are going to have to figure out a third way or we are going to descend into techno feudalism and that is going to suck for everybody but about 5000 people on the entire planet .

if you are reading this you are not one of those 5,000

Comment What part of Venezuela's situation (Score 1) 48

Is socialism? Almost the entire world is against them except Russia that uses them occasionally as a thorn in the side of the United States.

America's gearing up for war with them. Prior to that we had cut them out of the rest of the world and all of the global markets.

So I don't think Venezuela which is under active attack by every capitalist nation in the world is a fair representative of alternatives to capitalism.

I do think we live in the real world though and we can't pretend that socialism works even if the only reason it doesn't work is that billionaires, who are themselves vehemently opposed to capitalism, will sabotage it making it impossible to properly implement.

The important thing to remember is billionaires do not support capitalism either. So capitalism is going to get sabotaged by billionaires too and therefore capitalism is not an alternative to billionaires.

We are going to have to figure out a third way. Because both capitalism and socialism have failed us.

Comment So you've been conditioned to believe (Score 0) 50

There is no fix besides austerity and suffering.

That's because rich people don't want to have to spend the money to solve problems that are mostly your problem and not theirs.

You need to get out of the habit, a habit let's remember you were conditioned into by the wealthy, of assuming that nothing can ever get better and that good things aren't possible anymore.

That habit is an extreme and toxic form of conservativism.

Comment Vpns will be criminalized next (Score 0) 78

Technically they can't ban them but they can't throw you in prison for using one. And they can throw people in prison for running them of course.

This is the ultra wealthy and the ruling elite moving the take over the last form of media where regular people can access information without their consent.

But hey, the girl who hands you your coffee says Merry Christmas now so that's a fair trade right?

And if you don't understand what that means that's the problem.

Comment I can see the point. (Score 4, Insightful) 78

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

Comment Read my post again (Score 3, Informative) 133

We were actively hiding the cost of college by giving colleges direct Cash subsidies from state and federal governments. They were passing those cash subsidies onto the students in the form of lower tuition. I do not know how much simpler I can explain this to you.

If you look at the actual operating expenses of colleges they have not increased substantially in the last 40 years. You will find some increases because there is more technology. Yes 70 years ago colleges did not need computers or advanced medical equipment to train doctors on. They also didn't need staff to keep all those computers and all that equipment running. So there is some increase due to do technology.

But that increase is relatively small. And can easily be accounted for by the new technology.

Meanwhile all of those subsidies are gone.

Suppose what we should have done is when you went to college we should have handed you a check and had you walk it to the finance office so that you would understand what the cost of college actually was instead of hiding that from you.

The reason we didn't do that is we were fighting a war with people who pretended to be socialists. So you needed to get socialism because that made America stronger country that could actually stand up to those enemies but we didn't want you to get comfortable with socialism so we hid socialism from you.

We did the same thing with the housing market where trillions of dollars were spent on infrastructure to subsidize baby boomer houses so that they could actually afford to buy houses. We also heavily subsidized the loans they got for those houses.

But if you really want to piss off somebody over 50 try explaining to them that they received a massive amount of benefit from socialism.

Comment It's not that everything is gambling (Score 3, Interesting) 48

Everything is a grift. Capitalism is breaking down, or rather it's being broken down by monopolies and billionaires. So people have to try to find money any way they can and since you can't do it the traditional way of competing in a free market, because there is no free market anymore, you have to try to grift your way to a living.

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