I know, right? There's only Facebook, QZone, Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube/Orkut/Google, Sina Weibo, Habbo, VK, LinkedIn, Renren, Bebo, Tagged, Netlog, Hi5, Flixster, Classmates, Fixer, Sonico, Douban, Odnoklassniki, Viadeo, Flickr, Myspace, MyHeritage, Last.fm, Xanga, Slashdot, Reddit, Pintrest, Something Awful, Deviant Art and barely 200+ other social media sites with over a million registered users that people can choose to use to connect with other people.

It's absolutely ridiculous that the Social Media giants can squash competition so thoroughly that they barely have a few hundred competitors to worry about. Simply shameful!

Just giving people money by itself won't work well as it'd require things like price fixing to keep that UBI a livable wage and there'd of course be issues with finding people willing to work less desirable jobs and such.

A UBI system coupled with a good public education system (likely via a virtual education system) that focused on teaching to a student's strengths, talents, interests, passion and ambition as well as a public job placement system that offers qualified people jobs they could take voluntarily that would allow them to earn money and status above the UBI in a field they are interested in working in might be workable.

But as such a system would essentially become a corruptible meritocracy it'd have all kinds of kinks to work out and would require pretty much the whole world to adopt a similar system at the same time which by itself makes any such system extremely unlikely any time in the near future.

Plus, such a system would be much closer to the much lamented socialism than our beloved capitalist system which means there'd be a colossally huge amount of philosophical resistance towards such a system so long as there's a large enough base of people out there who don't need a UBI or the survival of 'peasant classes' to maintain their quality of life it's even more unlikely to happen anytime soon. It'd probably require every major, modern society across the world to be at the brink (or beyond) of collapse with corporate executives and investors having no choice but to capitulate and support such a system or fall with the rest of society before there's any chance of such a system ever being implemented in any of the larger industrialized nations.

The only guarantee is that society is coming a major crossroads that's more likely than not going to become a colossal shit show in the relatively near future and a lot of people are going to horribly suffer before it all gets worked out and stabilized again, if it ever does.

Or endlessly complain loudly about how inconvenient and unacceptable the modern world is to you while you shut yourself away from it in fear of some hypothetical consequences. That's a choice too. All that new-agey tech stuff just distracts from the important things, like making sure teenagers don't walk across your lawn. Right?

Meanwhile, the rest of the world will continue to happily carry their credit and debit cards around because if they carry cash around it can get lost or stolen and they won't have any chance of hell of getting it back, while most bank cards these days have fraud protection and can be quickly replaced if lost or stolen and often give numerous other benefits people who use cash don't get. Those people also usually don't find some huge corporation with millions of customers knowing what they buy as concerning as the checkout girl at Walmart that goes to college with their kids, and everyone else in the store they walk past with their cart knowing what they buy which happens when you routinely use cash and shop at those beloved mom & pop B&M stores.

Because scanning the Unemployment site job postings in my area (midwest), there are a couple hundred job listings in my area. But 80% of them are in nursing, truck driving or other jobs that generally require certification, prior experience or a degree in the the field like accounting or systems analysis.

When I turn on the filter to exclude jobs that require a degree, experience or bilingual abilities there's a couple listings for factory work, a couple construction jobs (must be able to lift 150lbs) and one for a dishwasher.

There's plenty of jobs available, the issue is getting qualified for them, which isn't easy for a lot of people. There's just not a lot of people on the streets carrying a bachelor's degree around in their shopping cart.

I love how the people who always say shit like this in regards to climate change have no problem with using the supposed edicts handed down by a being for which there is absolutely no evidence that supports it's existence when they're arguing against things like letting gay people get married or allowing women access to birth control.

Dammit. Meant to say, in pro wrestling it goes back way before WM 2.

It goes way, way before that.

From the January 12, 1936 issue of The Ogden Standard-Examiner:

There's other articles using the word going back to 1923 on (paywalled) newspapers.com according to Google.

You should check your ability to read and comprehend what you're replying to more carefully. Especially if you want to criticize others for not 'checking their facts'.
Read the title of the article again. Slowly. See the "hardware-business" part? If not, try again until you do. Now then....

There's a very obvious difference between the Playstation hardware (you know, the stuff everyone else here is talking about) and the Playstation business unit (which only you are talking about).

It is a verifiable fact that at launch, Sony lost money on every Playstation 4 sold, a fact the guy you tried to criticize for not checking his facts got completely right (remember what we're talking about yet?). On the PS3 hardware (have you learned what that word means now?), they lost $3.5 Billion in 2007-2008 alone.
The business unit made that up with PlayStation Plus subs, game sales and things like peripheral licensing. But that doesn't change the fact that Sony took a loss on the hardware (once again, hardware is the stuff we're talking about, if you've been able to grasp that yet) and that mjwx's facts were completely correct despite your inability to comprehend that fact.

The Playstation business unit has, yes. The latest generations of Xbox have also allowed the Xbox division to become a profitable unit within Microsoft as well, despite them also selling their console hardware (Damn, there's that word again. I hope you aren't still averse to it) at a loss. This is compounded a bit by the fact that Sony also gets a small piece of every Xbox sold due their patents related to the included Blu-Ray hardware (Shit! There's that word again! You just can't escape it. At least, not when it's the topic being discussed by everyone with the reading comprehension of a 3rd grader).

From better articles about this, it appears a large number of the bans were actually people who used returns as part of a fake review scheme. They'd 'buy' something, review it as a 'verified purchase', then return it at the last possible minute to get discounts, freebies or pay outs.

Of course Facebook, other companies or Governments can't solve the problem. Because the problem isn't 'fake news', it's the people who believe it.

So long as we have anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, creationists, pizzagaters, science deniers, conspiracy theorists and a million other flavors of stupid, crazy and blissfully ignorant people making up a very significant portion (if not the majority) of the world's population, it will remain a problem that is well outside the scope of a for-profit business or Government entity, who is encouraged by unrestrained capitalism to exploit the stupidity of others for power and profit, to address.

Back in the 80s, my local Toys-R-Us had rows and rows of toys, 3 full rows (3x as long as the rows they have now) of video games, multiple rows of hobby stuff like model rockets, remote control cars and planes, model trains and high end slot car parts. Hell, I used to buy computer components from Toys-R-Us.
Now, My local (NW Arkansas) Walmart has 6 rows of toys, plus 2 long rows of video games and accessories in the Electronics section. However the local Toys-R-Us (as of last summer, the last time I was in the store) has one small square section of toys and video games that is no bigger than my living room and in total is equal to maybe 4 of the toy rows at Walmart. The rest of the store is dedicated to Babies-R-Us with clothes, cribs, kid's beds and car seats filling 5 times as much floor space as toys. The last time I went in there was to buy a baseball mitt for my nephew last summer, they didn't stock them at all. Walmart had plenty though.

Most of us are also geeks though. We know what goes into making someone a convincing Klingon. :)
The person who wrote the article however, obviously thinks that what his wife does for 45 minutes in front of the mirror each morning is the furthest extent of what a make up artist does.

Another example is bartenders. People think the only skill set they need is pulling the handle on a tap, pouring mixes out of bottles and maybe at the high end places occasionally looking up a recipe in on a bartnending app. However, one bar I used to go to started hiring only licenced bartenders, even though they weren't required to, because just hiring people off the street who could mix a drink meant they'd been hiring people who had no clue about things like responsible serving and food safety. That led to several instances of people being over served and having to be carted out of the place on a stretcher (and they were fortunate none of them tried to sue), a couple of health department fines due to poor bar cleanliness (bartending uses lots of sugary liquids which if spilt and not cleaned up properly, are prime food for bacteria) and they were on the crux of losing their liquor license due to being caught numerous times serving under aged people as off the street people never took getting ID, especially from the undercover enforcement agents who had no problem being difficult to get served, seriously until they got their $500 fine and the bar got their strike against them.

The vast majority of licensing requirements come not from a corporate conspiracy to raise the bar for competitors to enter a certain market as the article tries to make it seem, but from reactionary lawmaking due to some incident where someone doing a job people had thought could be done competently by a retarded monkey ends up proving that what they do can be dangerous if done by someone without proper training, so lawmakers make such training mandatory by instituting licensing.
In short, licensing is often the equivalent of the "Caution HOT! Avoid Pouring on Crotch Area" warnings on Starbucks coffee sleeves. They exist because some stupid person got hurt or hurt someone else.

The intended victim never had any contact with the swatter. Apparently he gave the fake address to his teammate, and it was the teammate who then hired the guy to do the swatting and passed along the fake address after a dispute over a game of COD.

Trying to say he reasonably should have known that his teammate would find and hire someone capable of successfully facilitating a swatting and that they would do such a thing over a petty dispute is a pretty big stretch that would be hard to get a jury to go along with.

Plus, few prosecutors (who are usually elected or work for someone who was) would want to try a case that's essentially charging someone who was threatened with being the victim of a crime as an accessory to the crime that was intended to be committed against them. It's like telling people "If someone is holding a gun to your head, just allow yourself to be executed and don't try to knock it away and escape because if you do and the guy fires and kills someone else because you selfishly knocked the gun away, you could be held liable for murdering an innocent bystander along with the guy who wanted to shoot you in the head".

The people in trouble in this case are the guy who called in the swatting, the guy who hired him to do it and provided the false address to the swatter, the police department for not doing anything to verify the report before dispatching a swat team and the cop who fired the fatal shot at an unarmed, innocent man.

The swatting part won't matter too much as the guy easily qualifies for at least one count of second degree murder ("a killing caused by dangerous conduct and the offender's obvious lack of concern for human life"), but they could also tack on charges for endangering each law enforcement officer who responded to the fraudulent report as well.
Plus, with the victim being in another state, it's likely the feds will take over prosecution pretty quickly as it's an interstate crime, so he'll be charged under Federal law whcih is a hell of a lot more brutal than CA state law (and the perp is apparently in CA as there's articles saying the LAPD picked him up). Add in the likely terrorism charges he'll get for making bomb threats against Federal buildings, and supposing the super nerd doesn't off himself as soon as he realizes he's gonna be someone's boytoy for the rest of his life, the guy will certainly never see the outside of a prison or court room again.

Just got a huge erection.