SaTaMaS posted:I get pretty scared when people start saying things like "If things get bad enough, they'll HAVE to implent UBI". Not that you're saying that, but a lot of people seem to be. Here's one alternative - mass unemployment leads to social unrest, which leads to nationalism, which leads to war, which leads to lots of people getting killed off who would have otherwise been unemployed. Sound familiar? The New Deal is how we got Social Security and Medicare though so there's more precedent of the rich caving in when poo poo is bad enough in the US than the Weimar outcome. Also I seem to recall the Weimar outcome blowing up in a lot of formerly wealthy peoples' faces which maybe will play a factor in how much they'll keep stoking the fire when poo poo starts getting real?
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Dec 8, 2016 02:32
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New technologies failing to go anywhere and then succeeding wildly way later when technology and design has advanced to make it feasible and cost-effective isn't even a new thing. Take the computer, for instance. The word itself used to refer to somebody who computed numbers for a living and now hell if anyone but word enthusiasts remember that. Not to mention cellphones were a joke in Clueless when they were big and bulky and hard to read, now that they aren't any of those things everyone has them.
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Dec 27, 2016 02:01
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:if millennials have the patience to navigate one of those loving phone mazes where they force you to talk to the robot that can't understand human speech, then God bless 'em. I have been told I have a pretty clear voice and I've played text adventures so I know how to keep it simple.  Sucks to be old and mumbly I guess?Alternatively I will do all your phone mazes for you at 50 cents a minute. Guaranteed to get you a live person or your task finished within 10 minutes or your money back!
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Dec 27, 2016 21:21
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:Creating jobs putting up with bureaucratic horseshit for people is the closest thing we've had yet to a viable trade substitute for the masses, but if you think I'm going to waste time on a wager that you'll only be on hold for ten minutes where I don't even get anything when I win, you're sorely misguided in your business model. I didn't throw in the *s that would crop up for actually staying on hold and/or pretending to be you so you wouldn't have to be involved in the actual call yourself instead of just either doing the machine maze or transferring you to the customer help line once I got there. I'm also not really a business major but I have sometimes wondered if I'd be able to make decent money out of that with someone who knows how to make a viable business model out of putting up with bureaucratic nonsense before it inevitably crashed when I had to hire other people and one of them started stealing customer data (credit/debit card info, social security numbers, addresses, work history, password recovery question answers... tons of poo poo people aren't expecting get used as verification material, there's no way around it for any business like this even assuming it's not considered outright illegal to begin with for intentionally falsifying the identity of the caller to gain access to someone else's records).
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Dec 28, 2016 00:19
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central dogma posted:Robots don't work so well after the displaced work force smashes them. All it takes is the state taking the side of capital for the displaced workforce to get broken in turn. The only thing that will make things different this time from the time Luddites smashed frames is that there won't be anywhere else for labor to go besides jail and street riots, and I don't think that will stop anyone unless labor proves amazingly successful at resisting incarceration and being framed as lazy malcontents.
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Jan 13, 2017 01:02
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Inferior Third Season posted:Plenty of land for mass graves. If the state breaks out brutal suppression before the workers can organize in a recognizable movement and the media stays in their pocket we're all hosed and headed straight for dystopia. I think it's more likely that there will be just enough suppression to keep resisting labor from having enough power to unseat capitalists without the messy PR backlash of stunts like the Bonus Army until the other shoe drops and capitalism runs out of consumption to fuel it, at which point chaos reigns and its anyone's guess what happens next.
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Jan 14, 2017 02:11
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Tasmantor posted:Just want to share this little laugh with a now dead thread. Pretty good. I especially like how he monitors the store on his phone most of the time and does the Bitcoiner thing of talking up his gross income without mentioning how much he had to outlay for the machines, storefront, and stock. All it'll take is a couple people with crowbars and his business is wrecked even if he's got insurance.
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Feb 5, 2017 08:47
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:What makes you think this is the first business that would be hurt by being smashed up by a gang hitting it with crowbars? It's not that someone wouldn't get the idea to do that in literally any other store, it's about the deterrent effect of having people actually present running the store as opposed to a place that looks completely unattended. Not to mention the effect of having the appearance of security cameras also has an effect on how likely people think they are to get caught stealing stuff. Granted, the prices might actually be comparatively low enough that busting in the machines isn't worth it but that doesn't make it not a thing, unless you think Walmart and gas stations just like wasting money on fake security cameras. It's funny because the guy seems the type who will be completely blindsided the first time his foolproof plan to deal with shoplifting fails and have no actual plan in place to deal with it. Ignatius M. Meen fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Feb 5, 2017 |
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Feb 5, 2017 21:03
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:This sounds like you are doubtful of the possibility of the existence of vending machines in general. No? Vending machines are usually in heavily trafficked public areas where the likelihood of somebody hearing or seeing something is pretty good and where they're not, there's probably just one or two. This is a storefront with dozens of them clumped together, if you can't see how these situations would be appraised differently I don't know what to tell you.
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Feb 5, 2017 21:27
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I happen to be legally blind so I can't just drive myself down to the grocery store and so is my mother. Can't exactly do anything about it until somebody figures out retina transplants. Grocery delivery is reasonable-ish here through Shop 'n Save but it's considerably cheaper to go shopping with my aunt who can drive us to Aldi's... and is also very involved in things at her church so shopping with her has to be scheduled around it all. It's not impossible to avoid being a shut-in in my shoes but when you either walk or take the bus everywhere in a city where more than a few people are not fond of buses or the people who typically ride them it's pretty easy to do it if you haven't got some obligation to leave the house for already set up that day. As for the vending machines, yeah okay the crowbars were overboard but drink codes are things people have spent time on figuring out before and I doubt it'd be easy to catch someone doing that from glancing at your phone. Have people really not ever had a machine take their money and refuse to give them what they paid for? There isn't always a customer number you can call on the side of the machine to get your money back in 4 weeks or whatever on these things either.
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Feb 7, 2017 00:41
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I feel like most of these arguments were made about TV too when kids were left watching it for hours, which doesn't bode well if there is any kind of effect because the kids will grow up before anybody can tell for sure.
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Nov 8, 2017 19:01
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Stairmaster posted:Otoh the future where autistic people go around wearing scouters from dbz to help them socialize is a future I'd love to live in. Sorta like Google Glasses except more tragic than funny. If you're clueless enough to take marketing without any salt and not see it as the giant Kick Me sign it'd be even if it worked as advertised (even more than your everyday autism-spectrum weirdness) you probably really need the help. Glassholes of yesteryear by comparison all had comfy jobs to let them make frivolous stupid purchases. 
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Jan 9, 2018 03:49
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