DDoS attacks, Wikileaks, and the evil party

[First Shirt]

I hope they take the waggling middle finger seriously, and start to do their freakin' jobs! It would be a nice change of pace from the current muddle.

[Jericho941]

After watching this I can't help but wonder inevitable the course of the near future may be, given the service economy.

Could you expand on that thought please?
I saw the video, thought it was quite interesting. Will be reading the book said video based itself upon once I get finished with Egil's saga.

Basically, the short version of my suspicions is that Joe Blow is increasingly worthless. We're rocking towards a more authoritarian government because US citizens just aren't the resource they used to be. For example, much ado is made of Lockheed Martin's huge contributions to Hillary. Well, yeah. But let's look at this country's demographics, in terms of people who actually work for a living -whether or not it's subsidized- and stack Those Who Produce against Those Who Serve.

This isn't meant to mean the easily stomached demographic pablum of makers vs takers. It's simply people who produce products the government buys vs people who facilitate it. Lockheed Martin and the defense industry still makes things. Extraction keeps going the way of the dodo. Most Americans gainfully employed aren't building or extracting, they're facilitating. Sure, you can be a well-paid consultant telling people how to do things, but at the end of the day you're just another waiter. You may be the top waiter, but you can always be replaced by another waiter.

If you're a Lockheed Martin employee, your vote matters, and it's pretty predictable which way you're gonna vote.
If you're managing a hotel in a mining town-turned-tourist-trap, you're screwed. And our economy is increasingly pushing towards making sure as many of us are managing hotels and not building last gen fighters as possible.

A lot of our skilled labor is only useful outside of the country, and that's becoming more and more limited. Shifts in the oil economy mean some people -cough- lose opportunities abroad earning a lot of money maintaining the high tech weapons of Saudi Arabia, for example. We are in a period where people must vote their wallet, and that is not good for freedom.

Stateside? You bus tables, manage hotels, maintain IT infrastructure, or you're redundant. We've been pushed into being a society of middle men, and automation is doing its level best to eliminate the middle man. Bluster over minimum wage is a smoke screen.

The stereotypical Millennial with a useless degree and a mountain of debt isn't a cautionary tale so much as a canary in a coal mine. Sure, we could all be plumbers, welders and carpenters but that is a finite market as well. There are limited opportunities to make oneself useful to those with power, and that limit becomes farther from reach for most every day. We are not living in a society where the masses are seeking to exceed their parents' quality of life anymore, or even to maintain it. We're reaching the point where Joe Blow just wants food on the table and a roof over his head. Health insurance is a pleasant afterthought. Obviously, Obamacare did nothing about that last part. For the rest of us, it's easier to point and laugh at the idiot canary for allowing itself to be carried into the coal mine than to actually acknowledge the danger and leave.

We the People, as a whole, can be safely steamrolled. The best we can hope for is a financial elite gremlin who can say the right things while giving us no hope of actually doing anything. It's a situation we've lost at arguing and voting against, and stand little chance of shooting our way out of.

And, y'know, I really hate doom and gloom predictions. I've complained about them before. But we're in a situation where we have an unstoppable candidate for POTUS that should be in jail, but our checks and balances have flagrantly taken a leave of absence on the matter. The moment the FBI decided to sit this one out, all the Wikileaks and disabled vets in the world ceased to matter. The rational debate horse left the barn months ago. There's no point in saying "Hillary must not be allowed to win" because we absolutely do not have any say in the matter. She has been anointed.

And we just don't matter.

I don't think there really is such a thing as a service economy. There could be service dominated ones, but at the core, I think some manner of transfiguration needs to go on.

A service dominated economy is a service economy. When the mine shuts down and the town turns to catering to Californians on vacation, it's pretty clear that it's no longer an extraction economy.

I read somewhere today that voting for Trump is giving a big "F**K YOU" to both parties. It is like the entire electorate wagging their middle finger at the established elite.

Voters should wag their middle finger at the established elite on a regular basis. Yeah, Trump is a misogynistic ashole, but he's not a career politician.

I'm watching this whole thing with utter amazement. And, I see a UPI poll today that says that Trump has a chance to carry the electoral college. It seems that there are a lot of people willing to wag the middle finger.

Well, Michael Moore thinks so.

I think it's shouting into the void, but I could be wrong.

[strike]I hope I'm wrong[/strike] Hell even if I'm wrong, what does it matter? Trump was a diehard Hillary fan right up until he wasn't. Hope left the barn when the primaries concluded.

[Termite]

Some of us are still in the extraction/mining/manufacturing business. But there are fewer of us, we are getting older, and there are increasing fewer young people interested in working in these fields.

My dream is that at Hillary's inauguration, someone, preferably Lil Kim, cracks open some canned sunshine about 5000 ft directly overhead. Since John Roberts will be swearing her in, good riddance to him too.

Hey, I can fantasize, right?

[BDK]

Part of the issue is, until fairly recently, most of the innovation has been going into cheap things. Some of this is probably based on Regis, somebis chasing an easy buck, much of it, I think, is the result of consumerism.

Most people live a life surrounded by junk our grandfathers wouldn't have touched and live off food they wouldn't have eaten, living in homes they would have demolished.

But drive a cake they'd only dream of, and carry a miracle in our pockets they wouldn't be able to imagine.


The food might improve, because lots of folks are nervous about why our food is killing us.

But, you can get better clothes, cheaper, in parts of Europe, once you're not at the bottom tier.

If we can flatten our distribution chain, and kill off the "machine" (Google/FB/everything else which sells identities for pennies), there's a chance for something very interesting to happen.

Take, soap. Very lovely soap can be made, surprisingly reasonably at a very small level.

It takes very little capital. And it's nicer than the assorted large soap companies (hence why soap companies became quite large. It's pretty cheap stuff).

The issue has been distribution, and maybe consumer acceptance though I'm not sure the middle-class American still has the same phobia of non-corp products he once did.

Hopefully we will see a shift from situations where a great deal of quality has been sacrificed for well, really more due to one party controlling distribution than to an actual market factor.

Some things will always scale, others scale and then stop. (EG, if a farmer buys 200k in equipment he needs enough crops to use them fully, but once he reaches the point of just buying multiples of that same unit, he won't have as much benefit. )

[HTRN]

Some of us are still in the extraction/mining/manufacturing business. But there are fewer of us, we are getting older, and there are increasing fewer young people interested in working in these fields.

Because the pay is terrible, has shitty working conditions, surrounded by addicts, and criminals, with near zero chance of advancement.

[Termite]

Because the pay is terrible, has shitty working conditions, surrounded by addicts, and criminals, with near zero chance of advancement.

So you would call $40K per year, with approx 6 months off, shitty starting pay for 19-24 yrs old?

Addicts? No-notice drug testing is common, and snares workers on a regular basis. #1 drug that flags? Marijuana.

As for criminals, there are fewer and fewer ex-cons offshore. TWIC cards are becoming required for more and more locations.

[HTRN]

Because the pay is terrible, has shitty working conditions, surrounded by addicts, and criminals, with near zero chance of advancement.

So you would call $40K per year, with approx 6 months off, shitty starting pay for 19-24 yrs old?

Addicts? No-notice drug testing is common, and snares workers on a regular basis. #1 drug that flags? Marijuana.

As for criminals, there are fewer and fewer ex-cons offshore. TWIC cards are becoming required for more and more locations.

Notice i bolded manufacturing? When you can make more working in a climate controlled home depot, where you actually can work your way up to manager, vs working for 9 bucks an hour in a barely heated, non climated controlled shop, with zero chance of advancement? AND YES junkies. Mj? They dont test for it, because they would have to fire twothirds of their workforce.

[Vonz90]

Because the pay is terrible, has shitty working conditions, surrounded by addicts, and criminals, with near zero chance of advancement.

So you would call $40K per year, with approx 6 months off, shitty starting pay for 19-24 yrs old?

Addicts? No-notice drug testing is common, and snares workers on a regular basis. #1 drug that flags? Marijuana.

As for criminals, there are fewer and fewer ex-cons offshore. TWIC cards are becoming required for more and more locations.

Notice i bolded manufacturing? When you can make more working in a climate controlled home depot, where you actually can work your way up to manager, vs working for 9 bucks an hour in a barely heated, non climated controlled shop, with zero chance of advancement? AND YES junkies. Mj? They dont test for it, because they would have to fire twothirds of their workforce.

I don't know where you work, but it sounds sucky. But I have worked in manufacturing since the mid 90's and the only place that sounded near as bad as that was the Ford Wayne assembly plant, but those guys are union and despite the fact that half of them seem like low life criminals, they are all making $80k+ for working not particularly hard.

The floor workers where I work now start at something like $14/hr with full benefits for Somedude to come in and pack boxes. The setters, Tool/die repair guys, etc. all go up from there quite a bit.

Just a quick look says that average manufacturing hourly rate is about $21/hr.

[BDK]

+1. Part of the increase in automation is, at least in food, the trend is fewer but better workers.

Not much chance of advancement, that's true. My shift managers usually come from workers/some were direct hires, but there is a cap on how far someone could go, at least without more education