The more I hear about Oracle the less respect I have for them. My company is already working hard at dropping all things Oracle. I really can't wait for the day when we can wash our hands of them completely. Its not that far off really.
Can you elaborate on that, datatan? I'm not saying lawless is necessarily correct, but from the confidence of your statement, it sounds like you have data to show otherwise. Would you mind sharing that? I feel it would make a good talking point in this thread.
The only reason to care about centralized currency is the possibility that whoever owns the central bank will simply print more. This is equivalent to taxation.
No that's just hyperbole without any basis in reality. Those poor and underprivileged can already find aid when/where needed. Poor people in the USA aren't even poor by world wide standards.
You do not have the right to rob Peter to pay Paul.
It's absurd to say that "because there are poorer people in (I'm assuming you are referring to) Asia/Africa/Central America, we should make no further effort to help". We should help them because they are our neighbors and it's our moral imperative.
It's not robbery, it's the cost of being part of society. Those billionaires rely on the laws, created and enforced by the government, to maintain their status and possessions. If it's a government of and for all the people in the country, then the government absolutely has moral authority to tax citizens relative to their ability to contribute, and to aid citizens relative to their need for aid.
> underprivileged can already find aid when/where needed
Mostly via the government, through food stamps, medicare, medicaid, welfare, etc. So the precedent is already there, and already consumes somewhere near 2/3 of your taxes today. Charity provides comparatively little for your average poverty stricken family.
If Paul got his wealth off the back of Peter and the government they both keep in power, is it theft to want Paul to help Peter when he can no longer work?
If you're using the iTunes Store or App Store for the first time
If you're using the store for the first time with an existing Apple ID, you must provide a payment method. After you create the account, you can change your payment information to None.
If you're creating a new Apple ID, you might be able to create an account without entering your credit card details.
The only way is with gift card which is not sold worldwide.
That's due to them using it as a way to limit fake accounts and account spam.
Quite reasonable as a trade off and as you mentioned it is possible to circumvent the need for a traditional credit card.
Plus, if you're against that then you'd have to be 100% off the grid anyhow - any bank or utility company (inc your phone company) knows more about you than Apple.
Worse, they say this while giving them selves multi-million dollar salaries and stock bonuses worth billions. It's outrageous. We're told we're replacable, that theirs third worlders that can do what we do for less but somehow the executive is a unique snowflake worth billions of dollars.
I watch VP's get million dollar bonuses while laying off workers. I watch execs outsource whole departments, watch quality tank, and they get millions.
The center can not hold. It will come crashing down.
> Wages rise on California farms. Americans still don’t want the job
No. Californians don't want the jobs. Americans live in more than just CA, I know a lot of people in CA find this hard to believe but there is a whole world outside of Sillycon Valley.
I lived in northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri for 12 years, until 2009. Not only is this where the Tyson corporation is based, but it's also where one of the highest densities of chicken farms are located.
We lived in a house in an extremely rural area. I made good money doing high tech work at the nearby WalMart Stores, Inc., home office.
Most of our neighbors, for miles in every direction, were pretty poor. Many of them lived in broken down trailers on properties handed down generation after generation. Unemployment was very high.
A kindly, law abiding man who went to our church ran one of the many chicken farms, and had for decades.
The only people he could find to work on his chicken farms were Latinos, many or most of them were probably illegal. They did provide proper documentation, so he wasn't breaking the law by employing them.
I asked him how he ran his farm before the Latinos started arriving 15 or so years earlier. He said that in that time, it wasn't hard to find young people who were happy to do the hard, unpleasant work associated with a chicken farm. He said he hadn't raised his wages past minimum wage since the very beginning.
In fact, he said, the Latinos worked a lot harder than the native locals had.
> Americans live in more than just CA, I know a lot of people in CA find this hard to believe but there is a whole world outside of Sillycon Valley.
While not adding much of anything to this conversation, and being needlessly snarky, I understand the fundamental sentiment here. I live in 'Sillycon Valley'. In many ways, it is quite silly here, and a lot of folks have a rather insular mindset, one that I personally try hard to keep clear of.
Yes which does an even better job of proving the point. When the economy was worse and unemployment was higher, why didn't the huge numbers of unemployed who need jobs take those available jobs? Hmm!
> The article indicates a 15-year trend of rising wages, yet we don't see American farmhands flocking to CA, so it seems like a fair headline to me.
That's because you're biased. Its a small trend over a long period of time that doesn't outpace the cost of living. There is also a massive shortage of farmers thanks to big agriculture killing them all off.
Most farmers want to own the land they work. Good luck with that in CA
I read there's a 50% increase in wages, during a period when CPI is up more like 30% in California [0], and I'm saying I agree with the article: it seems like a reasonable economic incentive.
To respond to your comment: isn't a farm worker different from a farmer? I thought the former was someone who does things that require little to no training, like picking grapes, and that these are the people the article references.
$16 in Napa is probably $2 in Nebraska. The cost of living there is so much lower than California you can barely compare the two. Homes are 1/10th the price or less.
You can find a nice house in Omaha for $175k that would cost about $2.5 million in Palo Alto for example.
When (if?) Bay Area workers ever figure this out they should telecommute from the midwest.
> Yes, but if they wanted the jobs, they'd come to CA for them.
CA is facing a mass exodus right now. Why on Earth would anyone willingly move there with costs being what they are?
I left 10 years ago and will never go back. I can earn just as much with a cost of living being half of that in any number of states.
> Most people in California—who are, after all, themsleves outside of Silicon Valley, which is a small piece of the state—are well aware of that.
I grew up there and no they aren't aware of it. SV isn't a small part of the state. Its the entire middle of it since hardly anyone who works there can live there. They have to commute for hours from all around.
The other half is in LA county with the same delusions. The populace out side of those areas is tiny in comparison.
No, it's not. It's facing a slowing rate of inward migration, but it still has net inward migration, not an "exodus" at all, much less a mass one (and a lot of the slowing is part of the national net out-migration of undocumented immigrants—the only a mass exodus involved—offsetting in-migration of others.)
"Figure 1 [0] shows California’s Department of Finance’s (DOF) estimate of domestic migration, migration between California and other states. According to the DOF, California’s domestic migration has been negative in 18 of the past 20 years."
I think you bring up a good point. The people who need jobs and the people that need to fill jobs live in different places. American mobility is at an all time low for our technological era. How do we get the unemployed Midwesterners into Napa Valley?
> How do we get the unemployed Midwesterners into Napa Valley?
Just a thought:
Government loans with low interest, delayed and income-contingent repayment, and forgiveness after a set period of on-time payments for relocation expenses for unemployed adults with job offers outside of their own immediate area. Getting people to where the work is good for the public fisc, good for employers, and good for the people involved.
People are easier to move than agricultural land, and employers with jobs that can be moved easily and realize cost efficiencies by doing that usually get financing to do so (though government programs to incentive moving jobs into depressed areas aren't unheard of.)
Why is the first instinct of every Democrat/Liberal to have Government subsidize everything? If the wages and cost of living were there people would come. Solve the problem, don't subsidize it and create more problems. Absolutely insane.
> If the wages and cost of living were there people would come
People who lack assets may not be able to afford to move, even if the wage/CoL balance would favor a different location discounting moving costs. Facilitating that through targeted lending (especially if the recipient would otherwise be drawing public benefits) is win/win/win: good for the government/public, food.for.the employer, good for employee.
Californians are Americans. Central Valley is very different to Silicon Valley. You're the person who connected it to Silicon Valley. There's a whole lot of California outside of and unrelated to Silicon Valley.
> Unemployment in the US is relatively low even on a long term basis.
Dear God save me from whatever unemployment you deem to be high. Over a third of the people in this country don't work and another third work part time.
Maybe you actually believe those numbers coming out of the gov on unemployment and don't pay attention to the people who have rolled off the unemployment benefits. I know people that have been looking for work for the better part of 5 years without luck.
Also, have to call bullshit on the "You have it easier than any generation in history" remark. This generation is the first generation since the inception of this country to not have it better than the previous one. Every person born today is born with upwards of 70k debt thanks to the drunken sailors in Congress. The bill will come due. It always does.
Would you rather get drafted and go to war? Because everything you say hints at politicians creating a war just to divert attention and offer the unemployed "a job": playing a first person shooter with real victims.
Those sorts of wars are largely in America's past. The real money is made in high-tech munitions: cruise missiles, anti-missile missiles, and drones with missiles.
If you're a defense contractor, you're not interested in selling "hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground," but rather guns (weapons systems) and ammo.
As a corollary, no one is lobbying politicians on behalf of a force increase at the scale you're suggesting. Private military contractors just don't operate at the "give the hoards of unemployed young men some plausible way to die" scale.
The situation you're referring to is more of an issue in countries with weaker economies and geographically close potential enemies.
What I was saying was give the hoards of men games to play: piloting drones, UUVs, playing Red Alert with robotic infantry, mostly against a weaker economy, the real victims. And let's not forget the amount of jobs created to build those drones.
I find your lack of imagination disturbing. There are more types of games out there, others can be based around finding the best designs, or alternate fulfillment for a standard interface if materials are short.
We have entire video-games, and mods for games, that revolve around setting up factories and designs.
Compared to 1917? The middle class was in its infancy at that point. Workers were still fighting for basic safety protections and one day off per week.
