Altay-

These sort of comments always annoy me.

If you work at declining companies like Yahoo, HP, etc you should already consider your job lost. Just show up for the paycheck while planning your next move. This has to be what >90% of people are doing as-is. People aren't that stupid... are they?

This is CERTAINLY not the last round of layoffs at Yahoo as it positions itself for sale. Same goes for every declining business in every industry in every country in every era of business history.

Your blurb seems to contradict it self. It claims we need stimulus then it says the West & Japan tried this already and it hasn't worked.

Maybe we need to allow the free market to function. Who cares if house prices drom from $250,000 -> $50,000 and the Dow from 16,000 -> 3,000? They will eventually be snapped up by someone at some price, thus fulfilling 'demand.'

So much debt will be wiped out through defaults in this process as well, it will be great for the average person who will finally be able to afford to meaningfully participate in the investment world. Dividends yields of 2-6% mean nothing to a small time investor, but 20% is something that we could very well see in a liquidation market.

I have yet to see a TV that is actually smart. What passes for Smart TVs today are a joke. The menus suck and the remote controls are even more unwieldy than 'dumb' TV remotes.

Until we get a TV that boots to an Android home screen and comes with a tablet that mirrors the TV screen, TVs will remain dumb.

I'm subscribed to Jacobin and the writing style certainly feels as though they are preaching to the choir rather than trying to persuade anyone.

If you don't think intelligence is heritable, you're delusional. Its quite easy to see in the field -- I bet the smartest kids in your class, I'm talking about the naturally quick learners not the hardest working, also have naturally bright parents.

Intelligence and social class are both heritable traits:

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21595396-new-st...

The writing quality was a lacking overall. I actually found that uplifting, I'm not a great writer but if VICE is willing to publish this story, I shouldn't be as self conscious about my own work!

We are in the midst of a financial boom today: The great exodus of the upper working class from the suburbs back into tier-1 city cores. I don't know what will prove to be the best way to capitalize on this shift, but here's my guess:

Use today's low rates to get a mortgage for a property downtown in a place like Seattle. Be wise and purchase an easily partionable property that can be partially rented out to cover the mortgage and you're golden.

If Seattle is out of your price range, Houston is a great starter city. Low prices, near the coast, growing state, etc.

Any interest bearing instrument includes risk.

To put it another way: On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone [or any investment] drops to zero.

Most people move their desktop as often as they move the rest of their furniture. For college students who dorm, there are small form factor cases that can still support full size GPUs and CPUs.

In other news, fire is hot...

The most shocking part of this story is that HP still employs 300,000+ people...

I don't think that's a fair comparison. AOL didn't initially position itself as a portal. It positioned itself as an ISP with a portal.

Had AOL built itself as a web portal like Yahoo from the start it may very well have stayed relevant. I still have business partners (in non tech fields) that use their AOL email and news/portal services.

Important people use Twitter. Teens and grandmothers use Facebook.

Is there an opportunity here? I regularly 'digitize' old media for archival purposes. If a lot of Netflix DVDs are truly not available anywhere else, I would consider simply ripping them, storing them online and sharing them via p2p.

I think its safe to say we've reached peak monthly-subscription-startup...

My company cannot afford benefits at the moment. It may one day, but not today. I very much like its existence.

It should not be a company's job to take care of an employees general welfare. Other developed countries seem to have a more elegant solution to this issue...

Banking allows us to get mortgages.

"Finance" gives us 2% down payment mortgages which are than packaged and sold to Japanese pension funds with currency and interest rate hedges mixed in... which then go on to screw everyone involved since NO ONE reads or understands the terms of the investment vehicle besides the financial engineers who wrote & sold them.

The same holds true for all the points you listed.

Fortunately, Capitalism has a fail safe. All this financial nonsense would have been fixed if the banks were allowed to fail in 2008. The US federal government is largely to blame for the continued parasitical rent seeking of the high finance class.

Here's a non-pdf version without some of the padding:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vgjC5VeySpjqzcHj1_4_-5MN...

Side note: Google should whip up a google doc only url shortner... so people know its a document and not a risky link, but its still short enough to share easily...

Reasonable how? Nuclear power is insanely expensive and no private investor would fund a nuclear project without a myriad of government assistance in the form of insurance guarantees, subsidized loans, etc.

The time horizon for a nuclear plant alone makes them inconceivable as anything but government white elephant projects...

I believe you are making yourself upset by arguing from the point of the ideal.

Its not a matter of meritocracy vs basic income. Its the current welfare state vs basic income.

People like you and I are already paying loads of money to the masses in the form of (from an American perspective) Food Stamps, continued Federal make-work programs (like the USPS/military), Social Security, Disability Insurance, Medicare/Medicaid, etc.

Just as a freebie example, The US spends ~$3000 per capita on its military. Cut that in half and give everyone $1500/year no strings attached. That alone would relieve a lot of stress for a large percent of Americans.

And you're not accounting for the price of the bottle relative to the cost of the water/syrup.

That's the whole point of inflation. Remember, wages are 'sticky' in that workers don't like getting their pay cut. So economists invented a way to rob them while giving them nominal wage raises!

I thought this was going to be an article about batteries and the quote would be attributed to Elon Musk or some other tech billionaire.

I was pleasantly surprised.

If you want to see just how irrelevant E-Commerce is, just look at your neighborhood Apple Store. Their products are the sort that could easily be purchased online -- commodity technology products aimed at the supposedly tech savvy.

The only visible effect of e-commerce has been the thinning of margins. The ability to check prices online leveled the playing field between retailers and customers. This has brought us closer to a real market -- one where perfect information is available to all parties.

E-commerce makes up ~6.40% of US retail sales. Its certainly shaken up the landscape, but 'crush' is overstating the case...