Why is Pinterest such a shining example when it doesn't have a fully developed market model yet and hasn't shown a single profitable quarter? What makes it more than just another overvalued company waiting for the next burst?
87 karma · joined August 13, 2012
1)Peasants absolutely exist. There's an enormous invisible labor force in the US that is paid a fraction of minimum wage, let alone a living wage, and that's not even counting the literal prison slave labor employed in multiple states. Further, while the US may export a great deal of food, there are plenty of food types and a majority of manufactured products that are imported from places where they are made through the exploitation of third world laborers.
2) Your claim that business-ownership used to be a widespread individual experience is historically nonsense.
3) The article is full of tautologies like "If you have the human and social capital to start a business, it means you don’t have to worry so much about money." Yeah, if you're rich enough to not have to worry about the world crashing down around you tomorrow, you're rich enough to not have to worry about the world crashing down around you. Brilliant insight, and also not the lived experience of 99% of the world's population. Your suggestion that people simply "choose" to be this way is ridiculous.
4) The assertion that middle-class people spending a majority of their income as it comes in is "cultural" rather than a reality of saving being a LUXURY afforded to the few wealthy enough to afford it is both wrong and incredibly insulting. You're hardly the first person to perpetuate the "poor people just don't have good money sense" myth but it doesn't make it any less noxious.
And that's just for starters! Wealth is a zero-sum game and capitalism is built at its very foundation on the upward mobility of wealth through exploitation of labor. You can't change that with fairy-tale ideas about everyone magically being able to afford the risks and costs of business ownership if they just want it bad enough.
This is the man whose funeral Obama will solemnly attend and whose death Romney will use as the rallying cry to up the US government's murder-rate of non-whites. A terrible little internet nazi cum computer janitor for imperialism.
Gaddafi was hardly a beacon of good government, but debt-slavery to the IMF and open doors to the ransacking of national resources by western corporations is hardly an improvement. Not to mention little things like the incidents of ethnic cleansing.
MUST BE THOSE IGNORANT SAVAGES AND THEIR MYSTICAL NONSENSE
Examples I point to are as follows -
The Zulu nation was happily destroying not only all of it's neighbors, but many of their own people as the leadership happened to be certifiably insane. Shaka for example had a small penis (actually historically accurate) and killed thousands of people because of it. The zulu empire was actually not the bad one as the Matabele under Mzilikali after his loss to the zulu, took his tribe and conducted a scorched earth campaign across the lower section of africa destroying all in his path.
Lets not forget the laughable Xhosa girl Nongqawuse who said she saw visions that if everybody killed off their cattle and burned their fields the dead spirits of their ancestors would grant not only tenfold cattle in return, but destruction of the new white Anglo/Boer civilization in the southern cape. Needless to say after they slaughtered and burned everything no ancestors were forthcoming and 25 thousand of the Xhosa tribe died. The tribes of africa were largely barbaric and vicious groups of people who really only understood killing for the most part. There were exceptions to the rule as there always are, the hottentots, and various smaller tribes, but for the most part african culture was set up to destroy other cultures to begin with.
I'm not going to say that they are better off having been colonized by the europeans, but the alternative was pretty vicious as well.
Consider TrackIR, a phenomenal gaming technology that has been around for years and significantly increases immersion and "natural" input/control yet has failed to find meaningful traction with developers outside of simulators and a few other niche titles like Arma. Or 3D, which is still little more than a quickly-tiring gimmick despite a much wider range of titles being developed with support for it. Or Kinect, which, after the initial rush, has proved to still mostly be a solution in search of a problem.
Even if VR hardware has finally reached feasibility for mass-market production and pricing, without a large developer commitment it won't take off. It faces the same catch-22 as every add-on technology, requiring large developer time investment to support yet not having the market share to warrant such an investment, and the market share never getting large enough to warrant it because the investment is never made. The announced "launch titles" for the Rift don't really indicate that this hurdle is anywhere close to being surpassed.
It's cool to think about these things but "the future is now!" is inevitably premature. The article frames the entire thing as hypothetical to try to avoid this, but is still pretty gushing to the point of walking past these obvious and serious challenges.
It doesn't take spending a lot of time in any nerd culture group to see that the racism, sexism, and homophobia are not ironic at all. Case in point, the enormous administrator/moderator-led backlash on SA in the past ~year against anyone daring to not openly welcome the death of anyone who is not a white cis male.
In fact I'd guess most devs would be willing to sacrifice environment choice for editor choice if it came to that.
If the poor have no food or homes it is because they have been taken from them by a greedy government and a brutal police force. They will reclaim their lives and achieve justice not through waiting for liberal reform or by surrendering further control to a government instituting bare-minimum programs in an attempt to appease away the inevitable, but through continued people's war.
Not "exceptionalism is a myth" but "exceptionalism needs a new paint job". This is what passes for dissent in mainstream American discourse.
Yet you still see people going "but this time the bubble's legit guys!"
A culture which supposedly prides itself on merit and intelligence at first glance ought to be most receptive to actually picking up a book and studying social issues, but the reality is instead that we get a social group full of men's right's advocates and evopsych true-believers and other terrible terrible people.
The issue isn't the software, it's people. People being allowed to be terrible to other people. People pushing euro/american-centric, white-centric, male-centric viewpoints. People creating a feedback loop of intolerance by making the place only habitable by the intolerant.
You can't graphic design these problems away.