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RIM Accuses Motorola of Blocking Job Offers
theodp writes "Taking a page from the insanely-jealous-husband-playbook, Motorola management has adopted an if-I-can't-have-you-nobody-can stance on its fired employees, reportedly blocking RIM from offering jobs to laid-off workers. In a complaint filed in state court, Motorola is charged with improperly trying to expand a previous agreement 'to prevent the RIM entities from hiring any Motorola employees, including the thousands of employees Motorola has already fired or will fire.' Through its Compete America membership, Motorola has repeatedly warned Congress that failing to accommodate the lobbying group members' 'principled' demand for timely access to talent would not be in the United States' economic interest and would make the US second-rate in education and basic research."
But if you aren't playing with your toys, you have to share with the other children.
If they really want to keep RIM from having their castoff engineers, just keep paying their salaries.
If RIM had a division in California, they could hire anyone they wanted since California law essentially forbids non-compete clauses.
There was a recent Slashdot discussion about this when a Former IBM Exec Ordered To Stop Working For Apple.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Interesting to see how the paragons of capitalism don't believe in the free market.
A company I once worked for once had a written policy that anyone who had ever worked as a direct employee could not be hired at a later date as a contractor (contracting is very lucrative in this industry). I always thought that sounded legally dubious but despite some efforts the media had no interest in pursuing it.
I eventually left that company to contract at a competitor. On my last day the director of engineering told me "You realize I can't approve of this." To which I did not reply, but always wished I had "I can not approve of the way you accept public subsidies and then exported my job to Ireland."
Can't wait until I get a little older so I can name names.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
just another log on the fire.
The two linked news sites contain identical regurgitations of the Reuters article.
I have noticed the space between duplicates has been shrinking over the years. Now they have found a way to occupy the same post! How do we stop this collapse before it destroys the universe?
From TFA: "BlackBerry maker Research in Motion sued Motorola over claims the mobile phone maker is improperly blocking it from offering jobs to laid-off Motorola workers"
This is really sad. The US has a very high unemployment rate and people are struggling to find jobs. Some people are barely able to put bread on the table and Motorola wants to keep it that way? For what? A dispute with Blackberry? Screw you Motorola, you've just lost my business forever.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
What bothers me most about Motorol's behavior here is that there are people who are not drawing a paycheck. Some are on unemployment and they could be back in the ranks of the employed, spending money and helping our economy... not to mention the personal ramifications of no longer being unemployed...
However, Motorola wants to keep these people unemployed. they want to flare their feathers no matter who is hurt in their little a pissing match.
We all wonder what went wrong when some ex husband dresses p as santa, goes to his ex wife's fmaily xmas party and kills 8 people, but when a company tries to do the same thing to thousands, we stand idolly by.
Because of this action, I will no longer allow any motorola product in my house. period.
I have never been an employee of motorola and am not mad because i am one being hurt, but I would want opthers to do this if my former company wanted to keep me poor after laying me off.
Stand up, consumers, and let motorola know that it is time to move past the anger stage already.
New and improved Guilt. Now its alcohol soluble!
I can't believe that anyone is even allowed to fire someone and then to prevent them from attempting to get another job anywhere they want.
One thing is when someone quits and there is a non-competition agreement, another thing is when someone is fired. Has anyone ever lost in court to a company that fired them when they started working for a competitor?
Everyone: if you are a 'permanent' employee, don't sign non-compete clauses, and if you do, at least modify them to say that if the company terminates your employment, then this clause does not apply.
Nice of Motorola, by the way, to attempt and stop people that they fired from trying to find employment, especially in this economy. If anything is going to hurt economy of the USA it's going to be millions of unemployed people.
You can't handle the truth.
The defense of this is that do not have to for RIM, the could be independent contractors. But the non compete clause might prevent a person from doing that as well. Non complete clauses are not uniformly bad. They may be good for preventing someone from quitting and going to a competing entity, or purposefully getting fired and doing the same. OTOH, in a country where many fears the welfare state enough to allow children to die of lack of medical care, but not due to accidental or forced conception, it would seem that we would not laws or regulations hat force highly trained persons onto those roles, or taking lower skilled jobs that might force other who might take the lower skilled jobs onto the rolls.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Since the US is far behind being 2nd in education - most notably math - wouldn't being 2nd be an improvement?
Perhaps we should retain our high-value educated workforce by preventing them from leaving the country, to make sure they carry out their patriotic duty! Maybe we could set up some sort of iron... curtain... or such, to make sure they stay.
And they all have draconian NC contracts. It's actually rather sad; I've run into dozens of ex-Illinoisians (sp) here in NYC who simply don't understand that they can negotiate a NC agreement. And none who would ever dream that in many circumstances here in NY and NYC, you don't have to sign them at all without any risk to your employment.
I started my tech career in Illinois, and I'm glad I did. It was incredibly competitive in Chicago in the early and mid 90s, and I learned more there in six years than I could have ever learned anywhere else in twice the time.
But I'd rather sling coffee out of a truck in Union Square than ever move back to Chicago and work in the tech industry there. It's unnecessarily brutal.
You'd think Motorola would want their competitors taking on those responsible for their vast array of shitheap products.
Depends. If they're firing lots of middle and senior management I'd tend to agree. Engineers design the kinds of products that management wants them to design: if those are shitheap then management is ultimately responsible.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
As much as people like to bitch about outsourcing here in the USA, why should we allow our talent to migrate to Canada? Doesn't allowing High Tech workers to work for foreign companies support Microsoft's contention that we need to increase H1Bs because the talent isn't here anymore?
That is a separate issue. If I fire you, what right do I have to say where you can and can't work? It is that simple. I believe we (U.S.) have a constitutional amendment addressing such practices.
Maybe we need a job czar to help enforce that iron curtain as well, maybe just a minister of the interior
New and improved Guilt. Now its alcohol soluble!
As much as people like to bitch about outsourcing here in the USA, why should we allow our talent to migrate to Canada?
Allow your talent to migrate? Jesus fucking christ, is this the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA or SOVIET RUSSIA?
A FREE COUNTRY does not lock in its citizens and prevent them from leaving. Are you building the new Berlin wall?
Is this the USA? The FREE WORLD? Or did someone cut off your country's balls?
Doesn't allowing High Tech workers to work for foreign companies support Microsoft's contention that we need to increase H1Bs because the talent isn't here anymore?
If you are FIRING the talent, you can't claim that the talent isn't there anymore.
In case you didn't know, RIM has offices all over the world. RIM employs quite a few people in the USA.
People must wake up and realize that we allow the corps to employ us at OUR sufferance, not the other way around. Do not let them make you think they are doing you some huge favor by employing you. It's the other way around.
"Crude and slow, clansman. Your attack was no better than that of a clumsy child."
[corporate flamebait start]
If US companies want to keep US workers in the US, they should offer them so attractive working conditions (this includes working environment, good salaries, and job security for those who are concerned with such) that they don't want to leave. US citizens are free to leave the country if it suits them, and if we are to continue calling this country a "beacon of freedom" or whatever the latest slogan is, then it will have to continue to be that way.
And if Microsoft has such a hard time finding workers in the US, why aren't they looking into hiring some of Motorola's castoffs?
[/corporate flamebait end]
Unfortunately being fired does not automaticly negate a signed contract. However, on the flip side, most noncompetes are so vauge, over reaching, and one sided that they are unenforceable from the get go, even assuming you don't live/work in a state such as California.
How can it possibly be in the economic interest of the US to allow a corporation to lay off/fire workers and then not allow them to accept a job in their own field?
To side with RIM would be to side with forcing the taxpayers to pay unemployment/welfare benefits while the corp gets off scott free. I say make RIM pay these benefits if this is how they want it. In fact, I think that if such "noncompete" crap is to be legal at ALL, it should be allowed ONLY if the corporation pays the worker his/her regular salary NOT to work.
I find it funny how corporations are "gung ho capitalists" when it comes to axing thousands of workers on a whim for their benefit, but become devout orthodox Stalinists when it comes to workers going elsewhere for THEIR benefit...
Corporatism != Free Market
This sounds like it could very well be due to RIM taking advantage of some information it got from Motorola under NDA.
RIM and Motorola had (have?) an agreement to share confidential information about some unrelated matter. RIM notices that Motorola is going to be laying off people from this information. RIM immediately starts soliciting these people that are likely to be laid off.
Now that doesn't sound entirely reasonable, does it? Especially since these people can be approached on the basis of "we're offering you a job with a 25% cut in pay because we know you are about to lose your job."
WTF?
Company A laid off people...
People have no jobs....
Company B said, "hey you know we could use you..."
Company A says, "oh no you can't work there because well we don't want you to kill our business completely..."
GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK!!!! Yes I am screaming here, but this patriotic act is completely misguided. The issue here is that people are laid off and they would like to put food and bread on their table. And if they need to travel to Canada so be it! This is what competition and capitalism is all about.
Want to know what might result?
Instead of hiring out of work American workers they will hire out of work workers from some other place. And then what spot is America? With more unemployed bitter people who say the government gets in their way!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Like an ANON said to you, there is a freedom thing. If you stop the flow of people out of the country, you are stopping the flow of people into the country too. If canada gets pissed at us for quite literally stealing jobs from them, they won't exactly smile through it.
Meanwhile, I seem to recall articles saying that H1B's have been abused/etc so issuing more would solve one problem and create another ripe for abuse.
Maybe they need to come up with a new system that isn't as easy to game as current H1B systems are. If you RTFA you'd notice that the "non-hire" agreement has already expired as well, so it's kinda irrelevant at this point. Anyone laid off from Motorola that decides to go to RIM should be able to do so at this point, bar company politics deliberately breaking the law.
What I mean by the last comment is that many states don't like noncompetes. Currently, Illinois does uphold them unfortunately. However, instead of having the employees sign a noncompete (which they could contest in court), the two companies signed a noncompete (which it's impossible for an employee to contest in court)....essentially making it impossible for people to switch companies in that scenario. Specifically because they could just BS their reasoning for declining to hire someone such as "they didn't meet our qualifications" (with no explanation).
If you don't want Canadian companies hiring your talent, maybe you should fire the H1Bs and give those jobs to your own people. Otherwise, what reason do they have to stick with your shitty economy that won't even let them work in the first place ? That, and RIM probably has a few offices in the US, meaning the people aren't moving up to Canada because they work for a Canadian company.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
True but their agreement expired in August.
New and improved Guilt. Now its alcohol soluble!
The agreement has expired, then why the lawsuit?
From one article:
But from the other:
So, both companies agreed not to solicit each other's employees and now RIM wants out of the deal. Why should the be let out of the deal?
Either the writer is incompetent or the above is false because "three months" ago was after the agreement supposedly expired, therefore the suit could not be in violation of the agreement.
From the linked letter to Congress:
How does that apply to anything in this case, in any way shape or form?
To me, this looks like a lot of biased reporting and RIM trying to weasel it's way out of an agreement.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Let's just erect a security fence to stop our skilled workers from leaving the country.
I own two Motorola GSM telephones & judging by their performance I was under the impression Motorola had no engineers left.
As much as people like to bitch about outsourcing here in the USA, why should we allow our talent to migrate to Canada?
Marketplaces are global now, whether you like it or not, and restricting labour to work in their home country is not only holding back the global market but also restricting viable financial options of those workers.
What if Canada didn't let any hockey players play in the NHL that were not originally born in North America (or even Canada)? Wouldn't be as good a league. Restricting how and where people can work only lets the entire industry suffer as a whole.
These people have been laid-off and/or fired. If they can't find gainful employment in their field in the area in which they live, who has the right to tell them they can't move to a place where they have a job that they are experienced in and making equal money. Who could tell them to stay put and take a huge pay-cut in a semi-related field? If the US economy can't handle them without taking a hit on their quality of life and their is an alternative then 'all's fair in love and war'.
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
We need to ENSURE ex-Motorola employees' right to get RIM jobs!
If they're such "talents", why are they being fired in the first place?
You generally don't see large-scale layoffs for incompetence (although, sometimes that wouldn't be a bad idea.) In most cases, it's because management screwed up, didn't make use of those talents profitably, and had to lay them off. That, or they're just planning on rehiring most of those workers at a substantial salary reduction or loss of benefits.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
[citation needed]
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It seems to me that the only time a non-compete clause should be enforceable is if:
1. You take special knowledge of a product/design to another company.
2. You use work relationships to bring in clients of your former employer.
These are the same guys who arrogantly rejected digital cellphones for a long time because it would interfere with their market share grasp of analog cellphones.
Reference desperately needed. Thx.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I said that as well, but that doesn't nullify that the suit they had in progress may be related. The question is whether they started this round of lawsuits about this specific issue before August. If not, then yeah these charges will probably be dismissed. If they did however, might be some issues there. Which way that situation is (before or after it expired) wasn't explained from what I gathered from the article.
Where are federal employment laws when you need them. Federal law should force non-compete employment contracts to be conjoined to the nature of forfeiture in any agreement. If you leave a company the contract restrictions remain, you forfeited in the agreement. If the employer discharges you for poor service, you forfeited the agreement. If the employer discharges you because of an inability of its own, it forfeits in the agreement. This, of course, would only be applicable to people falling into the venue of the Federal government.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I would also like to see a similar employment scourge killed off: There are some big companies (and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the companies mentioned in this topic are among them) who in behind the scenes deals, blackmail headhunters from hiring away employees for better pay.
Employer: "You contract out one of our employees who wants to leave us, and we will never hire another one of your contractors who wants to work for us... ever." (Sounds kind of stupid, but really, that is what it works out to.)
Headhunter: "Understood."
I know for a fact that a telecom software vendor I worked at in Saint Louis had these agreements. I would get a call from a headhunter and when they would find out I was still working for this company they would tell me they couldn't work with me until I quit or was laid off (and this would happen for real jobs, not just their prospecting calls). I heard this from a good number of my workmates too. That is when personal networking becomes very important. I eventually quit for a contracting gig in a different city where my former employer had less sway. I ended up working on the client side of one of their implementations where I could help combat their equally obnoxious manners with their customers (they have a strangle hold on the market).
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I'm not even sure what to say here except that along with Sony, Motorola is the next company I will refuse to buy any product they make.
Can the workers who got fired get some kind of restraining order against Motorola and its agents?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Probably because they lack seniority in the company. That's how things usually go when it comes to layoffs.
I thought campaign contributions were considered more valuable than individual votes.
And that's exactly why political campaign contributions coming from anyone other than individual registered voters needs to be outlawed.
Ever watch Seinfeld? Would you like everyone to suddenly pull a "George"?
Conversely, they can ALWAYS find a reason to let you go with cause. ALWAYS. It's like traffic law.
Such a law would have such horrible unintended consequences that I would rather they simply outlaw or globally permit NC's before seeing that enacted.
I'm sure Motorola isn't doing so, but I wouldn't mind a non-compete so long as the company demanding that would pay full salary equivalent during the interval they effectively demand I stay unemployed. Simple as that. Would also be fine with a severance package of exactly equivalent value (so long as the interval didn't span more than one tax year, in which case the payment would have to be spread to avoid unfair taxation).
Anyway, I know companies aren't up for it. The most generous severance package I got was three months pay on top of untaken vacation, and that was without any non-compete criteria attached.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
From a more practical perspective, we are already running a huge trade deficit. Some economists say this doesn't matter, but others say it risks nasty bubbles and major instability. If the US continues being the dumping ground for cheap products and services, this bubble risk grows as the trade imbalances create credit bubbles. Economists tend to under-estimate bubbles, perhaps because they are overconfident in their ability to "fix" them, so I will take the view of the "bubblers".
Further, many times those countries are cheaper because they lack regulations that keep us safe and healthy. They may have 60-hour work-weeks in asbestos-festered offices or work with dangerous chemicals and pollution in factories. It's unfair if we have to compete with regulations that they don't have.
Further, it would push us to all be Walmart greeters and shoes salesmen as "non-face" jobs shift to where the labor is cheaper. Diversity in careers would diminish, and lack of diversity is also a bubble-risk.
The "open borders" labor thinking just has too many unsolved problems. Adam Smith's equations need a rewrite to reflect risk and uncertainty better. Maximizing an economy based over-simplistic models is partly what got us into the current mess.
Table-ized A.I.
Baby needs a new yacht?
No, it's called a "firewall" these days, a term apparently borrowed from the computer industry. The province of Alberta wanted to put one up a few years back, to keep Canadians out. (;-))
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
That word is TREASON. They know their actions cause direct harm to the people of the United States. only an insane entity would think otherwise.
So the people should just declare Motorola a Traitor to the country. What does it take, two sworn affirmations from people of good reputation? I can find two hundred without thinking.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
What happens with people who work on secret stuff when they are let go, fired or quit?
Are they banned from working in another country?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Wouldn't that be "large-scale layoffs for incompetence"? Just that the incompetent escapes the axe, sort of like GM CEO Rick Wagoner?
I don't know which one you mean. I suggest that you get a copy of the Inferno by Dante and read it (or see wikipedia). It was circle 9, round 3 of hell. For the modern update of it (featuring Cheney) , it was a cheap performance I saw on the Ovation channel.
I believe that the first stipulation is adequately covered by an NDA. There is no reason to block you from working in the industry that you likely went to school for 4 years or more to learn just because you decided you or they decided to terminate your employment. Now, if they would like to compensate you for all of that training, plus pay for you to learn another industry and compensate you for setting your experience clock back to you, that would be fine.
I think a previous poster said it best, if you don't want them to go work for the competition, then keep paying their salary.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Was there an effort to make a law that prohibit such contracts?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK!!!! Yes I am screaming here, but this patriotic act is completely misguided. The issue here is that people are laid off and they would like to put food and bread on their table. And if they need to travel to Canada so be it! This is what competition and capitalism is all about.
How can we take you seriously when you don't talk sense? Bread is food!
signed
intel management
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
In Europe, some countries have adopted the 35-hour working week, which makes it illegal to employ a worker for longer than that. According to your argument, this is unfair...
Close. What's unfair here is if the companies based in 35-hour countries have to compete with products and services made in or delivered from countries without the 35-hour week without any tariffs, the amount of which would only have to be enough to make up for the difference in costs to the companies caused by these regulations.
Also, the average salary in some countries, like Switzerland, is higher than the U.S. ($66,000). According to your argument, this is unfair...
Not even close. The point is not demographics, it's regulations. There is, to my knowledge, no law stating that the Swiss must make an average of $66k/year. It's not even about salaries, directly; it's about costs to the companies in question.
Again, the point is that any country with lower levels of regulation, leading to lower costs to the companies, should, to ensure fair competition, have tariffs on goods and services sold from their country to countries with higher levels of such regulations sufficient to offset the difference in costs.
Personally, I think that a certain amount of such tariffs would be good, to ensure that you can't just ship your manufacturing jobs to the cheapest dirthole you can find and exploit the people there for labour. However, I don't know how far it should be taken. That's the kind of thing I prefer to leave up to economists.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Non-compete clauses are mostly unenforceable around here (same is true of many other European countries) *unless*:
Or, how, about, they pay you for the rest of your life. - you are being facetious but I am not certain why exactly, I suppose there is very thick sarcasm somewhere there.
Nope and you completely misread what I wrote. What I meant was, if they're going to fire you, for what ever reason, and still enforce the non-compete, then they should pay your salary for as long as they enforce the non-compete because you can't get a job because of the non-compete. Right?
And this BS about not signing it is completely unrealistic because if everyone demands it, how are you supposed to "not sign it"? I understand NDAs, but other than that, these agreements that employers demand that you sign just a form black mailing employees.
... I modify them where I see it necessary. Most people make the mistake of not doing this and it will bite them.
Really? Good for you! Every time I had a non-compete or any agreement that has to be signed for a job was a take it or leave it. In other words, you either sign it as is or you do not get the job. Of course it depends on what you do and who you are. Meaning, someone like you has skills and talent that, apparently, I do not have and you are able to pull that off. (I am NOT being facetious or sarcastic.)
I agree with everything else in your post. I just had a problem with the way you interpreted my comment. I typed this with a smile on my face and with warm and fuzzy Holiday feelings.
Happy New Year!
Have you seen Motorola's finances lately? It doesn't matter if they have Albert Einstein himself on the payroll, a lot of people have to go.
Is there a +1 stupid mod so we can expose ignorance for what it is?
I lived that way when I was single. Now we pay insurance regularly, etc. My kids get sick regularly. My wife is making herself sick. I'm watching this all go down.
In fifteen years, we've wasted more in insurance than it has saved us, plus whatever it will cost to fix my wife back up.
Me? I've got something that the neither the Japanese version of the AMA nor the AMA recognize. So no insurance covers it. I live with it, and I control it by eating right, as much as is possible in Japan. (Really hard to get good whole-wheat products and other such things that I need here, but somehow I keep finding alternatives when I need them.)
Insurance is just a lottery. It's a luxury neither individuals nor society can afford, in the end, unless we can learn how to quit using insurance as just another whip to keep everyone's noses to the keep-up-with-the-neighbors grindstone.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
... a form of restraint of trade? A violation of the Sherman Anti-trust act?
If the labor market is similar to any other market and I negotiate with my competitor to split a market between us and not compete with them, I'd get a vacation at Club Fed. Striped pajamas and all.
Have gnu, will travel.
He probably got her when he was making $55k/yr. Now she's stuck with the cheap bastard. ;)
"would make the US second-rate in education and basic research."
-- Wait a minute, somehow the U.S. is going to improve as a result of this beating out the 5 or 6 other countries that kick the 5#17 out of them for education and basic research? Awesome!
Ace
With their donations, which buys ads that matter more than your chad or Diebolt bit!
A country is not made of land; a country is made of its people. --G.A.Rao
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante's_Inferno_(2007_film) Didn't see it. This might not be the inferno you are looking for.
Their they're doing there hair.
That's why corporate personhood needs to be repealed.
There is plenty of room on the earth for everyone to have enough land and access to water to live the way this guy suggests. There always has been.
No.
NO, NO, NO, there isn't.
There's almost 7 Billion people living on planet earth, and without things like genetically modified crops and modern production equipment, we only would produce enough food to feed 4 Billion of them. You volunteering for suicide squad?
Sorry, man, but the hard work of lots of other people, putting in long hard hours and working for a decent wage is what makes that guy's lifestyle possible.
He buys feed from a feedlot - where do you think that comes from? Someone owns a multi-million dollar farm, with millions of dollars worth of silos, grain elevators, combines, tractors, trucks, milling machines, pipelines, augers, and packaging facilities to make that happen. Then, someone drives the feed in a diesel truck from the farm to the warehouse, where a multi-million dollar computer system tracks orders, shipping info, inventory, etc. Then, yet another truck takes it to the feedlot, where the feedlot employees work to stock it, manage the store, sell it to him, etc.
Just inside that transaction, you have a farm with probably 20-30 employees and $20,000,000 worth of equipment, a trucking company with millions of dollars worth of trucks, and then you have to find the fuel for the trucks, which probably comes from Venezuela or Saudi Arabia, in a tanker, halfway across the globe, to be refined in a multi-trillion dollar facility into diesel fuel, which is then pumped or driven to gas stations for the truck to fuel up to carry the feed. The trucks need mechanics who have to go to school or have on-the-job training to know how to keep them operating. The oil companies hire Ph.D. Geologists and mechanical engineers to find oil and design oil rigs; their educations each cost $300,000 and can't be repaid on a $9000/yr salary.
The warehouse needs electricity that comes from a coal plant that uses coal mined in south africa and shipped across the globe to the plant, which has 100 employees who work round the clock, not to mention full time environmental techs to deal with government regulations. The warehouse also hires software companies or buys commercial software to manage orders and inventory, plus guys who drive forklifts and guys who repair the forklifts. The feedstore has 5 full time employees that handle inventory, stocking, sales, future capacity planning. The feedstore also needs electricity, this time it comes from a hydro-plant which employs 300 full time employees and an army of scientists and engineers and environmental impact researchers; the electrical company has a fleet of trucks that manage all the power poles and transformers that get the electricity to the feed store. Oh, and this year, the feedstore had to repave their parking lot, which involves getting asphalt, which is recycled concrete from other building projects mixed with tar mined out of the same places that the diesel fuel came from that's needed to bring the asphalt to the parking lot.
There's probably a MILLION people, and a HUNDRED TRILLION dollars worth of industry, who all get a slice of the $40 this guy pays for a bag of feed corn. But, it's all worth it, because it allows him to claim that if we all just lived off the grid, the planet would be in better shape.
sig?
No. The world should take notice. All of those people around the planet earth that cheered Obama's election are going to find themselves learning a hard lesson of history. Today's Democrats are against free trade, and quite frankly, as a Republican who thinks this policy has failed, I'd say, let the Dems pull the plug on it. I don't care.
My question is this. Since when does someone in the rest of the world have the same rights to the marketplace of my country as a citizen of my country. That concept is bullshit.
When push comes to shove, other countries do not, have not, or will not, contribute to American security. I don't see too many Indians flying B-17s over Germany, B-29s over Japan, landing at Okinawa, freezing their asses off at the Chosin Reservoir, fighting at Denang, and certainly not in Iraq. In a similar vein, I seem to recall that the Germans, Japanese and Chinese were all on the other side! For the last 70 years, the USA has been to war all over the planet for some cause or another and the outcome is invariably that the middle classes sent to fight and pay for these wars wind up having to compete economically with the very people that they had to fight. When do Americans actually get to benefit from American wars? I mean, we beat the Germans to have German steel knock off American steel, beat the Japanese to have Japanese cars pollute our streets, fought the Chinese to have their crap on our stores, and now, to top it all off, we go and occupy the largest oil producing nation on the planet in order to have a summer of $4/gallon gasoline and a consequent total economic meltdown.
It's sickening.
There's so many people on the right wing that talk about family values, self reliance and community, and all of it is easily revealed to be a treasonous fraud when its all brushed aside in the name of free trade. You can't have family first when you place them under the microscope of worldwide competition and declining wages. You can't say a nation is self-reliant, when, it replaces a tradition of thrift and industry with a bidding war for imported slave labor, and you can't say you favor community, when, the community factories, schools, and infrastructure all shut down because of imported crap. Republicans continually rant about the death of tradition and culture in America but remain utterly and willingly oblivious to the fact that it is their own economic ideas that cause it.
A nation is more than a geographic coincident of world wide consumers. A nation includes a common history, common art, a common cultural base. As much as someone in Japan or Germany or India or China might make a good product, they do not have the same background as the union stiff next door.
My son goes to a school with that union stiff's kid, not some dickhead in Breslau.
This is my sig.
Because you claim to be the "Land of the Free", and it would be nice to live up to this standard?
In the USA, it varies widely by state. Some forbid it outright, some allow it with almost no reservations, some are in between of those two.
I went through total hell thinking something was wrong with me. I couldn't be blacklisted for having been laid off. It was insane to even think that way.... I couldn't get another communications sector engr. job. The kids were stressed in college-one dropping out and still not getting his life back together. I had to re-invent myself into a new career. A hard and painful task at the 47-53 age range. I needed to borrow from my parents to save the house and the wife didn't understand... Now I find out that there is a good chance we were blacklisted everywhere... That churches and businesses and pols supported this because it was so PC-CORRECT and LIBERAL to want to give INDENTURED SERVANTS (H1B visa holders) jobs and deny them to CITIZENS who worked hard for the MOT for years and years........ Well I hope that there is a HELL and these corporate and other leaders rot in hell forever for the crime they committed against 10s of thousands of us! IF there is an army of class action lawyers out there that want to pursue this.... you have my aid and comfort.
There *is* a difference though. Between an earth with less people in earlier days and an earth now with more people, who decide to collectively scale down a bit. That difference is knowledge. Granted, to keep up the pace of the increases in knowledge in the areas of medicine, farming etc, it is necessary to maintain our current day infrastructure (and adapt that infrastructure to those increases), but if you were to say: ok, our knowledge of motors / the human body and its ailments / farming is sufficient now, then theoretically you could stop at 'another level' as it were than we would have if we had said that say, two hundred years ago. I'm not advocating it, I'm just saying that it's an interesting thought-experiment.
Also, consider how the advances in for example motors have made a revolutionary machine which was at first very dirty, very clean again. The motor itself is, as it were, coming 'off the grid'. Well, apart from the ones made in Detroit, that is ;P It isn't entirely unthinkable that certain advances in medicine (stem cells come to mind) will make our current day medical infrastructure seem dirty and archaic in comparison - becoming more personalized and simple, going more and more 'off the grid' as it were.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
There is plenty of room on the earth for everyone to have enough land and access to water to live the way this guy suggests. There always has been.
No.
NO, NO, NO, there isn't.
sez yoo.
There's almost 7 Billion people living on planet earth, and without things like genetically modified crops and modern production equipment, we only would produce enough food to feed 4 Billion of them. You volunteering for suicide squad?
You drank the kool-aid, too, huh? (Monsanto's kool-aid, for starters.)
Genetically modified crops are the poorest crops there are in the kinds of nutrition that count for long-term health. And the production rates are temporary. Do some research, man.
Sorry, man, but the hard work of lots of other people, putting in long hard hours and working for a decent wage is what makes that guy's lifestyle possible.
Give me a break.
Seriously.
He buys feed from a feedlot - where do you think that comes from? Someone owns a multi-million dollar farm, with millions of dollars worth of silos, grain elevators, combines, tractors, trucks, milling machines, pipelines, augers, and packaging facilities to make that happen. Then, someone drives the feed in a diesel truck from the farm to the warehouse, where a multi-million dollar computer system tracks orders, shipping info, inventory, etc. Then, yet another truck takes it to the feedlot, where the feedlot employees work to stock it, manage the store, sell it to him, etc.
And you're going to tell me that's the only way to make feed grains?
And what do long hours have to do with anything? Are you under the impression that he doesn't work his own garden long hours or something?
Just inside that transaction, you have a farm with probably 20-30 employees and $20,000,000 worth of equipment, a trucking company with millions of dollars worth of trucks, and then you have to find the fuel for the trucks, which probably comes from Venezuela or Saudi Arabia, in a tanker, halfway across the globe, to be refined in a multi-trillion dollar facility into diesel fuel, which is then pumped or driven to gas stations for the truck to fuel up to carry the feed. The trucks need mechanics who have to go to school or have on-the-job training to know how to keep them operating. The oil companies hire Ph.D. Geologists and mechanical engineers to find oil and design oil rigs; their educations each cost $300,000 and can't be repaid on a $9000/yr salary.
And you're going to tell me that moving all that fuel and equipment is efficient?
The warehouse needs electricity that comes from a coal plant that uses coal mined in south africa and shipped across the globe to the plant, which has 100 employees who work round the clock, not to mention full time environmental techs to deal with government regulations. The warehouse also hires software companies or buys commercial software to manage orders and inventory, plus guys who drive forklifts and guys who repair the forklifts. The feedstore has 5 full time employees that handle inventory, stocking, sales, future capacity planning. The feedstore also needs electricity, this time it comes from a hydro-plant which employs 300 full time employees and an army of scientists and engineers and environmental impact researchers; the electrical company has a fleet of trucks that manage all the power poles and transformers that get the electricity to the feed store. Oh, and this year, the feedstore had to repave their parking lot, which involves getting asphalt, which is recycled concrete from other building projects mixed with tar mined out of the same places that the diesel fuel came from that's needed to bring the asphalt to the parking lot.
And you're going to tell me that's the only way to do that?
I have friends and relatives involved in re-educating people in third world countrie
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
That's a good question. In this case (ostensibly the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA), RIM would not be giving you a job. It follows then that in SOVIET RUSSIA, RIM job gives you! Does that clear things up?
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
What would be the keywords to search if I want details?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
There are re-writes to Adam Smith. No modern-day economist worth his or her salt agrees with Adam Smith's models or the Classical Ricardian model(s). There are re-writes that explain more about the present-day economies. The only places where Adam Smith is taught is in first-year courses, and the upper level courses are basically about how the things taught in first year aren't true.
You drank the kool-aid, too, huh? (Monsanto's kool-aid, for starters.)
Genetically modified crops are the poorest crops there are in the kinds of nutrition that count for long-term health. And the production rates are temporary. Do some research, man.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug says you're wrong, and he's won a Nobel Peace prize for increasing the food supply and saving a BILLION human beings from starvation, not to mention a Ph.D and 60 years experience with food science; so I'll take his word over some random fuck on the internet's word, thank you.
And you're going to tell me that moving all that fuel and equipment is efficient?
Yes, several orders of magnitude more efficient than doing it on small scale. Why do you think big mega farms exist? If everyone had to be a jack of all trades to grow their own feed for their own cattle, no one would be very good for it, and there would be a lot of duplicated work on the small scale. God, you're not very smart. Idealism isn't reality there, hippie.
I have friends and relatives involved in re-educating people in third world countries because the people who sell BIG have convinced them that the can't win small so they might as well get on the dole and do nothing. Awful lot of people doing close to nothing all day. Any wonder they start wanting to have wars when they think we are having all the fun?
I have a tertiary, several people removed, connection with people who are actually in poverty, and this gives my argument a human connection, making it more relevant.
I will admit. There are some aspects to going back to small that won't be pleasant for some people. It's a lot easier to think you can behave like a fool on the weekends and get away with it when you live in a big city and work for a big company.
yes, we can all go back to working 2 hour a day telecommute jobs, then work 8 hours a day as a farmer, and still have a great quality of life. Oh wait. The efficiency of modern life and modern manufacturing/industrial process *IS* what allows us to have fun on a weekend. If you think we should all become our own subsistence farmers, you're a douchebag who's advocating a resurgent dark ages. Go die in your own cave, fool.
sig?
Headline: Motorola Bankruptcy Triggers Increased Unemployment in China and Mexico; U.S. Employment Statistics Barely Affected. Motorola is still suffering from Chris Galvan's philosophy of "The employee is the enemy." Motorola might as well have hired Catbert as its corporate H.R. Director. Ed Zander at least attempted to reduce the "warring tribes" mentality within the company, but to little avail. I was laid-off during Zander's tenure, so I don't know as much about Greg Brown, et. al., but I doubt that very much has changed in the last few years. One would think that if the employee is the enemy, Motorola would have very few enemies left in this world, but if ex-employees are the enemy, Motorola's in BIG trouble!
Famous last words. Or rather, the last words are "But you can't do this to me!"
I think what the person meant by "allow" was more a scenario of "talented worker X is offered a better paying job in Canada, he will move to a different country if his employer doesn't match it with an equal or better offer".
If you work for me, and you have a better offer in a foreign country, and I choose not to match it (for whatever reason) then when you leave the country, in a sense, I have "allowed" that to happen.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
I think you really need to reconsider your medical insurance. True, you don't currently need it. That is exactly why you should consider "insurance" rather than a "health program" mislabeled as insurance. Real health insurance covers unusual accidents, like getting kicked by the goat and ending up in the emergency room. Usually, this kind of health insurance is called major medical and has outrageous deductibles, but is quite cheap. Granted in most states you can just show up at the emergency room and get treated, but as soon as they find out you don't have insurance your going to face some ugly realities. Farm accidents are particularly nasty and without insurance the hospital is as likely to cut your legs off, rather than spend 300k attempting to rebuild them and send you through therapy so you can walk.
Now that you mention it, healthy kids do have statistically fewer accidents, and take less damage when they do have accidents.
Setting up a savings account for emergency needs is one alternative to buying insurance, but, then, if you're paying out insurance premiums, it's that much harder to allocate money to it. It's also something of a gamble, true. You might end up needing the money before you've saved it.
Of course, you have to have a certain amount of self-discipline to keep your hands out of that money when the newest XBox or PlayStation or iPhone or whatever comes along.
The Japanese Postal Service sells a kind of insurance that basically turns into savings if you don't use it. It has some limitations, and tends to be bought in addition to the other, semi-compulsory health insurance.
(Either your company arranges the "social" insurance for you or have to buy the "National Insurance", which is more expensive. I'm not sure what the punishment for not having insurance is, besides having to pay full rate if you do need to go to the doc for some reason. Hmm. And employers are required to see that employees are insured, one way or another. The employer is required to foot half the premiums or something like that.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Read your links. All the way down. A Nobel doesn't exactly make a man God. And I have trouble accepting the idea that his bred semi-dwarf grains single-handedly saved a billion people. There's a lot more that goes into such programs when they succeed than simply giving them a new breed of rice or wheat. Witness the trouble his programs have in Africa.
Do you know the difference between genetic editing and breeding, BTW? I'd tell you to go read up on why Japan keeps genetically modified soy and rice out of the country, but can you read Japanese?
Selective breeding can be a good thing or a bad thing. But letting edited genes out into the wild is just asking for trouble. I mean, can you imagine doing a binary edit on a running OS that you don't have source code for, that you've just reverse engineered parts of, and then putting the OS on the web, live, outside a firewall, and unsupervised?
Economics of scale only works when you take individuals out of the picture. What is so hard to understand about that? Yeah, when Model Ts were available in any color the customer wanted, as long as it was black, mass production made a lot more sense.
But food, you're dealing with individuals -- different races, different climates, different customs, different preferences, etc. Some people get along okay on wheat. Some are allergic to wheat. Some do well on rice. People like me need vitamin B supplements occasionally or even regular when on a steady diet of rice. If I'm not careful, I can easily get to the point where I can't metabolize what I'm eating, and I can't maintain weight, and I feel like I'm starving (headaches, gnawing pains in the stomach, etc.) even though I'm averaging well over 3000 kcal a day.
The traditional local diet and the people who live in a place are generally tuned to each other. Try overlaying a monoculture staple grain on that and people may do well for a little while, but unless they find some way to adjust, it starts making them as sick as not having enough food makes them.
But, no, it makes a lot more sense to move grains and other foods the shortest distances possible, and, while large combines might be useful in the big farms of the west (which I don't think should exist, but whatever), the farmers here in Japan use much smaller machines and, thank you very much, they are very efficient at producing a variety of breeds of rice. Small farms, small machines, very efficient. Not entirely problem-free, but it meshes well with the lifestyle and customs here.
Oh, and, yeah, where your Borlaug guy had his first great successes, South America, that's where my cousins are going to help people figure out how to grow their own again. And they are succeeding, bringing tiny villages up in the tops of mountains and in other out-of-the-way places back to life, in some cases helping them break the local economic dependence on coca and cannabis.
I'm not saying Borlaug is all bad, he worked with breeding more than editing, and that has its place. But it doesn't work everywhere.
If you only have quality of life on the weekends, I think you're missing out. You're also missing the point if you think I'm talking about subsistence farming. Technology can do lots of good things without being big.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.