"What evidence do you have that show they rarely help improve anything? When I worked for Verizon Telecom/Frontier the union made sure our wages were above that of similar jobs in the area. They made sure our benefits were great. My union also went to bat if an employee's performance was deemed "less than satisfactory" and would look at the situation (it was a customer service/sales position that tried to sell inferior products at a rate far more expensive than competitors with crappier service) before management would cull the herd of sales people who didn't lie or leave out details like "this is a 2 year contract". There are plenty of good unions out there and I speak from experience."
If you want to sling anecdotes, I have a relative who went to work for Verizon a few years ago. He is an experienced manager and ex-Army Captain who managed troops in Iraq.
He could not stand the place. He said the employees were idiots, the workplace rules ridiculous, and management the most ridiculous of them all. He quit after a month. (BTW, he is an excellent manager himself and is now general manager for a fairly prestigious but not huge company.)
And then of course there is the famous Verizon "I don't understand the difference between $0.01 and $0.0001" debacle. The fact that they didn't get it even when the issue was escalated through several layers of management is telling.
" If you look at states which have collective bargaining versus right to work states, the income is markedly higher in the collective bargaining states. The main exceptions are states that have large amounts of oil."
First, that is a false dichotomy: right-to-work states STILL have collective bargaining. All the right to work law does is say that you DON'T HAVE TO belong to a union to work somewhere. It doesn't say you can't.
Second, according to the source posted just a bit above here by someone else, the average difference is 4%. Perhaps significant, perhaps not. For one thing, that 4% doesn't take union dues into account. A higher wage doesn't make much difference if you just turn around and pay it out in dues anyway. Of course, that would not be 4%. More like 1%. Still, the point is that 4% is not a great deal, and the actual difference in take-home may be a bit smaller.
Another matter is that all the studies to date have only studied correlation. Real evidence of causation is notably absent.
You just described "Right to Work" laws. That's what they do: make unions optional.
Prior to the passing of Right to Work law here, I had a union job, and I hated it. The Union took their dues and did nothing in exchange. The manager of the company told me flat out that the company would treat employees better if it weren't for the union. But because the employees had unionized, by law you had to be a union member to work there.
After they passed the law, things were different.
As for public sector: after seeing it in action in our local government, I have come to the conclusion that public employees should not be allowed to unionize. Clerical workers should not have better wages and retirement packages than engineers.
"Uh, yeah, so you must not be American, because the unions don't suck from companies, they do suck from you."
I guess the first argument here would be that outrageous benefits and ridiculously lazy working conditions (and yes, I have seen that) DOES suck from companies.
But even aside from that they still can, depending on the state. Not long ago, in my state, companies had to give employees' retirement benefits to the union... but the law was never updated to then remove the responsibility for that money from the company and put it on the unions. The result was that the unions got the money, and when they squandered the retirement money (which was far too often), it was the companies that had to make it up.
Granted, that was something of a fluke in the law. But I wonder if other states had that problem too.
"Except if you compare private sector wages in right-to-work vs. collective bargaining states. GDP per capita differences are all over the place, but in states that don't engage in union busting, wages are higher."
"Right to Work" and "union busting" are two VERY different things. While your comment is not an explicit lie, it implies one.
Actual "Right to Work" laws merely say you don't have to belong in a union to work somewhere. It doesn't say you can't. In fact, in many industries we see union and non-union employees working side-by-side in the same jobs.
In this state, before Right to Work, lots of jobs were restricted: you either joined the union or you didn't work. That's not "protecting" anybody; the union becomes an elitist club and people are left without work (UNLESS, of course, they want to join the union which will take their dues and spend them on political candidates the employee loathes).
Calling that "union busting" is misleading to the point of lying. Busting of union monopolies, more like.
If Ms. FTC wants to impress me, she can propose that we have access to that material and the ability to remove it, not to change it.
I wouldn't want to change it. If some asshole screws me over because they were using faulty data, I might have a chance to sue. If I did their work for them and corrected their information, I'd pretty much be waiving any right I might have if they then used it against me somehow.
"I'd expect a bit more from a 597. What you claim is an unoriginal figment of your imagination."
I'd expect more from someone who expects more. Your argument is irrelevant to what he was saying.
While thermal imagers may not "see" what is inside a home, in the sense that they can't pick up shapes in any detail through a wall (the signature becomes too diffuses), they still can impart significant information about what is going on, on the other side of those walls. That is the relevant issue here.
The point being: something that can't see much more than a warm blob is already illegal for the police to use without a warrant. So something that actually captures motion doesn't even come within a country mile of being usable by police without a warrant.
Their "content analysis module" must, according to their diagram, access "illegal" content to analyze it before they can track it.
Which means: if they use it, they are JUST AS GUILTY of "downloading" as whoever they're tracking. This is the very same problem that has stopped all the other tracking systems in their tracks, as it were.
"If anything, one recent study suggests, the growth of immigrant workers in American companies helps younger American technical workers"
Not only do I find that claim dubious, it's completely beside the point. At least one recent study discussed here on Slashdot, possibly more, said THEIR IS NO SHORTAGE of qualified technical workers in the United States. Some corporations just want more H1-Bs because they're cheaper.
"1. The banks aren't extorting anything. They are not getting any significant profit from this, only some small short term benefits from the origination of new mortgages. "
1. Not wrong. If you don't understand how banks, Wall Street, and government profit across the board from inflationary policies, you need to re-take Econ 101. The "delay factor" in inflation alone is enough to make it worth their while. While at the same time, the average consumer loses.
"2. It isn't particularly inflationary. Low interest rates increase money supplies a bit, yes, because of the loans. But the money printing is not because the money the Fed creates is held in reserve accounts at the Fed. It never goes into circulation. Why do you think inflation rate has been ZERO three out of the past four months?"
2. Holy crap, man. Quantative Easing IS INTENTED TO BE INFLATIONARY, AND IT IS!!! According to the Federal Reserve's own chairman, they have been doing it TO KEEP INFLATION UP and fight off that horrible (but largely imaginary) demon of "deflation"!
Read the f*ing news. And I repeat: take a closer look at your grocery bill. Because it's not just in the news; the proof is all around you.
"3. The government pays interest because of the loans it issues. It would ALWAYS pay interest regardless of whether the Fed bought the loans or not. What the Fed purchase does is a gift to the taxpayers because the resulting interest rates are much LOWER than would be the case in a free market."
Do you have reading comprehension issues? Let me lay this out again for you, in simple, straightforward terms:
(A) "Quantitative Easing" is the practice of buying government debt WITH NEWLY CREATE DOLLARS. That's what it is. That is the definition.
(B) The Federal government pays interest on EVERY new dollar the Federal Reserve creates, for ANY reason. They do. Look it up.
"... the indirect purchase of GOVERNMENT issued debt by the FEDERAL Reserve aka Quantitative Easing?"
The Federal Reserve is about as "federal" as my neighbor's hemorrhoids. Other than having some people on the board government-appointed, it's not government at all. Each of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks is little more than a co-op of PRIVATE member banks, many of them largely owned by foreign interests.
"Note this is a flow of money TO the government from the banking system. The banks are simple intermediates in the process. They don't profit on the transaction."
Go back to school yourself. Quantitative Easing, by definition, is the buying of bonds WITH NEWLY CREATED DOLLARS. And I'll let you in on a little clue: the government pays interest on every one of those dollars created by the Federal Reserve.
It is BY DEFINITION inflationary. It is INTENDED TO BE inflationary (Bernanke's own words). And that inflation takes money straight out of citizens' pockets. Don't believe me? Compare your grocery bill to what it was 5 years ago. And commodities like food are among the FIRST things to go up.
"The idea that this is extorting money from the taxpayers is complete unvarnished BS."
It is nothing of the sort. The taxpayers get the money extorted from them all right. Just not directly. That's the beauty of the Federal Reserve system. Much of that loss comes from eventual higher government debt and inflation. But you had better believe it is real.
When a large percentage -- MAYBE even the majority, I don't know -- of "investment" is no longer in the means of production, but instead is just a bunch of asshats trading fictional derivatives with each other, it puts "the economy" in danger. That's not investment. I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's gambling. Plain and simple. Government-sanctioned gambling, with other peoples' money.
"A good part of the consumer wealth in this country is invested on wall street"
Ah... but should it be? That's more the point I was talking about.
Wall Street was supposed to be about investing in corporations that were involved in production. Now it's largely (maybe even mostly?) just a circle-jerk of suits trading derivatives with each other. That's not an "investment", that's gambling.
"...when the market contracts, people become more worried about their retirement and become less willing to spend money."
Good. Because that's part of the problem: these so-called "economists" who are obsessed with spending.
Spending isn't wealth. Savings are wealth. American NEEDS to "contract" its spending, and start saving again.
"What happens on Wall Street does a huge amount to shape the willingness of people to spend money--including the willingness of endowed institutions to spend money. That makes it important to the economy."
I don't dispute that. But I do have 2 things to say about it: the first is what I just said above. The second is that yes, it is important to the economy. More important than it SHOULD be, in a rational world.
It's high time people stopped confusing Wall Street with "the economy". A very large part of Wall Street anymore is little more than a glorified casino. And high-frequency trading combines the casino with a horse race.
"The thing is, booth babes aren't there for geeks, they're there for non-geek distributors who are salesmen that probably had a much better relationship with hot girls in school."
I'm not so sure. High-school football players get fat and sloppy. But Geeks rule the world. Literally.
Anyway, I wanted to point out, guys, that for every "OMG I'm offended!" pseudo-feminist out there, there is another who really, really enjoys being slobbered over as a booth babe. And they need employment, too.
And one more thing: statistically, going from zero one year to one the next is actually an increase of infinity %. That hardly seems "going away" to me.
"Can any real developer explain why having a javascript backend would be any different to any other backend in such a way where something jaw-dropping could only be the result of the javascript backend?"
Hmmmm.... Yes! Now that I think about it, I can!
JavaScript is jaw-droppingly obtuse. It has the property that objects are represented in totally, jaw-droppingly unreadable JSON. Its syntax is jaw-droppingly primitive, full of a jaw-dropping number of unnecessary brackets and parentheses, and jaw-droppingly verbose and stubborn. I could go on, but my jaw is sore.
And contrary to what OP wrote, JavaScript has not even remotely "emerged as the lingua franca of the modern Web". It is an annoying and obnoxious holdover from the very early days of the Web.
Further, Node.js was obviously a fad, and MongoDB has already been superseded by superior products.
"Yes, it is perfectly within the spirit of the GPL to add exemptions to the license terms. Plenty of GPL projects, even those from the GNU project, have exemptions to the GPL terms such as linking in GPLed libraries, etc. Stop being such a freetard."
It may be within the spirit, but not for OP's given, manufactured, bullshit reason.
The fact that it runs on the browser rather than the server has absolutely no bearing on its licensing model. That's like saying player piano rolls weren't "music" because they played on a mechanical device rather than an orchestra. The courts have actually ruled on that (circa 100 years ago) and the answer is: no.
Slashdot Mirror
"What evidence do you have that show they rarely help improve anything? When I worked for Verizon Telecom/Frontier the union made sure our wages were above that of similar jobs in the area. They made sure our benefits were great. My union also went to bat if an employee's performance was deemed "less than satisfactory" and would look at the situation (it was a customer service/sales position that tried to sell inferior products at a rate far more expensive than competitors with crappier service) before management would cull the herd of sales people who didn't lie or leave out details like "this is a 2 year contract". There are plenty of good unions out there and I speak from experience."
If you want to sling anecdotes, I have a relative who went to work for Verizon a few years ago. He is an experienced manager and ex-Army Captain who managed troops in Iraq.
He could not stand the place. He said the employees were idiots, the workplace rules ridiculous, and management the most ridiculous of them all. He quit after a month. (BTW, he is an excellent manager himself and is now general manager for a fairly prestigious but not huge company.)
And then of course there is the famous Verizon "I don't understand the difference between $0.01 and $0.0001" debacle. The fact that they didn't get it even when the issue was escalated through several layers of management is telling.
" If you look at states which have collective bargaining versus right to work states, the income is markedly higher in the collective bargaining states. The main exceptions are states that have large amounts of oil."
First, that is a false dichotomy: right-to-work states STILL have collective bargaining. All the right to work law does is say that you DON'T HAVE TO belong to a union to work somewhere. It doesn't say you can't.
Second, according to the source posted just a bit above here by someone else, the average difference is 4%. Perhaps significant, perhaps not. For one thing, that 4% doesn't take union dues into account. A higher wage doesn't make much difference if you just turn around and pay it out in dues anyway. Of course, that would not be 4%. More like 1%. Still, the point is that 4% is not a great deal, and the actual difference in take-home may be a bit smaller.
Another matter is that all the studies to date have only studied correlation. Real evidence of causation is notably absent.
You just described "Right to Work" laws. That's what they do: make unions optional.
Prior to the passing of Right to Work law here, I had a union job, and I hated it. The Union took their dues and did nothing in exchange. The manager of the company told me flat out that the company would treat employees better if it weren't for the union. But because the employees had unionized, by law you had to be a union member to work there.
After they passed the law, things were different.
As for public sector: after seeing it in action in our local government, I have come to the conclusion that public employees should not be allowed to unionize. Clerical workers should not have better wages and retirement packages than engineers.
"Uh, yeah, so you must not be American, because the unions don't suck from companies, they do suck from you."
I guess the first argument here would be that outrageous benefits and ridiculously lazy working conditions (and yes, I have seen that) DOES suck from companies.
But even aside from that they still can, depending on the state. Not long ago, in my state, companies had to give employees' retirement benefits to the union... but the law was never updated to then remove the responsibility for that money from the company and put it on the unions. The result was that the unions got the money, and when they squandered the retirement money (which was far too often), it was the companies that had to make it up.
Granted, that was something of a fluke in the law. But I wonder if other states had that problem too.
"Except if you compare private sector wages in right-to-work vs. collective bargaining states. GDP per capita differences are all over the place, but in states that don't engage in union busting, wages are higher."
"Right to Work" and "union busting" are two VERY different things. While your comment is not an explicit lie, it implies one.
Actual "Right to Work" laws merely say you don't have to belong in a union to work somewhere. It doesn't say you can't. In fact, in many industries we see union and non-union employees working side-by-side in the same jobs.
In this state, before Right to Work, lots of jobs were restricted: you either joined the union or you didn't work. That's not "protecting" anybody; the union becomes an elitist club and people are left without work (UNLESS, of course, they want to join the union which will take their dues and spend them on political candidates the employee loathes).
Calling that "union busting" is misleading to the point of lying. Busting of union monopolies, more like.
"?! "
I think your reading comprehension skills need a little work. That isn't even close to what I wrote.
"That, and the telomeres are shorter. Unless they solved that problem via resetting the length however. I doubt it though."
Besides, "could reproduce" is nothing but speculation. It may be an educated guess, but it's still a guess.
"Did reproduce" is unequivocal.
Exactly.
If Ms. FTC wants to impress me, she can propose that we have access to that material and the ability to remove it, not to change it.
I wouldn't want to change it. If some asshole screws me over because they were using faulty data, I might have a chance to sue. If I did their work for them and corrected their information, I'd pretty much be waiving any right I might have if they then used it against me somehow.
"I'd expect a bit more from a 597. What you claim is an unoriginal figment of your imagination."
I'd expect more from someone who expects more. Your argument is irrelevant to what he was saying.
While thermal imagers may not "see" what is inside a home, in the sense that they can't pick up shapes in any detail through a wall (the signature becomes too diffuses), they still can impart significant information about what is going on, on the other side of those walls. That is the relevant issue here.
The point being: something that can't see much more than a warm blob is already illegal for the police to use without a warrant. So something that actually captures motion doesn't even come within a country mile of being usable by police without a warrant.
This patent doesn't look like it amounts to much.
Their "content analysis module" must, according to their diagram, access "illegal" content to analyze it before they can track it.
Which means: if they use it, they are JUST AS GUILTY of "downloading" as whoever they're tracking. This is the very same problem that has stopped all the other tracking systems in their tracks, as it were.
The law DOES NOT exempt corporations.
"If anything, one recent study suggests, the growth of immigrant workers in American companies helps younger American technical workers"
Not only do I find that claim dubious, it's completely beside the point. At least one recent study discussed here on Slashdot, possibly more, said THEIR IS NO SHORTAGE of qualified technical workers in the United States. Some corporations just want more H1-Bs because they're cheaper.
"1. The banks aren't extorting anything. They are not getting any significant profit from this, only some small short term benefits from the origination of new mortgages. "
1. Not wrong. If you don't understand how banks, Wall Street, and government profit across the board from inflationary policies, you need to re-take Econ 101. The "delay factor" in inflation alone is enough to make it worth their while. While at the same time, the average consumer loses.
"2. It isn't particularly inflationary. Low interest rates increase money supplies a bit, yes, because of the loans. But the money printing is not because the money the Fed creates is held in reserve accounts at the Fed. It never goes into circulation. Why do you think inflation rate has been ZERO three out of the past four months?"
2. Holy crap, man. Quantative Easing IS INTENTED TO BE INFLATIONARY, AND IT IS!!! According to the Federal Reserve's own chairman, they have been doing it TO KEEP INFLATION UP and fight off that horrible (but largely imaginary) demon of "deflation"!
Read the f*ing news. And I repeat: take a closer look at your grocery bill. Because it's not just in the news; the proof is all around you.
"3. The government pays interest because of the loans it issues. It would ALWAYS pay interest regardless of whether the Fed bought the loans or not. What the Fed purchase does is a gift to the taxpayers because the resulting interest rates are much LOWER than would be the case in a free market."
Do you have reading comprehension issues? Let me lay this out again for you, in simple, straightforward terms:
(A) "Quantitative Easing" is the practice of buying government debt WITH NEWLY CREATE DOLLARS. That's what it is. That is the definition.
(B) The Federal government pays interest on EVERY new dollar the Federal Reserve creates, for ANY reason. They do. Look it up.
"It really feels as if the government is getting desparate to find boogymens for everything."
Not to play conspiracy theorist or anything, but history says this is (really) TYPICAL tyrannical-government strategy.
* Label things as far worse than they actually are, as long as it's only citizens being labeled.
* Label things far better than they actually are, when it's government behavior, not citizens.
* Make everything illegal. When everybody is a criminal, then you can enforce the laws arbitrarily and only against those you don't like.
(Think that is a joke? YOU are probably a felon already, many times over, and didn't even know it.)
---
"... the indirect purchase of GOVERNMENT issued debt by the FEDERAL Reserve aka Quantitative Easing?"
The Federal Reserve is about as "federal" as my neighbor's hemorrhoids. Other than having some people on the board government-appointed, it's not government at all. Each of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks is little more than a co-op of PRIVATE member banks, many of them largely owned by foreign interests.
"Note this is a flow of money TO the government from the banking system. The banks are simple intermediates in the process. They don't profit on the transaction."
Go back to school yourself. Quantitative Easing, by definition, is the buying of bonds WITH NEWLY CREATED DOLLARS. And I'll let you in on a little clue: the government pays interest on every one of those dollars created by the Federal Reserve.
It is BY DEFINITION inflationary. It is INTENDED TO BE inflationary (Bernanke's own words). And that inflation takes money straight out of citizens' pockets. Don't believe me? Compare your grocery bill to what it was 5 years ago. And commodities like food are among the FIRST things to go up.
"The idea that this is extorting money from the taxpayers is complete unvarnished BS."
It is nothing of the sort. The taxpayers get the money extorted from them all right. Just not directly. That's the beauty of the Federal Reserve system. Much of that loss comes from eventual higher government debt and inflation. But you had better believe it is real.
"Not going to happen..."
Well, if you look at it that way. The way I see it is: Wall Street has already failed, and needs to be re-built from the ground up.
"The folks probing the systems here are probably the same people that put the security in in the first place. The folks doing to probing..."
I like the way you put that. Probing. How amazingly appropriate.
Thank you. You put it more concisely than I did.
When a large percentage -- MAYBE even the majority, I don't know -- of "investment" is no longer in the means of production, but instead is just a bunch of asshats trading fictional derivatives with each other, it puts "the economy" in danger. That's not investment. I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's gambling. Plain and simple. Government-sanctioned gambling, with other peoples' money.
"A good part of the consumer wealth in this country is invested on wall street"
Ah... but should it be? That's more the point I was talking about.
Wall Street was supposed to be about investing in corporations that were involved in production. Now it's largely (maybe even mostly?) just a circle-jerk of suits trading derivatives with each other. That's not an "investment", that's gambling.
"...when the market contracts, people become more worried about their retirement and become less willing to spend money."
Good. Because that's part of the problem: these so-called "economists" who are obsessed with spending.
Spending isn't wealth. Savings are wealth. American NEEDS to "contract" its spending, and start saving again.
"What happens on Wall Street does a huge amount to shape the willingness of people to spend money--including the willingness of endowed institutions to spend money. That makes it important to the economy."
I don't dispute that. But I do have 2 things to say about it: the first is what I just said above. The second is that yes, it is important to the economy. More important than it SHOULD be, in a rational world.
"Geeks do tend to get some money, but very little power."
Hahahahahahaha!
"Statistically, there aren't enough samples to conclude that going from 0 to 1 is growth."
I didn't say it was showing growth. My point was that it isn't an INDICATION that they were "going away".
I hope it fails, and fails big.
It's high time people stopped confusing Wall Street with "the economy". A very large part of Wall Street anymore is little more than a glorified casino. And high-frequency trading combines the casino with a horse race.
"How long before advanced aliens experience Paypal's "customer service" and decide to annihilate us all?"
Hahaha! It would indeed be hard to blame them.
In all honesty, this just seems to me like an excuse of a way to get their paws on really big-ticket payments.
As a control systems engineer.
"If you accept DRM, however, you GUARANTEE that parts of the Web will become walled off."
Very well said. Can't we find some kind of way to mod people past 5?
"The thing is, booth babes aren't there for geeks, they're there for non-geek distributors who are salesmen that probably had a much better relationship with hot girls in school."
I'm not so sure. High-school football players get fat and sloppy. But Geeks rule the world. Literally.
Anyway, I wanted to point out, guys, that for every "OMG I'm offended!" pseudo-feminist out there, there is another who really, really enjoys being slobbered over as a booth babe. And they need employment, too.
And one more thing: statistically, going from zero one year to one the next is actually an increase of infinity %. That hardly seems "going away" to me.
"Can any real developer explain why having a javascript backend would be any different to any other backend in such a way where something jaw-dropping could only be the result of the javascript backend?"
Hmmmm.... Yes! Now that I think about it, I can!
JavaScript is jaw-droppingly obtuse. It has the property that objects are represented in totally, jaw-droppingly unreadable JSON. Its syntax is jaw-droppingly primitive, full of a jaw-dropping number of unnecessary brackets and parentheses, and jaw-droppingly verbose and stubborn. I could go on, but my jaw is sore.
And contrary to what OP wrote, JavaScript has not even remotely "emerged as the lingua franca of the modern Web". It is an annoying and obnoxious holdover from the very early days of the Web.
Further, Node.js was obviously a fad, and MongoDB has already been superseded by superior products.
"Yes, it is perfectly within the spirit of the GPL to add exemptions to the license terms. Plenty of GPL projects, even those from the GNU project, have exemptions to the GPL terms such as linking in GPLed libraries, etc. Stop being such a freetard."
It may be within the spirit, but not for OP's given, manufactured, bullshit reason.
The fact that it runs on the browser rather than the server has absolutely no bearing on its licensing model. That's like saying player piano rolls weren't "music" because they played on a mechanical device rather than an orchestra. The courts have actually ruled on that (circa 100 years ago) and the answer is: no.