At least once a week there seems to be another flashy technique to filter or block spam. Great.
Except that this ignores the truth behind the spam problem, that many people don't seem to care about. Spam is, at its root, an economic problem. Spam is sent by people who are making money helping someone sell something. The spam you got this afternoon for discount v!@gra or 0EM software is making money for someone. And as long as someone can still make money off of it, they'll keep doing it.
If you want to stop spam, you need to take away the economic incentive. We've already seen how many spam filtering / blocking programs produced in the past 5 years? But yet the spam problem just keeps growing as the number of "solutions" grows. This tells us that the spammers are more than willing to work on ways to circumvent these reactive techniques, so that they can continue to make money off their deeds.
Once we can stop spam from being profitable, we will finally see it go away. But no sooner.
But what has any of this got to do with the OLPC system?
The point I was trying to make - and this seems to very much have been lost since - is that Carlos Slim, who is the owner of CompUSA, likely won't be bringing much business to CompUSA by way of his purchase of 50,000 OLPC systems. This was in response to the original post in this thread where someone said:
Since Slim owns CompUSA, maybe he's creating new customers
To which I attempted to state two reasons why I didn't expect that to work out as a profitable venture for CompUSA:
The OLPC systems run Linux, and hardly anyone who works at CompUSA is likely to be knowledgeable on it
CompUSA makes more profit on cables than anything else, and the OLPC's don't have much use for high-priced printer cables, anyways
Of course, others took that to be me complaining about what companies have to do in order to make profit, or what have you. But all that this has to do with the OLPC is that I don't suspect that program will lead to much business for CompUSA.
Since Slim owns CompUSA, maybe he's creating new customers.
Except that the OLPC systems run Linux. What are the chances of finding someone at CompUSA who would know anything about them? Might as well take it to 7/11.
And I don't think that the OLPC systems have much need for the $20 CompUSA printer cables, either*.
*I know from having previously worked at CompUSA (#787, Minnetonka, MN) that the markup was at least 10-fold on printer cables, which far, far, exceeded the margin on the printers - or just about anything else in the store except for CD jewel cases.
... can take second semester organic chemistry for me. I had to take that abysmal class twice because I couldn't memorize the material quickly enough the first time around.
For those of you who have not visited both North & South Dakota, I have. They are, in fact, not the same place.
Actually, I have visited them both - though never in the same trip (I grew up in Minnesota).
But can anyone explain why there is a North Dakota and a South Dakota?
And yes, that was a joke. Notice the acronym spells out "TRIPE". If the original was still available, you'd find that they described it coming from a fossilized big toe found under a tree stump by Dr. Ross Geller. They even described genes such as "TINYBRAIN" for the animal, though it was all just an April Fool's joke (notice that it also says 1 April 2003).
I've heard of the AI approach for spam, and I'll tell you why I don't think that will solve the problem either.
First, it doesn't scale well. There are millions of email addresses on the internet, receiving email through thousands of mail servers. How many of them (users or servers) could run the AI anti-spam program? How many of them will?
Second, there are too many users that would never agree to be helped by this. Primarily I am talking about people who still use the likes of hotmail and yahoo as their primary email. These people pretty well couldn't install this, even if they wanted to, and probably wouldn't want to even if they could.
Hence, even if you were able to set this up for all the users that want it, there would still be far too many others who wouldn't want it (or wouldn't comprehend a reason to want it), and the spammers would continue to adapt their game accordingly.
Therefore, I stand by my previous statements that the solution to spam needs to be economic, not technical. When there is no longer a profit to be made by the spammers for sending out spam, then they will stop. People have correctly pointed out that yes, many spammers aren't selling anything directly. However, the spammers are still getting a cut off the proceeds of whatever site they are spamvertising, hence the game is still profitable for them.
now see maybe 1% of all the crap thrown at it. That means it's now 100 times more costly per delivered message than it used to be
Either I'm missing your math here, or I have to claim non-sequitur. I don't agree that the reduction in incoming crap is indicative of a higher cost for the sender. I would argue that you could just be lucky enough to have fallen off of a spammer's list somewhere.
If you have something to support your conclusion of it being more costly for the sender, please elaborate.
Not to mention that spam email usually isn't meant to spread viruses.
While its true that not much spam is meant to spread viruses, many viruses do send spam. The botnets that are used by the major spammers to propagate spam throughout the world are heavily populated with compromised windows boxes.
So while the conversion rate of windows users to users of non-windows operating systems isn't tremendous, the OP has a point in that compromised windows systems do make the spammers' lives easier. Whether or not this ties in directly to a speculative decrease in spam volume is open to discussion.
They won't give up as long as there's a monetary incentive for them to send out spam. As long as they can sell something through spam, they will continue to send it out. We can talk about how wonderful filter ABC is, and compare it endlessly for false positives against filter XYZ. But in the end, its just a matter of time until the spammers defeat both of them, and we're on to filter ABC version 2.
So no, in the end, nothing that most people are doing will do squat to bring about the end of spam. You can filter until you're blue in the face, and spam will still be sent. You can shut down all your mailboxes and open a new gmail address every week, and you'll still get spammed.
Spam is sent because spammers can make money by sending it. Period.
I first thought we were talking about the government facility where we might or might not have extraterrestrials. Then I figured you meant a game designer, so I thought we were talking about the arcade game from a few years back (get off my lawn...) where you blasted extraterrestrials in the government facility where we may or many not have extraterrestrials.
But as for this product, I for one have never even heard of it. I have no idea why its delays would be at all important.
Though some of the things that were discussed in this thread I felt warranted the extra point. But as I said, this thread is pretty much deceased now anyways.
Athletes, etc, make a lot of money simply because of market forces. If you don't like it, then tough; that's the way it'll always be, because of supply and demand.
In the case of airline executives, in particular, the compensation is not based on the forces of the market and what it can bear. If it were, then the airlines would adjust their CEO compensation before asking for government money to bail their sorry selves out.
Instead, the CEOs set their own salaries to beyond what the market can bear, and they expect the market to adjust accordingly to accommodate their "needs".
And thanks for the comment about crying into a pillow - I'm still laughing at that one several hours after you first posted it. That you would think so poorly of me is, well, quite laughable. But again, you are intended to your own poorly-informed opinion, even if it has little to no grounding in reality.
That's a well-constructed argument. I wish I could apply my karma bonus to it so that more people would see it. Being as this discussion has already likely moved past the end of the day (and never even made full front-page status) its not likely that asking for someone to mod it up it will do much at this point.
But I tip my hat to you, sir. It looks like the best feedback we can take from it is that the staunch anti-union guys here won't touch it.
Which government exactly is it that's breaking up unions? Please let me know, I'd like to sign up.
Try the current government in the US. You could start by going back to the actions that Ronald Reagan took against air traffic controllers in 1981, when he fired over 80% of the unionized workers. Similarly, the Bush currently in the white house has tried to revoke the right to strike from the US Postal Service.
Or were you either not born or not awake during the Reagan administration? I'm inclined to believe that you know at least enough about it that you credit him personally with taking down the Berlin wall, though.
And thanks for admitting openly that you hate the unions enough to want to see the government partake in their demise. You're getting your wish with the current administration...
Please take a basic economics course from your local college.
I already took Econ 1001. I don't intend to take any time off my PhD to take any additional Econ, as it isn't close enough to my field of study to justify it. But thanks for the offer.
What you have are not opinions, they are non-facts.
I find it interesting that you discarded the parts of my reply where I used facts to point out the flaws in your argument. You then proceeded to call me narrow minded and lacking in facts. Have you looked at yourself in a mirror lately? As I said before, you are free to hate the unions as much as you want (and I see you do that part quite well). I'd just like to see you actually use truthful information to back up your hatred.
Sometimes businesses hire low entry wage and raise the salary if they wish to keep the employee.
Except that some schools don't have that option. If the school doesn't have the money to increase the teachers' salaries - because the board said they must pay teachers X wage even though another is paying 1.5*X - then the district loses the teacher.
If instead the district is told that teachers won't work for less than 1.5*X, then they have to come up with the money - either raise funds or reduce other expenditures and salaries. Hence the union-set minimum salary is actually helping because it aids in getting the entire labor force of that industry and market a better wage.
Often inner-city school kids don't WANT to be smart or get good grades, because they don't want to give in to "the man"
Thats an interesting perspective. From inner city youth that I have known, their lack of academic progress usually has less to do with "the man" and more to do with their culture. Many of them seem to believe that they will be the next star athlete or hip-hop artist. An effective teacher should be able to help them to realize that they need a plan B. However a teacher at a lousy wage will likely be more concerned with either finding a better job or getting ready for their second job of the day.
Of course, this is all your personal opinion.
I believe you are referring to where I demonstrated that the union doesn't meet his definition of price fixing. I guess you can discard my statement as opinion, but that doesn't change his previous definition or its lack of application to supporting opinion.
If a teacher decides that the 20k a job is worth it, then they're not getting ripped off, are they? They aren't owed the job, and nobody is forcing them to take it.
Taking the job at a given wage and agreeing with the wage are not the same thing. If a teacher takes a job straight out of school at $20k because its offered, that doesn't mean they think the wage is correct. And likely, they'll move on to a better paying position not long after. But in the end, the school loses.
I guess cartels don't partake in price-fixing, either, because they only set the minimum price.
If you want to talk cartels, than maybe we should ask why our government has put so much work into breaking up the "labor cartel" and so little into breaking up the oil cartel.
Again, that's your personal, narrow-minded preferences; you're a consumer that wants things, wants them now, and wants them cheap, with no idea of the forces that determine price and why some prices may be high and some prices may be low.
Thank you for clarifying my stupidity. I never realized that I was so horribly narrow minded and uninformed. Obviously you know more about my buying preferences on goods than I ever could, so it was very nice of you to clarify this.
Similarly:
The parallels between yours and Marx's philosophies are pretty clear.
I'll presume that coming from your perspective, this is the economic equivalent of invoking a Hitler comparison in a political discussion. I'll also say I do find it slightly amusing that you seem to feel that labor unions lead towards communism. There are plenty of G8 countries - indeed pretty much all of them except for our own - that would argue that strong labor unions do not do that.
No, it's about seeing that all of its members get an unfair shake
Please elaborate on this. I'd like to know how you feel the unions see that their members get an unfair shake.
However, when labor suppliers (unions) are able to collude on wages and labor demanders (employers) are not, that creates a situation that disproportionately favors the suppliers, artificially driving up costs (wages).
Thats an interesting viewpoint, but I disagree with your description of the situation. Indeed, there are few examples remaining outside of education where the people looking for labor are obligated to work with the unions. And even in that example, I've seen districts that hire substitutes from outside the unions, sometimes to longer than usual time frames.
Furthermore, your statement that it artificially drives up costs is opinionated at best. Union members are often better qualified for their work than those who would do the work for much less, which results in a better value for the money when compared to paying less up front and then having to have the shoddy work of the underqualified fixed later.
They have a government-protected right to not only set minimum wages for their members, but also to create an effective labor monopoly.
I'm not sure where you think that is in effect. The department of labor has a reputation over at least the past 7 years of continually working against the unions. And as I already mentioned, only around 12% of the US labor force is in a union, so I'm not sure how that constitutes a "labor monopoly". Even many of the manufacturing jobs in this country - where unions were previously quite strong - have gone to non-union shops. If you look at http://www.uaw.com/uawmade/auto/2007/index.cfm/ a list of union made cars from the US and Canada, you'll see that even a many vehicles that claim "made in the USA" are not made by unions. So their labor monopoly really doesn't exist, and doesn't have government protection.
If there were 100 teachers willing to work for 40,000, 50 willing to work for 30,000, and 10 willing to work for 20,000, why should we not be allowed to hire those bottom 10 at the rate they are worth?
Thats really two not the same question - what a teacher is willing to work for, vs. what they are worth. And I'd like to start by asking who would really want their kids taught by someone willing to teach for only 20k? Shouldn't the wage for a full-time job be at least high enough to discourage the employee (the teacher in this case) from needing to seek out a second job to pay their cost of living? If you only pay a teacher $20k in a city where cost of living is $35, they'll have to make the other $15k somewhere. And that could well be a second or third-shift job that goes year round. This would of course eat into the time that the teacher should spend grading junior's homework and planning junior's lesson plan.
And on top of that, if a school hires at $20k, what kind of retention would you expect them to have? If one school hires teachers straight from college for $20k, and another school 5 miles away does it for $40, how long will any teacher worth their salt stay at $20k? This is a big part of why inner city schools (and even first ring suburbs in some areas) end up with sub-par teachers; they're only willing and able to pay sub-par rates.
However, the union assisting the wage floor actually helps this problem. I say this because if the poor schools don't have the option to hire teachers at $20k, they will subsequently need to raise money to pay the base wage.
All jobs in all walks of life get paid exactly as much as they should be, unless they are at the floor or ceiling of any price fixing strategy.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I don't think that the executives at HMO's or airlines deserve multi-million dollar annual bonuses, nor do I think that any athlete alive or dead ever truly earned a multi-million dollar annual salary. And thats to say nothing about the people who contribute orders of magnitude more to society and the world at large who are paid so much less.
Price fixing isn't just about setting a maximum (like sports owners sometimes try to create) but rather about setting any rate as the rate for a given job or product.
Then by that statement, the teacher's union is not partaking in price fixing. They don't set the rate. They set the minimum rate. You can pay a teacher as much over the minimum as you want, and the union won't stop you. They just want to ensure that you're not ripping off the teachers and cheating them out of a livable wage for full-time work.
but price is always best decided by the market
Again, we'll just have to agree to disagree. I'll say the market can sometimes accurately decide a price. But there are some products and occupations that I feel should not be left to the lowest bidder.
Frankly, that statement just doesn't hold water. Neither the individual part, nor the fix wages part have much grounding in reality.
First of all, the union isn't about the individual. Its about the union, hence the name union. The union is concerned with seeing that all of its members get a fair shake. There is no individual action within a union, for better or for worse. The union instead goes by something like the strength in numbers principle, using the collective strength of its members together.
But equally wrong is your statement about fixing wages. The union isn't trying to fix wages - that would be communism. The union is just trying to ensure that the wage floor is adequate for full time work. In the example you were complaining about regarding the teachers union, the union wants to ensure that full time teachers make an adequate salary when they start. They don't restrict the maximum that their members can earn (how would they retain members if they did?) - they just want to ensure that their members all have livable wages.
It is also worth pointing out that countries who are doing better economically than the US (their numbers growing every day) tend to actually have higher rates of union membership than we do. For example, Canadian union membership is around 30% nationally, as opposed to around 12% in the US. But yet their dollar is worth more than ours, and their life expectancy exceeds ours. Oh, and their educational system is often more highly regarded than ours.
So you are free to hate the unions if you wish, but please, check your facts before you blame the world on them.
I suspect I'm not the only person who didn't know the answer to this person's question. I have no idea why someone felt the need to mod it "troll".
And even further into the thread, it is pointed out that the answer lies in Apple's earlier promise to provide Java for OS X people (rather than Sun doing it). I suspect I'm not the only person who wasn't previously familiar with that, either.
Just with XP Alone. It got the population off of DOS based OS's DOS, Windows 3 - Windows ME onto the more stable NT Kernel.
Actually, Windows 2000 accomplished that, XP was descended from it. But thanks for playing...
Desktop Linux never really hit full force mostly because of the rebirth of Apple but there were a lot of huge improvements in OS User-interface and it is comparable to current versions of windows.
I don't really think Apple deserves credit for that one. Its more likely that Linux just isn't what people are used to. The number of new computer owners is getting pretty small in comparison to the number of people who are buying new computers to replace PCs that they owned before. So naturally they are inclined to buy something familiar instead of something different.
And of course the near-impossibility of buying a PC that doesn't have windows on it (when buying at a store) doesn't help get Linux out to consumers, either.
For information
you needed to trek to the library, doing papers required huge amount of time dedicated on finding sources.
Encyclopedias were available on CD-ROM starting at least 1995 if not earlier. And for primary sources, which would require academic libraries anyways, many universities allowed people to dial up (via modem [gasp!]) to their libraries to browse the collections before going in. Particularly useful for large schools with libraries spread over multiple buildings.
Finding People, getting directions
Phone book anyone? Particularly in the 90s, when most people couldn't afford cell phones, the local white pages was a great way to find peoples information, and the yellow pages got you the information you needed for a local business.
In short, I think the world hasn't changed as dramatically as your post implies. Indeed, I think much of the change you mention was actually brought about due to peoples' resistance to change.
I'd say this isn't really anything new. The drives have been available for months, and there are likely other vendors that have already done it. Really, what's new and exciting about this, other than it has the most expensive four-letter word in consumer electronics attached to it?
Can anyone explain what this AC is trying to accomplish? I've seen this post in many different topics, over the course of several months now. I haven't bothered to read it in its entirety, but it seems to always be the same story about eating things in the library that should not be eaten.
But yet the poster doesn't proceed to advertise for a web site or any agenda at the end. Is this just a bot testing the system or some other such nonsense?
Slashdot Mirror
At least once a week there seems to be another flashy technique to filter or block spam. Great.
Except that this ignores the truth behind the spam problem, that many people don't seem to care about. Spam is, at its root, an economic problem. Spam is sent by people who are making money helping someone sell something. The spam you got this afternoon for discount v!@gra or 0EM software is making money for someone. And as long as someone can still make money off of it, they'll keep doing it.
If you want to stop spam, you need to take away the economic incentive. We've already seen how many spam filtering / blocking programs produced in the past 5 years? But yet the spam problem just keeps growing as the number of "solutions" grows. This tells us that the spammers are more than willing to work on ways to circumvent these reactive techniques, so that they can continue to make money off their deeds.
Once we can stop spam from being profitable, we will finally see it go away. But no sooner.
The point I was trying to make - and this seems to very much have been lost since - is that Carlos Slim, who is the owner of CompUSA, likely won't be bringing much business to CompUSA by way of his purchase of 50,000 OLPC systems. This was in response to the original post in this thread where someone said:
Since Slim owns CompUSA, maybe he's creating new customers
To which I attempted to state two reasons why I didn't expect that to work out as a profitable venture for CompUSA:
Of course, others took that to be me complaining about what companies have to do in order to make profit, or what have you. But all that this has to do with the OLPC is that I don't suspect that program will lead to much business for CompUSA.
Except that the OLPC systems run Linux. What are the chances of finding someone at CompUSA who would know anything about them? Might as well take it to 7/11.
And I don't think that the OLPC systems have much need for the $20 CompUSA printer cables, either*.
*I know from having previously worked at CompUSA (#787, Minnetonka, MN) that the markup was at least 10-fold on printer cables, which far, far, exceeded the margin on the printers - or just about anything else in the store except for CD jewel cases.
... can take second semester organic chemistry for me. I had to take that abysmal class twice because I couldn't memorize the material quickly enough the first time around.
Actually, I have visited them both - though never in the same trip (I grew up in Minnesota).
But can anyone explain why there is a North Dakota and a South Dakota?
And yes, that was a joke. Notice the acronym spells out "TRIPE". If the original was still available, you'd find that they described it coming from a fossilized big toe found under a tree stump by Dr. Ross Geller. They even described genes such as "TINYBRAIN" for the animal, though it was all just an April Fool's joke (notice that it also says 1 April 2003).
I'm afraid it was already done on a T. Rex a few years ago...
The Wellcome Trust at the Sanger Institute Present the T. Rex International Paleontonomics Experiment
I've heard of the AI approach for spam, and I'll tell you why I don't think that will solve the problem either.
First, it doesn't scale well. There are millions of email addresses on the internet, receiving email through thousands of mail servers. How many of them (users or servers) could run the AI anti-spam program? How many of them will?
Second, there are too many users that would never agree to be helped by this. Primarily I am talking about people who still use the likes of hotmail and yahoo as their primary email. These people pretty well couldn't install this, even if they wanted to, and probably wouldn't want to even if they could.
Hence, even if you were able to set this up for all the users that want it, there would still be far too many others who wouldn't want it (or wouldn't comprehend a reason to want it), and the spammers would continue to adapt their game accordingly.
Therefore, I stand by my previous statements that the solution to spam needs to be economic, not technical. When there is no longer a profit to be made by the spammers for sending out spam, then they will stop. People have correctly pointed out that yes, many spammers aren't selling anything directly. However, the spammers are still getting a cut off the proceeds of whatever site they are spamvertising, hence the game is still profitable for them.
Either I'm missing your math here, or I have to claim non-sequitur. I don't agree that the reduction in incoming crap is indicative of a higher cost for the sender. I would argue that you could just be lucky enough to have fallen off of a spammer's list somewhere.
If you have something to support your conclusion of it being more costly for the sender, please elaborate.
While its true that not much spam is meant to spread viruses, many viruses do send spam. The botnets that are used by the major spammers to propagate spam throughout the world are heavily populated with compromised windows boxes.
So while the conversion rate of windows users to users of non-windows operating systems isn't tremendous, the OP has a point in that compromised windows systems do make the spammers' lives easier. Whether or not this ties in directly to a speculative decrease in spam volume is open to discussion.
They won't give up as long as there's a monetary incentive for them to send out spam. As long as they can sell something through spam, they will continue to send it out. We can talk about how wonderful filter ABC is, and compare it endlessly for false positives against filter XYZ. But in the end, its just a matter of time until the spammers defeat both of them, and we're on to filter ABC version 2.
So no, in the end, nothing that most people are doing will do squat to bring about the end of spam. You can filter until you're blue in the face, and spam will still be sent. You can shut down all your mailboxes and open a new gmail address every week, and you'll still get spammed.
Spam is sent because spammers can make money by sending it. Period.
I first thought we were talking about the government facility where we might or might not have extraterrestrials. Then I figured you meant a game designer, so I thought we were talking about the arcade game from a few years back (get off my lawn...) where you blasted extraterrestrials in the government facility where we may or many not have extraterrestrials.
But as for this product, I for one have never even heard of it. I have no idea why its delays would be at all important.
And sometimes I also elect to not use mine...
Though some of the things that were discussed in this thread I felt warranted the extra point. But as I said, this thread is pretty much deceased now anyways.
In the case of airline executives, in particular, the compensation is not based on the forces of the market and what it can bear. If it were, then the airlines would adjust their CEO compensation before asking for government money to bail their sorry selves out.
Instead, the CEOs set their own salaries to beyond what the market can bear, and they expect the market to adjust accordingly to accommodate their "needs".
And thanks for the comment about crying into a pillow - I'm still laughing at that one several hours after you first posted it. That you would think so poorly of me is, well, quite laughable. But again, you are intended to your own poorly-informed opinion, even if it has little to no grounding in reality.
That's a well-constructed argument. I wish I could apply my karma bonus to it so that more people would see it. Being as this discussion has already likely moved past the end of the day (and never even made full front-page status) its not likely that asking for someone to mod it up it will do much at this point.
But I tip my hat to you, sir. It looks like the best feedback we can take from it is that the staunch anti-union guys here won't touch it.
Try the current government in the US. You could start by going back to the actions that Ronald Reagan took against air traffic controllers in 1981, when he fired over 80% of the unionized workers. Similarly, the Bush currently in the white house has tried to revoke the right to strike from the US Postal Service.
Or were you either not born or not awake during the Reagan administration? I'm inclined to believe that you know at least enough about it that you credit him personally with taking down the Berlin wall, though.
And thanks for admitting openly that you hate the unions enough to want to see the government partake in their demise. You're getting your wish with the current administration...
Please take a basic economics course from your local college.
I already took Econ 1001. I don't intend to take any time off my PhD to take any additional Econ, as it isn't close enough to my field of study to justify it. But thanks for the offer.
What you have are not opinions, they are non-facts.
I find it interesting that you discarded the parts of my reply where I used facts to point out the flaws in your argument. You then proceeded to call me narrow minded and lacking in facts. Have you looked at yourself in a mirror lately? As I said before, you are free to hate the unions as much as you want (and I see you do that part quite well). I'd just like to see you actually use truthful information to back up your hatred.
Except that some schools don't have that option. If the school doesn't have the money to increase the teachers' salaries - because the board said they must pay teachers X wage even though another is paying 1.5*X - then the district loses the teacher.
If instead the district is told that teachers won't work for less than 1.5*X, then they have to come up with the money - either raise funds or reduce other expenditures and salaries. Hence the union-set minimum salary is actually helping because it aids in getting the entire labor force of that industry and market a better wage.
Often inner-city school kids don't WANT to be smart or get good grades, because they don't want to give in to "the man"
Thats an interesting perspective. From inner city youth that I have known, their lack of academic progress usually has less to do with "the man" and more to do with their culture. Many of them seem to believe that they will be the next star athlete or hip-hop artist. An effective teacher should be able to help them to realize that they need a plan B. However a teacher at a lousy wage will likely be more concerned with either finding a better job or getting ready for their second job of the day.
Of course, this is all your personal opinion.
I believe you are referring to where I demonstrated that the union doesn't meet his definition of price fixing. I guess you can discard my statement as opinion, but that doesn't change his previous definition or its lack of application to supporting opinion.
If a teacher decides that the 20k a job is worth it, then they're not getting ripped off, are they? They aren't owed the job, and nobody is forcing them to take it.
Taking the job at a given wage and agreeing with the wage are not the same thing. If a teacher takes a job straight out of school at $20k because its offered, that doesn't mean they think the wage is correct. And likely, they'll move on to a better paying position not long after. But in the end, the school loses.
I guess cartels don't partake in price-fixing, either, because they only set the minimum price.
If you want to talk cartels, than maybe we should ask why our government has put so much work into breaking up the "labor cartel" and so little into breaking up the oil cartel.
Again, that's your personal, narrow-minded preferences; you're a consumer that wants things, wants them now, and wants them cheap, with no idea of the forces that determine price and why some prices may be high and some prices may be low.
Thank you for clarifying my stupidity. I never realized that I was so horribly narrow minded and uninformed. Obviously you know more about my buying preferences on goods than I ever could, so it was very nice of you to clarify this.
Similarly:
The parallels between yours and Marx's philosophies are pretty clear.
I'll presume that coming from your perspective, this is the economic equivalent of invoking a Hitler comparison in a political discussion. I'll also say I do find it slightly amusing that you seem to feel that labor unions lead towards communism. There are plenty of G8 countries - indeed pretty much all of them except for our own - that would argue that strong labor unions do not do that.
Please elaborate on this. I'd like to know how you feel the unions see that their members get an unfair shake.
However, when labor suppliers (unions) are able to collude on wages and labor demanders (employers) are not, that creates a situation that disproportionately favors the suppliers, artificially driving up costs (wages).
Thats an interesting viewpoint, but I disagree with your description of the situation. Indeed, there are few examples remaining outside of education where the people looking for labor are obligated to work with the unions. And even in that example, I've seen districts that hire substitutes from outside the unions, sometimes to longer than usual time frames.
Furthermore, your statement that it artificially drives up costs is opinionated at best. Union members are often better qualified for their work than those who would do the work for much less, which results in a better value for the money when compared to paying less up front and then having to have the shoddy work of the underqualified fixed later.
They have a government-protected right to not only set minimum wages for their members, but also to create an effective labor monopoly.
I'm not sure where you think that is in effect. The department of labor has a reputation over at least the past 7 years of continually working against the unions. And as I already mentioned, only around 12% of the US labor force is in a union, so I'm not sure how that constitutes a "labor monopoly". Even many of the manufacturing jobs in this country - where unions were previously quite strong - have gone to non-union shops. If you look at http://www.uaw.com/uawmade/auto/2007/index.cfm/ a list of union made cars from the US and Canada, you'll see that even a many vehicles that claim "made in the USA" are not made by unions. So their labor monopoly really doesn't exist, and doesn't have government protection.
Thats really two not the same question - what a teacher is willing to work for, vs. what they are worth. And I'd like to start by asking who would really want their kids taught by someone willing to teach for only 20k? Shouldn't the wage for a full-time job be at least high enough to discourage the employee (the teacher in this case) from needing to seek out a second job to pay their cost of living? If you only pay a teacher $20k in a city where cost of living is $35, they'll have to make the other $15k somewhere. And that could well be a second or third-shift job that goes year round. This would of course eat into the time that the teacher should spend grading junior's homework and planning junior's lesson plan.
And on top of that, if a school hires at $20k, what kind of retention would you expect them to have? If one school hires teachers straight from college for $20k, and another school 5 miles away does it for $40, how long will any teacher worth their salt stay at $20k? This is a big part of why inner city schools (and even first ring suburbs in some areas) end up with sub-par teachers; they're only willing and able to pay sub-par rates.
However, the union assisting the wage floor actually helps this problem. I say this because if the poor schools don't have the option to hire teachers at $20k, they will subsequently need to raise money to pay the base wage. All jobs in all walks of life get paid exactly as much as they should be, unless they are at the floor or ceiling of any price fixing strategy.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I don't think that the executives at HMO's or airlines deserve multi-million dollar annual bonuses, nor do I think that any athlete alive or dead ever truly earned a multi-million dollar annual salary. And thats to say nothing about the people who contribute orders of magnitude more to society and the world at large who are paid so much less.
Price fixing isn't just about setting a maximum (like sports owners sometimes try to create) but rather about setting any rate as the rate for a given job or product.
Then by that statement, the teacher's union is not partaking in price fixing. They don't set the rate. They set the minimum rate. You can pay a teacher as much over the minimum as you want, and the union won't stop you. They just want to ensure that you're not ripping off the teachers and cheating them out of a livable wage for full-time work.
but price is always best decided by the market
Again, we'll just have to agree to disagree. I'll say the market can sometimes accurately decide a price. But there are some products and occupations that I feel should not be left to the lowest bidder.
Frankly, that statement just doesn't hold water. Neither the individual part, nor the fix wages part have much grounding in reality.
First of all, the union isn't about the individual. Its about the union, hence the name union. The union is concerned with seeing that all of its members get a fair shake. There is no individual action within a union, for better or for worse. The union instead goes by something like the strength in numbers principle, using the collective strength of its members together.
But equally wrong is your statement about fixing wages. The union isn't trying to fix wages - that would be communism. The union is just trying to ensure that the wage floor is adequate for full time work. In the example you were complaining about regarding the teachers union, the union wants to ensure that full time teachers make an adequate salary when they start. They don't restrict the maximum that their members can earn (how would they retain members if they did?) - they just want to ensure that their members all have livable wages.
It is also worth pointing out that countries who are doing better economically than the US (their numbers growing every day) tend to actually have higher rates of union membership than we do. For example, Canadian union membership is around 30% nationally, as opposed to around 12% in the US. But yet their dollar is worth more than ours, and their life expectancy exceeds ours. Oh, and their educational system is often more highly regarded than ours.
So you are free to hate the unions if you wish, but please, check your facts before you blame the world on them.
I suspect I'm not the only person who didn't know the answer to this person's question. I have no idea why someone felt the need to mod it "troll".
And even further into the thread, it is pointed out that the answer lies in Apple's earlier promise to provide Java for OS X people (rather than Sun doing it). I suspect I'm not the only person who wasn't previously familiar with that, either.
Actually, Windows 2000 accomplished that, XP was descended from it. But thanks for playing...
Desktop Linux never really hit full force mostly because of the rebirth of Apple but there were a lot of huge improvements in OS User-interface and it is comparable to current versions of windows.
I don't really think Apple deserves credit for that one. Its more likely that Linux just isn't what people are used to. The number of new computer owners is getting pretty small in comparison to the number of people who are buying new computers to replace PCs that they owned before. So naturally they are inclined to buy something familiar instead of something different.
And of course the near-impossibility of buying a PC that doesn't have windows on it (when buying at a store) doesn't help get Linux out to consumers, either. For information you needed to trek to the library, doing papers required huge amount of time dedicated on finding sources.
Encyclopedias were available on CD-ROM starting at least 1995 if not earlier. And for primary sources, which would require academic libraries anyways, many universities allowed people to dial up (via modem [gasp!]) to their libraries to browse the collections before going in. Particularly useful for large schools with libraries spread over multiple buildings. Finding People, getting directions
Phone book anyone? Particularly in the 90s, when most people couldn't afford cell phones, the local white pages was a great way to find peoples information, and the yellow pages got you the information you needed for a local business.
In short, I think the world hasn't changed as dramatically as your post implies. Indeed, I think much of the change you mention was actually brought about due to peoples' resistance to change.
I'd say this isn't really anything new. The drives have been available for months, and there are likely other vendors that have already done it. Really, what's new and exciting about this, other than it has the most expensive four-letter word in consumer electronics attached to it?
Really, there's no shortage of bad movies still being made that deserve the MST3K treatment. Did you just get tired of mocking bad movies?
Can anyone explain what this AC is trying to accomplish? I've seen this post in many different topics, over the course of several months now. I haven't bothered to read it in its entirety, but it seems to always be the same story about eating things in the library that should not be eaten.
But yet the poster doesn't proceed to advertise for a web site or any agenda at the end. Is this just a bot testing the system or some other such nonsense?