The problem with alternative apps like acrobat->gimp is that ultimately software is a tool (and so are some users;-)). If you are a graphics guy with 10+ years experience using an app, you are very very quick at doing hundreds of different things with the software. Through in gimp, sure you might be able to do all the things that you can do in photoshop but there will be a huge learning curve. If you are billing 100+ per hour for your time and some stupid "free" app cuts your productivity in half for a few weeks that is a problem.
Heck the nuisance factor of having to learn something new is a problem for a lot of people that aren't overly interested in tech for tech sake. I had users that were upset that an okay button moved from the left to the right on a form after an upgrade. lmagine how much it would piss you off if someone told you you can't use your favorite shell, or programming language for no technical. You might enjoy learning something new, but it would piss you off because you'd go from an expert to a beginner again and have to relearn simple tasks. Now imagine how much more that would piss people off that don't even like computers in the first place but just use them as a tool.
The better argument I think is to teach people from scratch on the new systems. Run linux in elementary schools. Kids would likely be "bilingual" since they'd likely have a Mac or Win box at home. So they might be unbiased one way or another. But taking people from one OS to another even if just a version upgrade is huge since the productivity losses are likely larger than the cost of the software, and even if it is not you just simply might not have more time to dedicate with learning how to use your computer ie. might have a life that doesn't involve a computer screen, or a business to run that doesn't pay you for learning how to do things you already know... again.
My understanding is to get the full use out of Sharepoint you need to be using MS Office and other products. The management of versions and such and integration of Office, MS project into the Sharepoint system is huge/pretty much the justification for the system. Otherwise you'd just have a subversion repository or something for your docs but than your revision control/sharing site would be pretty stupid in terms of its understanding of the innards of the documents and what it means (as well as likely a more cludgy integration).
Having to run an emulator to run a piece of software sucks IMO. If you are running an emulator to do your work you might as well be running the real thing. Than you have no issues with, oh crap the latest patch breaks it under wine. If your software is going to break it might as well break because it is broken for everyone, and any work arounds will work for you, versus using some custom hack and hoping it keeps working when the app moves to a new version of.Net or whatever.
A lot of the same arguments can be used for the Mac platform in my opinion though. Admin functions can be locked down even without having a password required at boot, things open the way you left it when you shut down, very simple user interface for most things.Old hardware: not so much, but you are essentially guaranteed capability with the OS from the same era as your machine since the hardware and OS vendor are the same. You got to put up with the vendor arbitrarily deciding that your few year old machine doesn't get the new OS though.
AV should be everywhere. Heck a virus writer just has to hack your browser and they can get most things that interest them since you likely browse the internet to your work, bank etc. The "but linux will ask me first before someone messes me up" thing doesn't really cut it. Most users will install things on their computers that they download. Something that seems trivial like: "oh you need this codec to view this file" and they'll say: "oh yeah that makes sense" and allow the install. They have no idea what the code in the app is, they have no way of knowing if there is a virus payload or not, that is why you need AV. The average user is not anywhere's near cautious enough, and even us technical dorks aren't because we are more likely to want to experiment with different things and install stuff we get for free constantly. Even if the source is available we don't have the time to review every line of code that when then compile from scratch to make sure that what we install is actually the code that is up in the CVS repository etc. In short AV protects us from ourselves:-) At best the "linux doesn't get viruses" means that the subset of uber-geeks that tend to be the current market for linux are knowledgeable enough about computers and computer vulnerabilities to properly manage their systems. That will by definition not be the case for the non-uber-geek crowd.
Dude you have the wrong idea of a cheap system. You might have found a better price but I suspect it is approximately right (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100008120+600038491&QksAutoSuggestion=&ShowDeactivatedMark=False&Configurator=&IsNodeId=1&Subcategory=636&description=&hisInDesc=&Ntk=&CFG=&SpeTabStoreType=&AdvancedSearch=1&srchInDesc=) the cheapest I could find for a 512GB SSD is $600. 3k just for disks is not a cheap system.
You are also dreaming in the same lala land as HDD/nic manufacturers the speed it says on the box and what you'll actually see are two different things. Build the box and then we'll talk.
Why does this matter? If it is a compiled program it is just a bunch of instructions. If the OS lets the instructions to run it doesn't much matter what compiler/language was used other than how efficiently it will do the crap it is told too.
The problem at least my understanding of it, is that a lot of the expensive channels (espn, fox etc) in a cable package are subsidized by the junk in the cable package. The cable provider pays for the channels and bundles them in such a way to try to target a family unit effectively. Since a large number (majority?) of households are now single adult/roommates maybe that will change. The problem will be people not willing to pay for all the high cost channels. Say $10 for expn, $5 for fox, $5 for CNN etc. People will say I'm paying 60% of the cost for 20% of the channels might as well keep my cable package.
Where it could win out I think is if they could renegotiate the prices with the channels. Ie. since our customers have specifically picked your channel we know they will be watching it. Thus you'll get more eyeballs for your ads and can sell them for more. So take more money from your advertisers and give us a lower rate. I'm not sure who watches TV now anymore anyways, other than sporting fans. I watch TV maybe 1 hour a week. Anything else I want to watch I download so I have no commercials, don't have to get a dvr, find out when something airs so I can set it up etc. Just check online every couple days see what I missed I want to watch and download away. Then again I live in a country that doesn't have internet piracy laws (yet) so no problems:-)
Foxconn has low margins and a lot of customers not Apple. They could very well lose the business of the other customers. Apple has crazy high margins. It is really hard to think of something both profitable enough and where the Apple brand wouldn't hurt rather than help. For example: buy HPs consulting business, or a big chunk of Google or MS say (would be funny turn around). Yeah okay but Apple isn't really seen as a enterprise partner (starting to change but still).
Exactly. What worth 100B dollars could Apple buy that they also could have a good fit with? They aren't about to buy SAP or controlling interest in oracle, or 2 HP's, or 3 Dells, or 5 Nokias, etc. There just aren't enough big enough targets out there, and even if they are they are pretty much worthless because Apple wins by having their systems completely designed as a integrated whole in house. I can't see how Apple + a Facebook, or HP or something makes sense. They still would be two completely different companies so all the "synergies" that deal-makers always like to conjure up are not so easy to imagine.
It should make the shares more valuable. It could end up not getting fully adjusted for, or alternatively it could hype up the stock more (investors expecting even more buy backs in the future for example). But at least in theory all metrics increase (earnings per share, profit per share etc) and things should exactly adjust.
Personally I say... about freaking time they did something with the money. It is okay to have a war chest, but you actually have to go to war sometime in a reasonable amount of time. Otherwise your investors are effectively paying for a money market account (or whatever income producing junk the company piles the money into). I don't need to pay broker commissions to get a GIC:-)
Yep there is huge amounts of junior positions. Really low end tech support someone that is interested in computers can learn in a few months most of the things they need to know. Then learn like crazy and gradually get trusted with more to the point that you end up a network, server admin, team lead or whatever your goal is.
If you like the software dev side of things try to find something that pulls in your pysch knowledge. That is how I got my first job in programming they needed a computer programmer than knew physics (my bachelors) after that everyone just finds in interesting that I have a variety of skills rather than worry about me not having a CS degree. A couple years dev work, a couple years overseas doing IT and I haven't hand any worries about my not having the degree since. It is the rare development gig that requires you to know the differences between the lexical analyzer and parser in a compiler for example. A lot of the CS stuff never gets used after school (someone probably has a job using each piece but it is rare to find someone that has a job that needs every piece (the only kind of job I can think that would come close would be project manager for Visual Studio, since you'd hit UI, software engineering methods, compiler, probably a lot of pull in from the OS group, etc) games use a specific subset, db uses a specific subset etc. Compilers/IDE are the only thing I can think that hits most if not everything.
Similarly my physics degree: studied quantum mechanics, particle physics, solid state, computational physics, thermo, classical mechanics, general relativity, etc. All I use is my particle physics now and a tiny bit of solid state. Kind of sad really my coworker, also a physicist, and I had a debate of why buses don't use seat belts. Her argument was "their bigger so your safer". I was thinking yeah but the momentum still has to go somewhere so I think you'd get less of the transfer but still say a 10km/h differential pre to post crash. So I pulled out my highschool physics and started conserving momentum and energy, got my adjusted mass equations crunched the numbers and formed a result assuming elastic collision (figured that was probably worse case since a car shooting off a bus would give it more of a backwards kick than one that sticks to it and just adjusts its mass buy ~10%). Anyways she lost interest and she was a physicist too. So... 1) You can't keep a woman's interest with conservation equations and 2) Even physicist's often don't even care about physics that they don't actually have to use in their work day to day. Same thing with CS I'm sure once all that graph theory has been learnt it is quickly forgotten for example.
Yeah and people chose to use their browser, and they convinced advertisers to advertise with them. It is amazing with MS search yahoo etc until recently somehow Google is the bad guy. It is the rare case where a company exists without competition. MS might be the closest in the tech world and look how that is working out for them (though to be fair until the last 6 months or so they were hugely undervalued IMHO versus increased revenue. For the last 10 years MS has been written off as doomed but they piled on the billions (probably more like 10s of billions) of revenue in the enterprise space to make up for losses from fewer PC sales.
Anyways the point is there were always Macs, there was Sun workstations, there was linux, early days OS/2 etc etc. Was MS anti-competitive? Yep. Was there still other options for customers? Yep.
Please. You see how shitty discussions people made with the real estate bust. Just because you have money doesn't mean you automatically don't make stupid mistakes with it. As well people that come up with the bs stories about how they came to country x with $100 and made their fortune for the vast majority of cases it is crap. Yeah they might have only had $100, then they worked their ass off, saved like crazy. Came up with an idea gambled on it with what they saved and it worked. So that $1 wouldn't just be $1. It would be 60hrs a week of labour for the next 10 years say. Oh and they'd have to be smart enough to come up with an idea same as that guy with 10M would have to, even if it is just an idea of what company he should buy next.
Besides the 1% isn't 10M networth (though they might have that too, the 1% quoted is usually 1% income. Which will throw in most specialist doctors, CEOs, investment bankers, the top half of lawyers probably etc. For example doctors yeah their well off. But they are also 35-40 by the time they've paid off their school loans. Income isn't networth.
Canada has it bad because our liberals think they know how to better spend our money than us and so do our conservatives. There is always a program that is essential for security, helping immigrants, helping the french, helping the natives, etc etc, it never ends.
It is amazing though how people criticize the billionaires' for doing so well but it is very rare the ideas that found companies at the size that they have to make their billions. It isn't "unfair" unless they got an uncommon reward for a common skill.
Exactly. If everything stayed the same and companies were free to just increase their prices the whole argument for higher gas taxes, CO2 taxes etc would fail because people would continue to buy those services. If they price the internet to the point where it becomes more expensive for me to have a connection to pirate my movies than I'll start buying DVDs, renting them, or spend more time trying to track down people that have it already. The government isn't trying to make the tax so large that it reduces the usage of the internet but more of a usage based billing way of funding their spy efforts. The sad thing here is even though you often pay for services you don't like this one is explicit. Really rubs me the wrong way that there is a good chance the tax would be on a percentage basis and I'd get paying more for something I don't want than the average person because I'm a heavy user with a top of the line package. I might be wrong but Assad Al bin Boom probably doesn't need the porn bandwidth I do to send his emails back to Al Qaeda.
Yeah except the 99% feed themselves, went to school, had vacations, raised kids, fought wars, drove on roads, went to hospitals etc, and then yeah the 1% gets the rest. A big problem with this concept of "the 1%" is that the 1% changes year to year. Similarly the bottom 20% are about 1/2 new workers and students. They don't stay at the bottom 20% their whole life and it seems pretty obvious that the people that have no experience and are just starting out "at the bottom" will have "at the bottom" wages.
I'm not arguing that a large income distribution doesn't exist it just isn't as bad as it is made out to be and a lot of the bottom are people that are temporarily at the bottom and who might very well have come from somewhere much higher up the year before. Since the statistics are usually quoted as salary for example that fat cat CEO that got 40M in 2007 might have been working for $1 for a couple years. He's not poor but he is low income. Also the truly poor if you actually account for the cost of the services they get for free (at least in the US, can't really count it in more socialist countries where everyone gets it) the cost of their healthcare is covered, food programs etc, several thousand dollars a year of goods in kind which often is more than they earn in salary (so if accounted for would divide the top 1%/bottom 1% at least in half).
While true I hate the continual addition of different types of taxes. It is horribly in efficient. Lets say the bill passes. Rather than add some revenue from existing taxes to pay for it (or the opposite: remove some unnecessary tax credits) they dream up another tax that than has to be collected, another dozen people get jobs doing nothing but making sure people pay this particular 0.1% of the governments revenue etc. Same thing with arguments for gambling as an alternative revenue source, horribly in efficient but sadly hidden tax everywhere distracts people from the total amount of their money that does to government.
Not sure where you work but in Canada even if you are salaried you are still entitled to overtime. So you are "salaried" in that you aren't keeping track of your hours. But once you hit 44hrs they have to pay you time and a half. So they still have to go through the math and figure out what you are making per work hour and then give you 1.5X that. A few jobs are exempt from this law though the biggest category being people that are paid at least 2X minimum wage (~20/hr) and have "significant control over their work and working hours". I seem to recall that was the way that US employers get around that for software engineers too they just say that they are professionals that manage their own schedule. That said if you have something like say 9am standup meetings that require you to work specific hours you probably can argue against having control over your work hours.
Anyways long story short in Canada if your employer isn't going to pay you for your extra hours when you are on salary they then have to let you control your schedule (a la flextime).
It is worse that that actually. It is a factor that effects productivity but it doesn't in itself say who is productive or not. For example in university I had a colleague that was a de-facto genius, whether he ended up that way afterwards who knows. But regardless he was doing assignments as fast as he could write the answers down everyone else was working all nighters to figure out how to answer the same questions. So: who's more productive the guy that spent 30min doing the work (and he graduated double major physics and math with a 100% 4 year average and his masters thesis already written) or the guys that spent 15hrs on the same assignment and got a 90%?
Time != productivity. I've had the same thing on my end where my boss thought I was working really hard but what he didn't realize is I could script things in bash and had jobs on a supercomputer churning themselves rather than sitting around a terminal firing them off manually like he and his PhD student did before me. A lot of things are just a matter or knowing that a better tool exists (and actually having the freedom to use it).
No what I'm saying is that several employers I've worked for that way. Business cards are no longer being used as a means of communication they are used as a status symbol now: if you aren't sales and you have a business card (at least at the companies I've worked) someone has deemed you "important". You still will likely end up exchanging emails or vcards or whatever but the card shows "hey look this guy rates personal stationary".
My mind, unless you are in sales business cards are just a penis-extension along with a corporate supplied phone, etc. Maybe I've just been working at cheap employers but they all seem to limit cellphones to managers because "they need them" even when it is the drones that are the ones getting paged (yes paged) back to work. Why can't we have an oncall cellphone instead of a oncall pager "because it is cheaper". Ah but the manager having a cellphone that he never gets called on that isn't expensive:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Might work as an effective but expensive tattoo remover think Magneto from the X-men movie with hemoglobin :-)
The problem with alternative apps like acrobat->gimp is that ultimately software is a tool (and so are some users ;-)). If you are a graphics guy with 10+ years experience using an app, you are very very quick at doing hundreds of different things with the software. Through in gimp, sure you might be able to do all the things that you can do in photoshop but there will be a huge learning curve. If you are billing 100+ per hour for your time and some stupid "free" app cuts your productivity in half for a few weeks that is a problem.
Heck the nuisance factor of having to learn something new is a problem for a lot of people that aren't overly interested in tech for tech sake. I had users that were upset that an okay button moved from the left to the right on a form after an upgrade. lmagine how much it would piss you off if someone told you you can't use your favorite shell, or programming language for no technical. You might enjoy learning something new, but it would piss you off because you'd go from an expert to a beginner again and have to relearn simple tasks. Now imagine how much more that would piss people off that don't even like computers in the first place but just use them as a tool.
The better argument I think is to teach people from scratch on the new systems. Run linux in elementary schools. Kids would likely be "bilingual" since they'd likely have a Mac or Win box at home. So they might be unbiased one way or another. But taking people from one OS to another even if just a version upgrade is huge since the productivity losses are likely larger than the cost of the software, and even if it is not you just simply might not have more time to dedicate with learning how to use your computer ie. might have a life that doesn't involve a computer screen, or a business to run that doesn't pay you for learning how to do things you already know ... again.
My understanding is to get the full use out of Sharepoint you need to be using MS Office and other products. The management of versions and such and integration of Office, MS project into the Sharepoint system is huge/pretty much the justification for the system. Otherwise you'd just have a subversion repository or something for your docs but than your revision control/sharing site would be pretty stupid in terms of its understanding of the innards of the documents and what it means (as well as likely a more cludgy integration).
Having to run an emulator to run a piece of software sucks IMO. If you are running an emulator to do your work you might as well be running the real thing. Than you have no issues with, oh crap the latest patch breaks it under wine. If your software is going to break it might as well break because it is broken for everyone, and any work arounds will work for you, versus using some custom hack and hoping it keeps working when the app moves to a new version of .Net or whatever.
A lot of the same arguments can be used for the Mac platform in my opinion though. Admin functions can be locked down even without having a password required at boot, things open the way you left it when you shut down, very simple user interface for most things.Old hardware: not so much, but you are essentially guaranteed capability with the OS from the same era as your machine since the hardware and OS vendor are the same. You got to put up with the vendor arbitrarily deciding that your few year old machine doesn't get the new OS though.
AV should be everywhere. Heck a virus writer just has to hack your browser and they can get most things that interest them since you likely browse the internet to your work, bank etc. The "but linux will ask me first before someone messes me up" thing doesn't really cut it. Most users will install things on their computers that they download. Something that seems trivial like: "oh you need this codec to view this file" and they'll say: "oh yeah that makes sense" and allow the install. They have no idea what the code in the app is, they have no way of knowing if there is a virus payload or not, that is why you need AV. The average user is not anywhere's near cautious enough, and even us technical dorks aren't because we are more likely to want to experiment with different things and install stuff we get for free constantly. Even if the source is available we don't have the time to review every line of code that when then compile from scratch to make sure that what we install is actually the code that is up in the CVS repository etc. In short AV protects us from ourselves :-) At best the "linux doesn't get viruses" means that the subset of uber-geeks that tend to be the current market for linux are knowledgeable enough about computers and computer vulnerabilities to properly manage their systems. That will by definition not be the case for the non-uber-geek crowd.
Dude you have the wrong idea of a cheap system. You might have found a better price but I suspect it is approximately right (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100008120+600038491&QksAutoSuggestion=&ShowDeactivatedMark=False&Configurator=&IsNodeId=1&Subcategory=636&description=&hisInDesc=&Ntk=&CFG=&SpeTabStoreType=&AdvancedSearch=1&srchInDesc=) the cheapest I could find for a 512GB SSD is $600. 3k just for disks is not a cheap system.
You are also dreaming in the same lala land as HDD/nic manufacturers the speed it says on the box and what you'll actually see are two different things. Build the box and then we'll talk.
Well a 360k floppy could probably hold all our documents.It is the porn stash that justifies the 1TB+ drive :-)
So sad about 1M per crazy killed.
Hmm, that they had access to a Windows PC and knew how to code in C? That is pretty much every software developer.
Why does this matter? If it is a compiled program it is just a bunch of instructions. If the OS lets the instructions to run it doesn't much matter what compiler/language was used other than how efficiently it will do the crap it is told too.
The problem at least my understanding of it, is that a lot of the expensive channels (espn, fox etc) in a cable package are subsidized by the junk in the cable package. The cable provider pays for the channels and bundles them in such a way to try to target a family unit effectively. Since a large number (majority?) of households are now single adult/roommates maybe that will change. The problem will be people not willing to pay for all the high cost channels. Say $10 for expn, $5 for fox, $5 for CNN etc. People will say I'm paying 60% of the cost for 20% of the channels might as well keep my cable package.
Where it could win out I think is if they could renegotiate the prices with the channels. Ie. since our customers have specifically picked your channel we know they will be watching it. Thus you'll get more eyeballs for your ads and can sell them for more. So take more money from your advertisers and give us a lower rate. I'm not sure who watches TV now anymore anyways, other than sporting fans. I watch TV maybe 1 hour a week. Anything else I want to watch I download so I have no commercials, don't have to get a dvr, find out when something airs so I can set it up etc. Just check online every couple days see what I missed I want to watch and download away. Then again I live in a country that doesn't have internet piracy laws (yet) so no problems :-)
Foxconn has low margins and a lot of customers not Apple. They could very well lose the business of the other customers. Apple has crazy high margins. It is really hard to think of something both profitable enough and where the Apple brand wouldn't hurt rather than help. For example: buy HPs consulting business, or a big chunk of Google or MS say (would be funny turn around). Yeah okay but Apple isn't really seen as a enterprise partner (starting to change but still).
Exactly. What worth 100B dollars could Apple buy that they also could have a good fit with? They aren't about to buy SAP or controlling interest in oracle, or 2 HP's, or 3 Dells, or 5 Nokias, etc. There just aren't enough big enough targets out there, and even if they are they are pretty much worthless because Apple wins by having their systems completely designed as a integrated whole in house. I can't see how Apple + a Facebook, or HP or something makes sense. They still would be two completely different companies so all the "synergies" that deal-makers always like to conjure up are not so easy to imagine.
It should make the shares more valuable. It could end up not getting fully adjusted for, or alternatively it could hype up the stock more (investors expecting even more buy backs in the future for example). But at least in theory all metrics increase (earnings per share, profit per share etc) and things should exactly adjust.
Personally I say ... about freaking time they did something with the money. It is okay to have a war chest, but you actually have to go to war sometime in a reasonable amount of time. Otherwise your investors are effectively paying for a money market account (or whatever income producing junk the company piles the money into). I don't need to pay broker commissions to get a GIC :-)
Yep there is huge amounts of junior positions. Really low end tech support someone that is interested in computers can learn in a few months most of the things they need to know. Then learn like crazy and gradually get trusted with more to the point that you end up a network, server admin, team lead or whatever your goal is.
If you like the software dev side of things try to find something that pulls in your pysch knowledge. That is how I got my first job in programming they needed a computer programmer than knew physics (my bachelors) after that everyone just finds in interesting that I have a variety of skills rather than worry about me not having a CS degree. A couple years dev work, a couple years overseas doing IT and I haven't hand any worries about my not having the degree since. It is the rare development gig that requires you to know the differences between the lexical analyzer and parser in a compiler for example. A lot of the CS stuff never gets used after school (someone probably has a job using each piece but it is rare to find someone that has a job that needs every piece (the only kind of job I can think that would come close would be project manager for Visual Studio, since you'd hit UI, software engineering methods, compiler, probably a lot of pull in from the OS group, etc) games use a specific subset, db uses a specific subset etc. Compilers/IDE are the only thing I can think that hits most if not everything.
Similarly my physics degree: studied quantum mechanics, particle physics, solid state, computational physics, thermo, classical mechanics, general relativity, etc. All I use is my particle physics now and a tiny bit of solid state. Kind of sad really my coworker, also a physicist, and I had a debate of why buses don't use seat belts. Her argument was "their bigger so your safer". I was thinking yeah but the momentum still has to go somewhere so I think you'd get less of the transfer but still say a 10km/h differential pre to post crash. So I pulled out my highschool physics and started conserving momentum and energy, got my adjusted mass equations crunched the numbers and formed a result assuming elastic collision (figured that was probably worse case since a car shooting off a bus would give it more of a backwards kick than one that sticks to it and just adjusts its mass buy ~10%). Anyways she lost interest and she was a physicist too. So ... 1) You can't keep a woman's interest with conservation equations and 2) Even physicist's often don't even care about physics that they don't actually have to use in their work day to day. Same thing with CS I'm sure once all that graph theory has been learnt it is quickly forgotten for example.
Yeah and people chose to use their browser, and they convinced advertisers to advertise with them. It is amazing with MS search yahoo etc until recently somehow Google is the bad guy. It is the rare case where a company exists without competition. MS might be the closest in the tech world and look how that is working out for them (though to be fair until the last 6 months or so they were hugely undervalued IMHO versus increased revenue. For the last 10 years MS has been written off as doomed but they piled on the billions (probably more like 10s of billions) of revenue in the enterprise space to make up for losses from fewer PC sales.
Anyways the point is there were always Macs, there was Sun workstations, there was linux, early days OS/2 etc etc. Was MS anti-competitive? Yep. Was there still other options for customers? Yep.
Please. You see how shitty discussions people made with the real estate bust. Just because you have money doesn't mean you automatically don't make stupid mistakes with it. As well people that come up with the bs stories about how they came to country x with $100 and made their fortune for the vast majority of cases it is crap. Yeah they might have only had $100, then they worked their ass off, saved like crazy. Came up with an idea gambled on it with what they saved and it worked. So that $1 wouldn't just be $1. It would be 60hrs a week of labour for the next 10 years say. Oh and they'd have to be smart enough to come up with an idea same as that guy with 10M would have to, even if it is just an idea of what company he should buy next.
Besides the 1% isn't 10M networth (though they might have that too, the 1% quoted is usually 1% income. Which will throw in most specialist doctors, CEOs, investment bankers, the top half of lawyers probably etc. For example doctors yeah their well off. But they are also 35-40 by the time they've paid off their school loans. Income isn't networth.
Canada has it bad because our liberals think they know how to better spend our money than us and so do our conservatives. There is always a program that is essential for security, helping immigrants, helping the french, helping the natives, etc etc, it never ends.
It is amazing though how people criticize the billionaires' for doing so well but it is very rare the ideas that found companies at the size that they have to make their billions. It isn't "unfair" unless they got an uncommon reward for a common skill.
Exactly. If everything stayed the same and companies were free to just increase their prices the whole argument for higher gas taxes, CO2 taxes etc would fail because people would continue to buy those services. If they price the internet to the point where it becomes more expensive for me to have a connection to pirate my movies than I'll start buying DVDs, renting them, or spend more time trying to track down people that have it already. The government isn't trying to make the tax so large that it reduces the usage of the internet but more of a usage based billing way of funding their spy efforts. The sad thing here is even though you often pay for services you don't like this one is explicit. Really rubs me the wrong way that there is a good chance the tax would be on a percentage basis and I'd get paying more for something I don't want than the average person because I'm a heavy user with a top of the line package. I might be wrong but Assad Al bin Boom probably doesn't need the porn bandwidth I do to send his emails back to Al Qaeda.
Yeah except the 99% feed themselves, went to school, had vacations, raised kids, fought wars, drove on roads, went to hospitals etc, and then yeah the 1% gets the rest. A big problem with this concept of "the 1%" is that the 1% changes year to year. Similarly the bottom 20% are about 1/2 new workers and students. They don't stay at the bottom 20% their whole life and it seems pretty obvious that the people that have no experience and are just starting out "at the bottom" will have "at the bottom" wages.
I'm not arguing that a large income distribution doesn't exist it just isn't as bad as it is made out to be and a lot of the bottom are people that are temporarily at the bottom and who might very well have come from somewhere much higher up the year before. Since the statistics are usually quoted as salary for example that fat cat CEO that got 40M in 2007 might have been working for $1 for a couple years. He's not poor but he is low income. Also the truly poor if you actually account for the cost of the services they get for free (at least in the US, can't really count it in more socialist countries where everyone gets it) the cost of their healthcare is covered, food programs etc, several thousand dollars a year of goods in kind which often is more than they earn in salary (so if accounted for would divide the top 1%/bottom 1% at least in half).
While true I hate the continual addition of different types of taxes. It is horribly in efficient. Lets say the bill passes. Rather than add some revenue from existing taxes to pay for it (or the opposite: remove some unnecessary tax credits) they dream up another tax that than has to be collected, another dozen people get jobs doing nothing but making sure people pay this particular 0.1% of the governments revenue etc. Same thing with arguments for gambling as an alternative revenue source, horribly in efficient but sadly hidden tax everywhere distracts people from the total amount of their money that does to government.
Not sure where you work but in Canada even if you are salaried you are still entitled to overtime. So you are "salaried" in that you aren't keeping track of your hours. But once you hit 44hrs they have to pay you time and a half. So they still have to go through the math and figure out what you are making per work hour and then give you 1.5X that. A few jobs are exempt from this law though the biggest category being people that are paid at least 2X minimum wage (~20/hr) and have "significant control over their work and working hours". I seem to recall that was the way that US employers get around that for software engineers too they just say that they are professionals that manage their own schedule. That said if you have something like say 9am standup meetings that require you to work specific hours you probably can argue against having control over your work hours.
Anyways long story short in Canada if your employer isn't going to pay you for your extra hours when you are on salary they then have to let you control your schedule (a la flextime).
It is worse that that actually. It is a factor that effects productivity but it doesn't in itself say who is productive or not. For example in university I had a colleague that was a de-facto genius, whether he ended up that way afterwards who knows. But regardless he was doing assignments as fast as he could write the answers down everyone else was working all nighters to figure out how to answer the same questions. So: who's more productive the guy that spent 30min doing the work (and he graduated double major physics and math with a 100% 4 year average and his masters thesis already written) or the guys that spent 15hrs on the same assignment and got a 90%?
Time != productivity. I've had the same thing on my end where my boss thought I was working really hard but what he didn't realize is I could script things in bash and had jobs on a supercomputer churning themselves rather than sitting around a terminal firing them off manually like he and his PhD student did before me. A lot of things are just a matter or knowing that a better tool exists (and actually having the freedom to use it).
No what I'm saying is that several employers I've worked for that way. Business cards are no longer being used as a means of communication they are used as a status symbol now: if you aren't sales and you have a business card (at least at the companies I've worked) someone has deemed you "important". You still will likely end up exchanging emails or vcards or whatever but the card shows "hey look this guy rates personal stationary".
My mind, unless you are in sales business cards are just a penis-extension along with a corporate supplied phone, etc. Maybe I've just been working at cheap employers but they all seem to limit cellphones to managers because "they need them" even when it is the drones that are the ones getting paged (yes paged) back to work. Why can't we have an oncall cellphone instead of a oncall pager "because it is cheaper". Ah but the manager having a cellphone that he never gets called on that isn't expensive :-)