>Every licensed driver, as a valid driver's license is a proxy for a birth certificate for this purpose.
That's fewer people than you think, and not all trans people are old enough to have one, and a drivers license can be changed if you legally change sex. They chose 'birth certificate' on purpose - exactly because, unlike a drivers license, it cannot be changed.
>Many of these bills exempt a single-digit-year-old child accompanied by his or her parent of the opposite sex Not all of them though - but at least some of them must have heard this common complaint I guess. That said - these bills remain a nightmare for enforcement anyway. There's already been a bunch of people who were falsely accused of using a bathroom not matching their biological sex - by people who just thought they didn't look feminine/masculine enough to be a women/man. The irony is that trans people try very hard to be indistinguishable - it's the only way to survive - and frankly a trans-women will usually present and appear more feminine than average - which means a great many women look less feminine than a trans-women does (and vice versa).
The biggest clencher of all of course... is that the people who write these bills always forget about trans-men, and seem oblivious to the fact that they just sent a bunch of ultra-masculine, muscled 6-foot-four dudes with beards into the ladies room because they happen to have a vulva.
And of course, most of them never think to add an exclusion for intersex people -if your genitals are ambiguous, you don't get to pee at all ?
Double happens to be the law where I live. That's where it comes from. But it's probably a decent basic standard for law.
The problem with 'let workers negotiate' is it works perfectly for people with rare skills - and it leaves the people who need protection the most, have the least freedom to change jobs with nothing. They don't get to negotiate - they get to put up or shut up, obey or starve. The low-end workers, the ones who are cheap and easy to replace - they end up screwed. And they happen to be the vast majority of people. Like it or not, most people are too stupid to get the kind of skills and education that will put them above that point. Now I know that slashdot libertarians like to mock them and live in the secure belief that stupid people deserve to be poor. Trouble is - they are also the majority - and the economy exists to serve them as much as it does us. It's a system to distribute resources to the people - NOTHING else matters, how it does it - not important, all that matters is how WELL it does it. The more resources the people can access, and the more people can access it - the more successful an economy is at the ONLY measure that actually matters because it's the measure based on the whole reason we bother with all the complexity of having one in the first place.
An economy where the majority get almost nothing - is a failed economy in and off itself. It has not distributed resources to the people. It's not inarguable that, that very failure and the hope of changing the system so stacked against them is what just put a deranged moron in the white house. That's the trouble when you think the little people don't matter - it turns out they may be stupid, but they are very, very powerful - and they tend not to use that power wisely. They use it to elect a conman to the highest office in the land because they lack the capacity to recognize a con. You can delay their wrath by getting them to blame OTHER poor people for their misery - just as Trump did, and by pretending not to be one of the elites they have come to hate - just as Trump did, but history says such delaying tactics only work for a little while. They may not be very intelligent or wise or educated - but they aren't THAT dumb either. Eventually - they learn better. When that happens - you end up with a fucking revolution on your hands.
At no step in the process is the outcome good. Sadly - even the revolution never works because, inevitably it just puts another bunch of exploitative bastards in charge - only now they tend to be more openly brutal.
The one thing that DOES work - is having people in charge who make a genuine efffort to improve things for the people who don't have much to offer in the libertarian parlance. Who build solid social-security networks, who put in place good labour laws, who protect unions, who believe the governments job is to be the great ENEMY of big business (like both Rooseveldts did) - which, ironically, is the ONLY way to make government a friend to SMALL business. You cannot be acting friendly to both because what helps one inevitably harms the other. Small businesses are competition for big businesses - promoting them hurts teh big corporations, and vice versa. The kind of neoliberal/neoconservative (the name varies depending on where you are) ideology which has ruled politics since the 1980s have only promoted big business and consistently screwed over the rest of humanity. In 2008 they stole a full third of all the wealth ever created - plunging the world into chaos - and instead of throwing the bastards in jail, we fucking bailed them out - we gave them money for stealing our money. The last great horror of the Bush administration. This is not a sustainable way to run the world - it MUST lead to revolution. Brexit and Trump was only the start.
Now notice how Geert Wilders suffered a humiliating defeat in the Netherlands - despite being a Trumpian candidate in this era. Why did the Dutch ultimate turn out in the highest numbers in decades to go vote against the man who had led the polls for a year, and was promising the same kind of things that Trump was ? Why did the rhetoric fail there? Because the Dutch take care of their people.
Essentially yes. More specifically by updating the civil rights act to recognise classes that were not covered when it was created - including LGBTQI folks. Others who may well belong on the list but aren't include the Romani - I mean they didn't even get the right to vote until 1992.
Its simpler than that though: either the government has the right to inspect and question everybody's genitalia, or the do not have the right to inspect or question anybody's genitalia. The moment you are proposing a law that subjects some citizens to a government scrutiny and not others - you have a violation of a basic human right: the right to equality before the law. The bathroom bills are just the noisy frontline. What this really is, is government claiming the right to question whether your genitals match your outfit - or did not match it a long time ago. The 'birth certificate' is based on the only proxy for gender available with a newborn: genitals and any claims about this that pretends it is not an attempt to reduce people to nothing more than genitals is therefore a flagrant and obvious lie.
And seriously... who the fuck carries their birth certificate around everywhere ? If some douchenozzle accuses you of not being feminine/masculimr enough for the bathroom you are in how the hell do you prove its the one the law forces you to use ?
It gets sillier... imagine this conversation. My 3yr old: daddy I have to go. Me: sorry my love, mommy is not here, you are not old enough that I can send you to a public bathroom alone, I cannot legally go with you and you cannot legally come with me. My daughter: but daddy I really have to go ! Me: you know what: piss on the floor right here my love. I want to see the judge who will convict us for it when its actually illegal for you to use the potty.
Plenty of moms are gonna have the same problem with their sons too.
Without minimum wage, in fact, what you tend to end up with is islands - areas with well to do people who are consumers and workers who live in poverty and gain no benefit whatsoever because the 'reduced prices' never quite reduce enough to allow them to become customers.
In the last few decades we've basically seen that switch from a national phenomenon to a global one. With 'worker countries' that consume very little, and 'consumption' countries that do. But that's not sustainable - the more the process goes on, the fewer people in the consumption countries can be consumers - because more and more of their jobs are going to the worker countries - but the worker countries rarely become consumer countries because their entire economy is BUILT on making labour cheaper than the people who consume things. We're busy causing that to happen right now.
Of course it's not an instant process - your middle class generally keeps consumption going for quite some time, it takes a while before the race-to-the-bottom starts hitting THEM - and generally that process is slow enough that, by the time THEY become poor - you've been able to outsource either working or buying to somewhere else. But you can't do that forever. The world is only getting smaller.
Though, that being said, trans rights are a debate about human rights. Either transgender people are people, and thus deserver full and equal rights, or they aren't and don't (a position I personally will not entertain). But debates like THAT belong at NEITHER the state nor municipal level -they belong at the federal level. Basic human rights are a federal matter because NOBODY should be denied them. If these are human rights - it's congress' job to protect them - and the states are NOT empowered to decide otherwise, nor should they be.
>The CBO has published a lot of terrible shit with respect to Obamacare. Its role is throw out propaganda studies at a time when no one else has studied the problem.
Funny how, when the CBO contained a clause you could spin as a bad thing - republicans loved it, now they pretend it's meaningless because it's dissing trumpkill.
>That's why we don't see significant differences IMHO between states with private prisons and those without. It's not just the private businesses that profit from a high incarceration rate. And yet EVERY SINGLE ONE of those corruption cases I cited happened in a state with a private prison to pay the bribes. In fact you're just plain wrong - a public prison has every incentive to make their fixed budget stretch as far as possible, that means as few people inside as possible.
To my mind this is fundamentally wrong. There is a reason that municipal governments exist - because what's good for the state may not be good in any particular city in that state. It SHOULD be possible for a municipality to make laws or implement programs that do no exist elsewhere in the state and the state should not be able to prevent this unless there is a truly compelling reason (like a constitutional violation). This becomes particularly egregious when you have liberal cities in red states- surely, at least within their own cities, the liberal voters' beliefs should get some traction into the laws they live under ?
It's a gross overreach when a state government interferes with a municipality's attempts to provide free broadband after ISPs failed to cover their citizens.
It is a gross overreach when a city votes to protect trans-rights and a state-law then not only changes the default law in the state to one that denies trans rights but also invalidates the local municipal law and prohibits municipalities from making such laws themselves.
It's a gross overreach when a city, for whatever reason, is told by the state what regulations they can or cannot have on what kinds of businesses. Some business regulations must be on the state or even federal level since they regulate activities which do not remain confined to borders (air and water pollution regulations for example), others are entirely local in their impact and whether those impacts are positive or negative thus entirely depends on the local context - and the municipality should be able to make local rules as appropriate for such activities.
But Friedman idiotically forgot that it costs money to be ABLE to work. You know for food and shelter and transport and the like.
Besides he was an Austrian meaning NOTHING he says EVER counts as "proven" because Austrian economics is a pseudo-scientific cult that rejects empiricism and that is better known as BULLSHIT.
> If a company sucks AND PEOPLE HAVE OTHER OPTIONS people quit
FTFY. Exploiting their lack of other options is the ultimate definition of asshole. Or you could use the older name if you prefer: bondage (which is really just a nicer name for 'slavery').
There's a huge difference between "sometimes when it's an emergency" and "all the time" - trouble is that "all the time" is the norm when unions are not there to prevent it.
More importantly - on those occasions when the company requires me to fix their bad management by working overtime, I demand the right to get paid double-time for doing so. All people deserve that. You take away my time with my daughter -you had better compensate me for that - double.
And that's why libertarianism is a crime against humanity and the market CANNOT be allowed to set wages unregulated - because wages are NOT just another consumable in a market. They are parts of people's LIVES. Human BEINGS.
You know what the key thing about human beings is ? THeir the PURPOSE. Their why we have economies. The economy exists to serve the people NOT the other way around. And never EVER denigrate workers for being greedy - because you know what ELSE workers are ? Consumers.
Good fucking luck selling ANYTHING in a market full of underpaid workers - because underpaid workers = consumers without money = no demand = no customers = bankrupt business.
Labour, like everything else in the economy - must be sold at a profit to be sustainable - and if the market won't pay a profitable price for it - then it cannot be sustained. But UNLIKE everything else in the economy - if the labour market collapses because the demand is too low -then EVERY OTHER BUSINESS COLLAPSES WITH IT. Because labour is not JUST a commoddity - it's also the business that provides all the buying power to consumers, the business that pays nearly all the taxes and funds all the government services and infrastructure - including roads and the military and the police and the judges. It's the fundamental business upon which all other economic activity relies. Make it unprofitable - and there is no economy, because you cannot have an economy without customers.
It's very simple - if you are asking people to work unpaid overtime - you're an asshole. If there is too much work for the current people to do in 8 hours a day - then you're obligated to your share-holders to hire more workers, NOT to overwork the current staff. Your supposed to meet demand WITHOUT being a dickwad.
Unions are one of the key ways we try to ensure a company that needs 16 hours of work done a day hires TWO people instead of just one (which actually CREATES jobs by preventing over-work of the existing staff). Frankly if your company needs to operate 24/7 and you have less than 3 people per role then you're an asshole who deserves to be out of business (in order to open up the market for a non-asshole company).
You're ignoring the massive subsidation being done by the hoodwinked drivers. In South Africa the average Uber driver makes about R1400 per week. It is physically impossible in South Africa for the amount of driving you have to do to make that - to fuel and maintain a vehicle for less than R2000 per week. That's assuming the car was bought for cash.
Their workers are actually operating at a loss. And the company is getting away with it because badly educated (often barely literate) drivers don't realize the maintenance costs - especially since those tend to come in the form of lump sum expenses months down the line.
I don't have numbers for other countries but the odds of it being different elsewhere are somewhere between zero and fuckall.
Typical (wrong) thinking. Firstly basic research is practically non-existent in the private sector and always has been and always will be- because the private sector wants profit and the vast majority of basic research does not lead to anything you can profit from. You need to study EVERYTHING to find the few things that lead to progress (and profit). That's just way too high risk for the private sector. There's a reason that public universities do most of the world's basic research - they can afford to because they don't have a profit motive. Indeed, I believe that the profit motive is fundamentally incompatible with the scientific method. Science demands your results be freely shared- otherwise it cannot be replicated and without replication it's not science anymore. Notice the problems we're having with pharma where much of the research cannot be independently verified because the for-profit stages of it adds 'secret sauce' that are not published. That means -we cannot independently confirm the validity of their results. That makes it not science anymore.
But there's another problem with the "small government" rhetoric. It leads to oppression. When an essential public service is removed - the private sector takes it over, and inevitably usurp much of government's power. That's not a good thing in a free country, because the private sector doesn't have the accountability restrictions that government has, it isn't subject to the checks and balances government is - so that power will inevitably be abused as thoroughly as in the worst dictatorships. Public prisons have every incentive to rehabilitate and reduce recidivism. But private prisons have every incentive to maximise the prison population - and so the very goal of having prisons is not part of their incentives. More-over, since the advent of private prisons there have been numerous scandals where private prison companies were found bribing judges to impose excessively harsh sentences for minor infractions - because it's to their advantage to get as many people in there as possible and the less deserving the inmates are the cheaper they are to manage.
Same goes for pretty much any public service. At BEST the outcome is that a lot fewer people have access to the service - after all private industry has no reason to make it available to people who cannot pay. This can, by itself, lead to disastrous outcomes - one house without water means a whole city is at risk of a cholera outbreak. One person without access to adequate healthcare puts EVERYBODY at risk of pandemic outbreaks. And that's the BEST case scenario. The more likely scenario is that companies use access to the service to extort and control people and force them to do other things they do NOT want to do. The republcans made a big deal about a clause in the CBO report on Obamacare which said it would lead to a million lost jobs. "Proof" they said that "Obamacare kills jobs". Except they were lying to you about what the report actually said. That million lost jobs were all VOLUNTARY. What that report ACTUALLY predicted was that lots of people who are held hostage in a job they don't want ONLY for healthcare access would be free to QUIT that job to go get a job that pays more, to go study so they can get better qualifications, to go start a small business - because employers would no longer be able to use healthcare access to blackmail people into staying in shitty jobs. In other words - a pure good thing. Just a slight decrease in how privatised healthcare was made people, over-all, far more free than they were before.
A job you cannot quit without dying is not a job at all - it's slavery with better disguised chains.
I care about what money is spent on far more than I will ever care about how much is spent. Feed Granny. Pay the teachers top dollar. Make medicare available to all. Reduce the military to five guys taking turns with one bb-gun.
No actually - when they did it that was not where anybody else was heading. The supercomputing world was still ruled by Seymore Cray who was convinced that clusters could never compete with massive-chip systems in either cost or power. And he still ruled the market.
NASA however, could not afford his computers anymore - and you know what they say about necessity and invention. So while others had theorised clusters before - nobody had tried to solve the issues of how to practically BUILD a super-computing cluster because the only game in the supercomputing town wanted none of it. NASA made them work - with beowulf - and it's noteworthy for it's impact (which was enhanced because NASA open-sourced the technology). Within two years the same idea was being used for redundancy and high-availability designs (expanding on the original 'build a cheap supercomputer' concept. Every cluster in every data center in the world today is a direct descendent of NASA's design. It's a cornerstone of 21st century computing - and in the research side it's how EVERY super-computer is built now. But NASA pioneered it - when every expert thought it couldn't be done.
I recently saw an American claim that "the moon landing program did everything with a commodore 64 and hasn't contributed anything since". Which, if it was true, would mean they'd unlocked the secrets of time-travel considering that the Appollo program ended in 1972 and the first C64 wasn't actually built until 1980 - not to mention the Commodore64 was made-in-Britain: hardly an American contribution, when it was first unveiled American companies were flabbergasted at what it offered for 500-dollars, a price they couldn't come close to profitably matching. The answer, by the way, was vertical integration: Commodore owned their own Chip-FAB and this meant they could easily test multiple chip designs quite cheaply and iteratively develop their chips because they could quickly make one in-house to see how it performed. Exactly the OPPOSITE of the current model of "outsource everything and only focus on your core business".
Either way - the claim tells you something about the level of understanding many American's have off the issues they form opinions on - and even the latter part of the claim is flagrantly untrue. NASA has, in act, contributed greatly to computer science - among the most noteworthy achievements was the invention of clusters.
>The federal budget isn't an endless stream of money to be spent on whatever whim of the moment you have.
A program started by Eisenhower 70 years ago is hardly a 'whim of the moment' now is it ? More-over - Trump is making ZERO effort to reduce the budget anyway, that's not at all on the cards: he is merely redirecting funds from programs that save lives to programs that kill people (he is pushing every saving int further o increasing a military budget that was massively overbudgeted 40 years ago already). Why do that ? So he can give cushy no-bid contracts to his friends to sell the army even MORE tanks they neither need nor want.
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>Every licensed driver, as a valid driver's license is a proxy for a birth certificate for this purpose.
That's fewer people than you think, and not all trans people are old enough to have one, and a drivers license can be changed if you legally change sex. They chose 'birth certificate' on purpose - exactly because, unlike a drivers license, it cannot be changed.
>Many of these bills exempt a single-digit-year-old child accompanied by his or her parent of the opposite sex
Not all of them though - but at least some of them must have heard this common complaint I guess. That said - these bills remain a nightmare for enforcement anyway. There's already been a bunch of people who were falsely accused of using a bathroom not matching their biological sex - by people who just thought they didn't look feminine/masculine enough to be a women/man. The irony is that trans people try very hard to be indistinguishable - it's the only way to survive - and frankly a trans-women will usually present and appear more feminine than average - which means a great many women look less feminine than a trans-women does (and vice versa).
The biggest clencher of all of course... is that the people who write these bills always forget about trans-men, and seem oblivious to the fact that they just sent a bunch of ultra-masculine, muscled 6-foot-four dudes with beards into the ladies room because they happen to have a vulva.
And of course, most of them never think to add an exclusion for intersex people -if your genitals are ambiguous, you don't get to pee at all ?
Double happens to be the law where I live. That's where it comes from. But it's probably a decent basic standard for law.
The problem with 'let workers negotiate' is it works perfectly for people with rare skills - and it leaves the people who need protection the most, have the least freedom to change jobs with nothing. They don't get to negotiate - they get to put up or shut up, obey or starve. The low-end workers, the ones who are cheap and easy to replace - they end up screwed. And they happen to be the vast majority of people.
Like it or not, most people are too stupid to get the kind of skills and education that will put them above that point. Now I know that slashdot libertarians like to mock them and live in the secure belief that stupid people deserve to be poor. Trouble is - they are also the majority - and the economy exists to serve them as much as it does us. It's a system to distribute resources to the people - NOTHING else matters, how it does it - not important, all that matters is how WELL it does it. The more resources the people can access, and the more people can access it - the more successful an economy is at the ONLY measure that actually matters because it's the measure based on the whole reason we bother with all the complexity of having one in the first place.
An economy where the majority get almost nothing - is a failed economy in and off itself. It has not distributed resources to the people. It's not inarguable that, that very failure and the hope of changing the system so stacked against them is what just put a deranged moron in the white house. That's the trouble when you think the little people don't matter - it turns out they may be stupid, but they are very, very powerful - and they tend not to use that power wisely. They use it to elect a conman to the highest office in the land because they lack the capacity to recognize a con. You can delay their wrath by getting them to blame OTHER poor people for their misery - just as Trump did, and by pretending not to be one of the elites they have come to hate - just as Trump did, but history says such delaying tactics only work for a little while. They may not be very intelligent or wise or educated - but they aren't THAT dumb either. Eventually - they learn better. When that happens - you end up with a fucking revolution on your hands.
At no step in the process is the outcome good. Sadly - even the revolution never works because, inevitably it just puts another bunch of exploitative bastards in charge - only now they tend to be more openly brutal.
The one thing that DOES work - is having people in charge who make a genuine efffort to improve things for the people who don't have much to offer in the libertarian parlance. Who build solid social-security networks, who put in place good labour laws, who protect unions, who believe the governments job is to be the great ENEMY of big business (like both Rooseveldts did) - which, ironically, is the ONLY way to make government a friend to SMALL business. You cannot be acting friendly to both because what helps one inevitably harms the other. Small businesses are competition for big businesses - promoting them hurts teh big corporations, and vice versa.
The kind of neoliberal/neoconservative (the name varies depending on where you are) ideology which has ruled politics since the 1980s have only promoted big business and consistently screwed over the rest of humanity. In 2008 they stole a full third of all the wealth ever created - plunging the world into chaos - and instead of throwing the bastards in jail, we fucking bailed them out - we gave them money for stealing our money. The last great horror of the Bush administration.
This is not a sustainable way to run the world - it MUST lead to revolution. Brexit and Trump was only the start.
Now notice how Geert Wilders suffered a humiliating defeat in the Netherlands - despite being a Trumpian candidate in this era. Why did the Dutch ultimate turn out in the highest numbers in decades to go vote against the man who had led the polls for a year, and was promising the same kind of things that Trump was ? Why did the rhetoric fail there? Because the Dutch take care of their people.
Essentially yes. More specifically by updating the civil rights act to recognise classes that were not covered when it was created - including LGBTQI folks. Others who may well belong on the list but aren't include the Romani - I mean they didn't even get the right to vote until 1992.
And I was arguing that the federal government should do its fucking job.
Its simpler than that though: either the government has the right to inspect and question everybody's genitalia, or the do not have the right to inspect or question anybody's genitalia.
The moment you are proposing a law that subjects some citizens to a government scrutiny and not others - you have a violation of a basic human right: the right to equality before the law.
The bathroom bills are just the noisy frontline. What this really is, is government claiming the right to question whether your genitals match your outfit - or did not match it a long time ago. The 'birth certificate' is based on the only proxy for gender available with a newborn: genitals and any claims about this that pretends it is not an attempt to reduce people to nothing more than genitals is therefore a flagrant and obvious lie.
And seriously ... who the fuck carries their birth certificate around everywhere ? If some douchenozzle accuses you of not being feminine/masculimr enough for the bathroom you are in how the hell do you prove its the one the law forces you to use ?
It gets sillier... imagine this conversation.
My 3yr old: daddy I have to go.
Me: sorry my love, mommy is not here, you are not old enough that I can send you to a public bathroom alone, I cannot legally go with you and you cannot legally come with me.
My daughter: but daddy I really have to go !
Me: you know what: piss on the floor right here my love. I want to see the judge who will convict us for it when its actually illegal for you to use the potty.
Plenty of moms are gonna have the same problem with their sons too.
Actually - yes, quite often.
Without minimum wage, in fact, what you tend to end up with is islands - areas with well to do people who are consumers and workers who live in poverty and gain no benefit whatsoever because the 'reduced prices' never quite reduce enough to allow them to become customers.
In the last few decades we've basically seen that switch from a national phenomenon to a global one. With 'worker countries' that consume very little, and 'consumption' countries that do. But that's not sustainable - the more the process goes on, the fewer people in the consumption countries can be consumers - because more and more of their jobs are going to the worker countries - but the worker countries rarely become consumer countries because their entire economy is BUILT on making labour cheaper than the people who consume things. We're busy causing that to happen right now.
Of course it's not an instant process - your middle class generally keeps consumption going for quite some time, it takes a while before the race-to-the-bottom starts hitting THEM - and generally that process is slow enough that, by the time THEY become poor - you've been able to outsource either working or buying to somewhere else.
But you can't do that forever. The world is only getting smaller.
Actually, yes it would be.
Though, that being said, trans rights are a debate about human rights. Either transgender people are people, and thus deserver full and equal rights, or they aren't and don't (a position I personally will not entertain). But debates like THAT belong at NEITHER the state nor municipal level -they belong at the federal level. Basic human rights are a federal matter because NOBODY should be denied them. If these are human rights - it's congress' job to protect them - and the states are NOT empowered to decide otherwise, nor should they be.
>The CBO has published a lot of terrible shit with respect to Obamacare. Its role is throw out propaganda studies at a time when no one else has studied the problem.
Funny how, when the CBO contained a clause you could spin as a bad thing - republicans loved it, now they pretend it's meaningless because it's dissing trumpkill.
>That's why we don't see significant differences IMHO between states with private prisons and those without. It's not just the private businesses that profit from a high incarceration rate.
And yet EVERY SINGLE ONE of those corruption cases I cited happened in a state with a private prison to pay the bribes. In fact you're just plain wrong - a public prison has every incentive to make their fixed budget stretch as far as possible, that means as few people inside as possible.
To my mind this is fundamentally wrong. There is a reason that municipal governments exist - because what's good for the state may not be good in any particular city in that state. It SHOULD be possible for a municipality to make laws or implement programs that do no exist elsewhere in the state and the state should not be able to prevent this unless there is a truly compelling reason (like a constitutional violation). This becomes particularly egregious when you have liberal cities in red states- surely, at least within their own cities, the liberal voters' beliefs should get some traction into the laws they live under ?
It's a gross overreach when a state government interferes with a municipality's attempts to provide free broadband after ISPs failed to cover their citizens.
It is a gross overreach when a city votes to protect trans-rights and a state-law then not only changes the default law in the state to one that denies trans rights but also invalidates the local municipal law and prohibits municipalities from making such laws themselves.
It's a gross overreach when a city, for whatever reason, is told by the state what regulations they can or cannot have on what kinds of businesses. Some business regulations must be on the state or even federal level since they regulate activities which do not remain confined to borders (air and water pollution regulations for example), others are entirely local in their impact and whether those impacts are positive or negative thus entirely depends on the local context - and the municipality should be able to make local rules as appropriate for such activities.
You know the kind of comment for which we have an 'insightful' mod ? Yeah, yours was the exact opposite of that.
But Friedman idiotically forgot that it costs money to be ABLE to work. You know for food and shelter and transport and the like.
Besides he was an Austrian meaning NOTHING he says EVER counts as "proven" because Austrian economics is a pseudo-scientific cult that rejects empiricism and that is better known as BULLSHIT.
It's the homeopathy of economics.
> If a company sucks AND PEOPLE HAVE OTHER OPTIONS people quit
FTFY.
Exploiting their lack of other options is the ultimate definition of asshole. Or you could use the older name if you prefer: bondage (which is really just a nicer name for 'slavery').
There's a huge difference between "sometimes when it's an emergency" and "all the time" - trouble is that "all the time" is the norm when unions are not there to prevent it.
More importantly - on those occasions when the company requires me to fix their bad management by working overtime, I demand the right to get paid double-time for doing so. All people deserve that. You take away my time with my daughter -you had better compensate me for that - double.
And that's why libertarianism is a crime against humanity and the market CANNOT be allowed to set wages unregulated - because wages are NOT just another consumable in a market. They are parts of people's LIVES. Human BEINGS.
You know what the key thing about human beings is ? THeir the PURPOSE. Their why we have economies. The economy exists to serve the people NOT the other way around. And never EVER denigrate workers for being greedy - because you know what ELSE workers are ? Consumers.
Good fucking luck selling ANYTHING in a market full of underpaid workers - because underpaid workers = consumers without money = no demand = no customers = bankrupt business.
Labour, like everything else in the economy - must be sold at a profit to be sustainable - and if the market won't pay a profitable price for it - then it cannot be sustained. But UNLIKE everything else in the economy - if the labour market collapses because the demand is too low -then EVERY OTHER BUSINESS COLLAPSES WITH IT.
Because labour is not JUST a commoddity - it's also the business that provides all the buying power to consumers, the business that pays nearly all the taxes and funds all the government services and infrastructure - including roads and the military and the police and the judges. It's the fundamental business upon which all other economic activity relies.
Make it unprofitable - and there is no economy, because you cannot have an economy without customers.
It's very simple - if you are asking people to work unpaid overtime - you're an asshole. If there is too much work for the current people to do in 8 hours a day - then you're obligated to your share-holders to hire more workers, NOT to overwork the current staff.
Your supposed to meet demand WITHOUT being a dickwad.
Unions are one of the key ways we try to ensure a company that needs 16 hours of work done a day hires TWO people instead of just one (which actually CREATES jobs by preventing over-work of the existing staff). Frankly if your company needs to operate 24/7 and you have less than 3 people per role then you're an asshole who deserves to be out of business (in order to open up the market for a non-asshole company).
You're ignoring the massive subsidation being done by the hoodwinked drivers. In South Africa the average Uber driver makes about R1400 per week. It is physically impossible in South Africa for the amount of driving you have to do to make that - to fuel and maintain a vehicle for less than R2000 per week. That's assuming the car was bought for cash.
Their workers are actually operating at a loss. And the company is getting away with it because badly educated (often barely literate) drivers don't realize the maintenance costs - especially since those tend to come in the form of lump sum expenses months down the line.
I don't have numbers for other countries but the odds of it being different elsewhere are somewhere between zero and fuckall.
Typical (wrong) thinking. Firstly basic research is practically non-existent in the private sector and always has been and always will be- because the private sector wants profit and the vast majority of basic research does not lead to anything you can profit from. You need to study EVERYTHING to find the few things that lead to progress (and profit). That's just way too high risk for the private sector. There's a reason that public universities do most of the world's basic research - they can afford to because they don't have a profit motive.
Indeed, I believe that the profit motive is fundamentally incompatible with the scientific method. Science demands your results be freely shared- otherwise it cannot be replicated and without replication it's not science anymore. Notice the problems we're having with pharma where much of the research cannot be independently verified because the for-profit stages of it adds 'secret sauce' that are not published. That means -we cannot independently confirm the validity of their results. That makes it not science anymore.
But there's another problem with the "small government" rhetoric. It leads to oppression. When an essential public service is removed - the private sector takes it over, and inevitably usurp much of government's power. That's not a good thing in a free country, because the private sector doesn't have the accountability restrictions that government has, it isn't subject to the checks and balances government is - so that power will inevitably be abused as thoroughly as in the worst dictatorships.
Public prisons have every incentive to rehabilitate and reduce recidivism. But private prisons have every incentive to maximise the prison population - and so the very goal of having prisons is not part of their incentives. More-over, since the advent of private prisons there have been numerous scandals where private prison companies were found bribing judges to impose excessively harsh sentences for minor infractions - because it's to their advantage to get as many people in there as possible and the less deserving the inmates are the cheaper they are to manage.
Same goes for pretty much any public service. At BEST the outcome is that a lot fewer people have access to the service - after all private industry has no reason to make it available to people who cannot pay. This can, by itself, lead to disastrous outcomes - one house without water means a whole city is at risk of a cholera outbreak. One person without access to adequate healthcare puts EVERYBODY at risk of pandemic outbreaks. And that's the BEST case scenario. The more likely scenario is that companies use access to the service to extort and control people and force them to do other things they do NOT want to do.
The republcans made a big deal about a clause in the CBO report on Obamacare which said it would lead to a million lost jobs. "Proof" they said that "Obamacare kills jobs".
Except they were lying to you about what the report actually said. That million lost jobs were all VOLUNTARY. What that report ACTUALLY predicted was that lots of people who are held hostage in a job they don't want ONLY for healthcare access would be free to QUIT that job to go get a job that pays more, to go study so they can get better qualifications, to go start a small business - because employers would no longer be able to use healthcare access to blackmail people into staying in shitty jobs. In other words - a pure good thing. Just a slight decrease in how privatised healthcare was made people, over-all, far more free than they were before.
A job you cannot quit without dying is not a job at all - it's slavery with better disguised chains.
Whether the federal budget is 5-trillion dollars or 5 dollars, what you DO with it will STILL matter more.
Smart investments can turn 5 dollars into 5-trillion dollars. But republicans are only skilled at turning 5-trillion into 5.
I care about what money is spent on far more than I will ever care about how much is spent. Feed Granny. Pay the teachers top dollar. Make medicare available to all. Reduce the military to five guys taking turns with one bb-gun.
It's all the same thing. But to me... that link is so integral it didn't need saying - I guess I had to spell it out for you to see it.
No actually - when they did it that was not where anybody else was heading. The supercomputing world was still ruled by Seymore Cray who was convinced that clusters could never compete with massive-chip systems in either cost or power.
And he still ruled the market.
NASA however, could not afford his computers anymore - and you know what they say about necessity and invention. So while others had theorised clusters before - nobody had tried to solve the issues of how to practically BUILD a super-computing cluster because the only game in the supercomputing town wanted none of it. NASA made them work - with beowulf - and it's noteworthy for it's impact (which was enhanced because NASA open-sourced the technology). Within two years the same idea was being used for redundancy and high-availability designs (expanding on the original 'build a cheap supercomputer' concept.
Every cluster in every data center in the world today is a direct descendent of NASA's design. It's a cornerstone of 21st century computing - and in the research side it's how EVERY super-computer is built now. But NASA pioneered it - when every expert thought it couldn't be done.
Assuming you're American - it wasn't, since this research was done by Australian scientists.
I recently saw an American claim that "the moon landing program did everything with a commodore 64 and hasn't contributed anything since". Which, if it was true, would mean they'd unlocked the secrets of time-travel considering that the Appollo program ended in 1972 and the first C64 wasn't actually built until 1980 - not to mention the Commodore64 was made-in-Britain: hardly an American contribution, when it was first unveiled American companies were flabbergasted at what it offered for 500-dollars, a price they couldn't come close to profitably matching. The answer, by the way, was vertical integration: Commodore owned their own Chip-FAB and this meant they could easily test multiple chip designs quite cheaply and iteratively develop their chips because they could quickly make one in-house to see how it performed. Exactly the OPPOSITE of the current model of "outsource everything and only focus on your core business".
Either way - the claim tells you something about the level of understanding many American's have off the issues they form opinions on - and even the latter part of the claim is flagrantly untrue. NASA has, in act, contributed greatly to computer science - among the most noteworthy achievements was the invention of clusters.
>The federal budget isn't an endless stream of money to be spent on whatever whim of the moment you have.
A program started by Eisenhower 70 years ago is hardly a 'whim of the moment' now is it ? More-over - Trump is making ZERO effort to reduce the budget anyway, that's not at all on the cards: he is merely redirecting funds from programs that save lives to programs that kill people (he is pushing every saving int further o increasing a military budget that was massively overbudgeted 40 years ago already). Why do that ? So he can give cushy no-bid contracts to his friends to sell the army even MORE tanks they neither need nor want.
Seeing as those dogs are not kept alive by humans now nor were they then - they are clearly outside the scope of the analogy.