Actually, yes you are. The part of that money that's not in the buy-back goes to the treasury, which is revenue they then do NOT need to get from taxes. So it means that your tax burden is smaller. The government can pay some of it's bills with money not from your pocket.
So yeah, you are getting a share by having a reduced burden for bills you would otherwise have to pay.
100 Deaths ? Fossil Fuel pollution kills 18000 people every day. For the US alone it's 200-thousand deaths a year. Now, granted, that includes things like factory smog and coal power plants - but cars are a major cause of those deaths. What VW did significantly increased that number over what it would otherwise have been. That figure comes to 550 deaths a day. Let's assume cars are responsible for 10% of those deaths.. This is an EXTREMELY generous assumption since an MIT study showed vehicle emissions are the single LARGEST cause of pollution deaths. We should be pegging this at more like 90% but let's be kind. That's 55 deaths a day from cars.
70% of all passenger diesel cars in the US are VW. That's 39 deaths a day - using the completely unrealistic and generous assumption that a mere 10% of pollution deaths are caused by cars !
VW killed more people every 3 days of the scandal than GM did in the entire 10 years of their scandal COMBINED. The scandal ranged from at least 2008 to 2015, that's 7 years. 7 * 365 * 39 = 99645
Just shy of a hundred-thousand deaths. Get it - VW in this scandal killed a THOUSAND TIMES as many people as GM did.
And that's just in the US - worldwide the problem gets much bigger, and remember VW is one of the two largest sellers in poorer countries (where VW and Toyota rule the roads) - so it would be worse there, those countries typically have poorer standards of healthcare and laws too - which would further exacerbate the death toll. The global death toll from this scandal must be deep in the millions.
And the absolute lack of conscience to experiment on those 100 paralel earths with different approaches - and not mind killing 99*7 Billion people in the failed experiments...
Aaah the old fallacy of pretending weather and climate science is the same thing. It's not, and predicting the weather is a LOT harder than climate. Weather is chaotic, but climate is an average - and averages are a lot easier.
I'll use the same analogy I always use. This is Pete. Pete will be finishing high-school this year. Please predict his final grades. Can't do it can you ? Now what if I give you his academic record up to now ? You can make a prediction and get it right some of the time (you can't know if a weak student will suddenly take fright and work really hard in the last year to greatly raise it, or maybe his dad gets sick and he has to get a job after school to help support the household and they drop signigicantly - you can get it mostly right, but there's too much you can't know which could change it for your prediction to be completely accurate)... this is weather prediction.
Now what if I asked you to predict the distribution of grades in Pete's class ? Well that's easy. 25% will fail. 50% will achieve an average pass and 25% will get distinctions. That's the normal-distribution-curve and I know that the 2017 class will have a normal distribution curve because ALL years have one, in fact if ever there isn't one - that is proof positive in a court of law that there was cheating in the exams ! Predicting the average grades is easy, because the chaotic effects on any particular one is smeared out in the large average. The blips dissapear. Climate is the average weather over a long, long time - that's EASY to predict.
The poster was clearly making a generalisation and suggesting that what he said applied to Muslim's as a whole - and that is flagrantly untrue. Hell oppression of homosexuality isn't even part of Islam - it was imported into that religion by Christianity.
There are 5 Muslim countries in the world today where homosexuality is legal and gays enjoy equal rights. They are, and this is no coincidence, also the only 5 Muslim countries that were never colonised by Europe. Oppression of homosexuality was invented by Westerners and exported (with great success) and now, as this atrocity is losing favour in the west, people who still practise it try to excuse their practise there-off by pointing fingers at the versions happening in other cultures - conveniently forgetting that those cultures are LESS bad than their own was quite recently - and indeed just bad copies of what their own used to be oh such a short time ago, because they adopted it in an effort to compete with their colonial oppressors. The colonists kept justifying their colonization on the grounds that they were "civilized" and the people they were colonizing were "barbarians"...so those people tried to end their subjugation by adopting the practises of their "civilized" masters - so as to appear "civlized" as well.
How ironic that the very "civlization" they adopted, are now held up as proof of their inferiority by the same colonial mindsets that STILL see them as "barbarians" and has never realized the simple truth - all cultures are EXACTLY equally advanced - because they all share the same origins, so they all are exactly the same age.
The fact that global warming is threatening to undo what DDT once achieved (the negative side effects aside) doesn't bother you then, does it ? And reading that article - it's pretty clear the author is a rampant denier of climate change theory as a whole - despite having no expertise about it. All the usual crap about "bad science" and "pushing an agenda" that you get from fringe lunatics who think they are smarter than all other scientists.
That makes me doubt his word even on his actual field of expertise - because his judgement is clearly compromised.
Actually the reason we laugh at your lot is because you'd be among the first to die.
The people who ACTUALLY have the best odds of surviving are NOT the ones who stocked up on anything, because it's utterly impossible to predict what you would need in an unpredictable scenario. The most likely to survive are the ones most adaptable, the ones best able to fashion equipment and resources out of whatever is to hand.
Because it doesn't matter WHAT he needs- he has a way of finding it - he can make it. The guys who go to maker shows, the engineers, hell even the less sedentary programmers - THOSE guys will survive. The ones who know something about stealth will defeat all the ones with huge assault rifles every time. You can't hit what you can't see. Hell my ancestors won a war against the biggest army on earth by being good at stealth, and damn near did it again 10 years later.
3-5 Guys who are good at stealth, and who will kill somebody with every shot - using single shot guns, could and repeatedly DID kill entire batallions armed with the latest and greatest multi-shot Lee-Henry's. Imagine being a battalion facing a small squadron of people who all shot as well as the best army snipers - but were about a thousand times better at hiding. Imagine trying to fight back when the only evidence that they are there at all is every few minutes one of your men collapses with a giant hole in his head. And knowing those guys have no supplies, no food, no more water than they can carry... When they finished destroying your entire battalion without ever showing themselves... they will walk down and take yours. Imagine being part of that, desperately scanning the hills hoping to find a target, knowing you probably won't... knowing that sometime in the next hour - one of those bullets are going to rip through your head too - and there is nothing you can do about it ?
Those are the people who survive- the ones who never take anything much WITH them into a difficult situation because WHATEVER is there, they can turn to their advantage. They'll beet you paranoid nutters every time.
Besides which, the fist major killer in the climate change scenario is likely to be diseases as the heat increases the range of pest-insects, good luck fighting off mosquitos with your AR15 and your crate of canned goods.
If your conspiracy theory was right- all the scientists would be publishing climate denial papers and a few crazy kooks would be publishing papers saying the theory is right. The exact opposite of what actually happens - because the biggest corporate funders have a massive vested interest in climate change being false.
That's just the start. One of the worst outcomes is greatly increasing the range of disease carrying insects - meaning things like Zika and Malaria can hit a LOT more people than it does now.
And lets put that in context. Malaria is now basically confined to a single continent - and even there, just 25% of the continent lies within the range of the single mosquito that spreads it.
Even so, that mosquito is the deadliest living creature on the planet- killing millions of people every year.
Imagine what happens if it's range is increased by just 5% ? If we double it - millions could easily become hundreds of millions.
Imagine if North America was getting as many Malaria cases as Africa is ? Don't imagine the death toll would be any lower - the higher availability of drugs would simply favour the extreme drug-resistant strains, so EVERY infection would be deadly.
I've had Malaria, I was one of the lucky ones who lived through it (mostly because I could afford good medical care and it wasn't an extreme drug resistant strain)... BELIEVE me - you do not want to experience it. It's hell on earth. It may well be somewhere near the top of the list of worst possible ways to die. And climate deniers are basically people who want their kids to die that horrible death.
There is one other possibility, if people who are harmed by cybercrime start suing manufacturers for making insecure IoT devices that get owned and led to the attacks on themselves. Judges are, generally, much harder to buy off than politicians and because of the multi-level appeals process it's much less practical to do. The worst judicial corruption the US has seen in a century were a few small town judges who took massive bribes to send kids to private prisons for truancy. Note that the targets in this case were (1) too poor to afford good lawyers (2) appearing for something so minor that they never expected jailtime to be on the cards (3) children who didn't know better.
Civil suits are a whole different ballgame, and you just need one large, successful class action to hit a company like LG for a 10 million dollar payment, even if the claimants only end up getting 2$ and a starbucks giftcard, before the others will seriously be thinking "maybe investing in some people with the skills to properly secure these things, running pen-tests before we sell them etc. is good business, if only so if we DO get sued we got a bunch of paperwork we can show the jury to prove we really did our due diligence and made every reasonable effort to ensure the devices were safe".
Frankly - such a case is at least potentially viable. It's a bit tricky since the victims generally are not the customers (when your internet fridge joins a botnet - chances are you personally will not be the one whose credit card is wiped out by that botnet) but it makes a lot more sense as an allocation of genuine liability from a harmed party than many other cases that succeed.
Yes, but the very next sentence reads: "It is important to note that gender dysphoria is not an illness as such".
It goes on to say that, if the effects are severe enough to significantly harm the patients ability to live as a functioning member of society it can become an illness. But that is incredibly rare, and generally, how bad the effects are, are entirely divorced from anything related to the patient - they are determined by how accepting the people around the patient are. Patients with plenty of people around them who accept and respect their identity generally live happy lives, those without frequently end up committing suicide.
Assistance in transitioning greatly reduces that suicide risk. Some here have tried to diminish transitioning-assistance by citing the high rate of post-op suicides, but conveniently ignore that, despite being high - that risk is still massively lower than the risk of suicide among transgender people who do not transition (a group which, in fact, has the highest suicide risk of all people by far).
Read up on the Tanzimat for a start - a series of civil rights reforms in the Ottoman empire which, among others, legalized homosexuality.
But that just put an official stamp on something which had been de facto legal all along. Sultans and other elites had been including young men in their harems for centuries - and if the sultans did it, it was by default legal (as per the way the Ottoman society was structured), It wasn't complete equality, there were some weird restrictions (It was only legal if the other man was quite young and the only the older man could be the penetrator).
Except that the supposed discrimination never happened. The trans women was hired, as an out trans person, worked there a few years and was let go - as happens at times. The libreboot person decided she was let go because of her gender (she never claimed to think it had played a role) the FSF said her gender played no role and she was let go simply because the job she was doing had become redundant. Sad but true.
So there is no evidence that there ever *was* any trans discrimination - on the contrary, they were happy to hire a transwomen, knowing she was trans and employed her for a very long time.
Actually - I would add - that getting to pay workers so little that they need welfare to eat AFTER earning a paycheck - is itself another form of corporate welfare. It's allowing the wallmarts' of America to outsource a huge chunk of their wagebill to taxpayers. Which raises valid questions about whether they are really cheaper - considering that you're paying a chunk of the price difference in taxes so the people who work there can eat.
No wonder so few businesses can compete with them - the other businesses have to pay their workers a living wage in order to have workers, they don't get to make you pay their wages for them like wallmart does.
>Wanna behave like a private company? Get treated like one. No taxpayer soup for you.
This is America, they are more likely to get INCREASED taxpayer soup by acting like a private company - considering vast chunk of America's taxes that get used to pay favours to big corporations. BP and Wallmart get far more of your taxes than their welfare dependent workers ever did.
There is another factor - which is that wealth multiplies effect. I really spend my life trying to do good to other people, to uplift people, to help people, to empower people. You know what, all I've done pales into invisibility compared to what the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has done - and I think Bill Gates is a terribly evil person, yet he has done more good in a year than I could achieve if I live to be a thousand.
Why ? Because he has far more financial resources at his disposal, which enables him to do good that affects far more people than I ever could.
But the same goes for evil. A crazy killer may poison a well, it takes a greedy corporation to poison an entire river and killed hundreds or thousands of innocent people downstream. A crazy, evil person may become a rapist killer. How many could victims can he conceivably affect ? Even the most successfull serial killers are in the low-twenties. Harold Shipman got (probably) around 300 but he was much richer than the average serial killer and his lucrative job also gave him very good cover to hide his crimes. But the vast majority don't even get to 5 - and that's serial killers (3 or more - the vast majority of potential serial killers are caught without ever becoming serial killers). So a few tens of victims... maybe. How many people have been killed by wall street corruption ? How many people took their own lives after a bank corruptly foreclosed on a house in a fraudulent matter ? There were millions of cases like that just in 2009, so it's inconceivable that the death toll is not at least in the thousands. When Katrina hit New Orleans - how much worse was the outcomes made for poor people, when the insurance companies found a million reasons not to pay their claims ? Sure the insurance companies feared they'd be bankrupted... but that was their PURPOSE - that's what htose people paid them for ! The sole reason we tolerate their existence is so that, when a hurrican destroys people's homes THEY go bankrupt instead of those people. How many more died in that floodwater thanks to greed? There is overwhelming evidence that wealthy people got prioritized rescue and other advantages which ultimately made the death toll far higher than it otherwise would have been.
When the average person commits evil - it affects only a small number of people. When the extremely wealthy commit evil - thousands suffer. Their very wealth magnifies the effect of their actions.
>Everything you do at work, for example, is "for personal profit". Would fewer or more women die, if the profiteer you are denouncing did not exist — and, consequently, his test was not available at any cost?
That scenario is impossible - and your claim is disproven by history. The correct counter-example is Jonas Salk. Created a vaccine that prevented one of the most debilitating diseases in human history (a disease which has killed at least one beloved US president by the way). Did not patent it. Did not even TRY to profit from it (was very happy with his middle-class professor's salary)... gave it to the world for free, and eradicated a disease entirely.
And since myriad are not staffed by gods knowing forbidden knowledge - had they not existed other researchers WOULD without any doubt have discovered those genes too - and NOT tried to see how many women they could kill.
You know what it's called when you tell somebody "give me a crapload of money or die ?" it's called robbery and extortion. It is definitely not called "doing honest business".
Aaah yes, steam engines, the number one argument against patents.
Watt gets the credit for inventing the steam engine - but he did nothing of the kind. Steam engines have been around since the ancient greeks. Getting progressively better over the centuries. By the 15th century there were more than a few steam powered mills in Britain. What Watt did do was come up with a good mathematically concise way of measuring the amount of work a machine did, which allowed him to compare various designs for efficiency and come up with the best combination of known technologies at that time. Not a single one of the designs was his own - he merely figured out which designs for various parts were the best performing and then put them all together. Along with a wealthy financier -they then pushed steam power for trains.
Great inventions are never the work of one man or company - they are always the culmination of thousands of years of gradual improvement by thousands of people, and the INEVITABLE result of the state of human knowledge at any given time. Which is why, for any invention you wish to think off, you will find several competing claims as to who made it (besides whoever got the common credit) and generally at least 2 of them will have genuinely and independently come up with the same design without any knowledge of one another's work at teh same time.
Invention is a consequence of the collective history of all science, when the science reaches the point where an invention becomes possible it WILL happen - and it SEVERAL people will see the possibility.
So why does ONE of those people get a piece of paper saying the others aren't allowed to be rewarded for it ? Why does the government interfere with the market by giving one of those people a monopoly ?
The ostensible argument is - if you allow them to compete right away then (all) the inventors will keep the working of their products secret, which means the product could be lost when they go. This is certainly a concern - but patents are a very poor solution to that problem. Even if you do accept it, it has nothing to do with the absolutely ridiculous notion that ideas can be owned.
Except that what you think is some amazing breakthrough - is the very point we are making when we say "they don't get to negotiate fares with passengers" - when we say "this makes them employees" we just don't bother to add "because the passengers are not their customers" because it's so utterly bleeding obvious that it's not worth mentioning. You're taking the reason why what we're saying matters, and pretending it's some amazing revelation that alters the conclusion - no, it's just the premise that's too obvious to say out loud.
Then there is the thing you're ignoring - which is the REASON these specific points keep coming up - they aren't being raised HERE. They are, consistently, the points being raised by the judges in the cases that Uber keeps losing - because they are the points of law. They are the basis on which the law defines the difference. There are, of course, jurisdictional differences in the law but they are not huge. The basic legal considerations are pretty much the same across the free world because they are the only ones that make sense. The judges keep bringing up these points - because that's what the law says they have to decide on.
It doesn't matter if you think it's a better logical argument to raise something else or not. Any debate we have is completely inconsequential. In the courts of law, where these cases are decided, the lawyers are expected to bring up LEGAL points - and the judges are expected to rule on those legal points. And that's why they keep coming up - because they are in every article and summary about this. Because these are the legal points. Whether you can negotiate your rates is one of the legal considerations for "are you a contractor or an employee" hence it's always brought up. Your issue may have mattered if you could say 'but they can negotiate prices with Uber". If Uber is their CUSTOMER rather than their EMPLOYER that must be possible.
>Uber does not control the number of drivers that it has, while an employer chooses to have a specific number of employees. That's NOT a legal consideration. Nowhere in any country is that a legal consideration. The law doesn't CARE if you hire as-needed or hire a fixed number of employees. Whether they are employees or contractors is determined by completely different things. This would be getting brought up - if it had been in any law, anywhere, and thus was raised in court (as Uber's defense lawyers certainly would) and judges were ruling on the point.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, yes you are. The part of that money that's not in the buy-back goes to the treasury, which is revenue they then do NOT need to get from taxes. So it means that your tax burden is smaller. The government can pay some of it's bills with money not from your pocket.
So yeah, you are getting a share by having a reduced burden for bills you would otherwise have to pay.
100 Deaths ? Fossil Fuel pollution kills 18000 people every day. For the US alone it's 200-thousand deaths a year. Now, granted, that includes things like factory smog and coal power plants - but cars are a major cause of those deaths. What VW did significantly increased that number over what it would otherwise have been. That figure comes to 550 deaths a day. Let's assume cars are responsible for 10% of those deaths.. This is an EXTREMELY generous assumption since an MIT study showed vehicle emissions are the single LARGEST cause of pollution deaths. We should be pegging this at more like 90% but let's be kind. That's 55 deaths a day from cars.
70% of all passenger diesel cars in the US are VW. That's 39 deaths a day - using the completely unrealistic and generous assumption that a mere 10% of pollution deaths are caused by cars !
VW killed more people every 3 days of the scandal than GM did in the entire 10 years of their scandal COMBINED.
The scandal ranged from at least 2008 to 2015, that's 7 years. 7 * 365 * 39 = 99645
Just shy of a hundred-thousand deaths. Get it - VW in this scandal killed a THOUSAND TIMES as many people as GM did.
And that's just in the US - worldwide the problem gets much bigger, and remember VW is one of the two largest sellers in poorer countries (where VW and Toyota rule the roads) - so it would be worse there, those countries typically have poorer standards of healthcare and laws too - which would further exacerbate the death toll. The global death toll from this scandal must be deep in the millions.
And the absolute lack of conscience to experiment on those 100 paralel earths with different approaches - and not mind killing 99*7 Billion people in the failed experiments...
Aaah the old fallacy of pretending weather and climate science is the same thing. It's not, and predicting the weather is a LOT harder than climate. Weather is chaotic, but climate is an average - and averages are a lot easier.
I'll use the same analogy I always use.
This is Pete. Pete will be finishing high-school this year. Please predict his final grades.
Can't do it can you ?
Now what if I give you his academic record up to now ?
You can make a prediction and get it right some of the time (you can't know if a weak student will suddenly take fright and work really hard in the last year to greatly raise it, or maybe his dad gets sick and he has to get a job after school to help support the household and they drop signigicantly - you can get it mostly right, but there's too much you can't know which could change it for your prediction to be completely accurate)... this is weather prediction.
Now what if I asked you to predict the distribution of grades in Pete's class ? Well that's easy. 25% will fail. 50% will achieve an average pass and 25% will get distinctions. That's the normal-distribution-curve and I know that the 2017 class will have a normal distribution curve because ALL years have one, in fact if ever there isn't one - that is proof positive in a court of law that there was cheating in the exams !
Predicting the average grades is easy, because the chaotic effects on any particular one is smeared out in the large average. The blips dissapear.
Climate is the average weather over a long, long time - that's EASY to predict.
The poster was clearly making a generalisation and suggesting that what he said applied to Muslim's as a whole - and that is flagrantly untrue. Hell oppression of homosexuality isn't even part of Islam - it was imported into that religion by Christianity.
There are 5 Muslim countries in the world today where homosexuality is legal and gays enjoy equal rights. They are, and this is no coincidence, also the only 5 Muslim countries that were never colonised by Europe. Oppression of homosexuality was invented by Westerners and exported (with great success) and now, as this atrocity is losing favour in the west, people who still practise it try to excuse their practise there-off by pointing fingers at the versions happening in other cultures - conveniently forgetting that those cultures are LESS bad than their own was quite recently - and indeed just bad copies of what their own used to be oh such a short time ago, because they adopted it in an effort to compete with their colonial oppressors. ...so those people tried to end their subjugation by adopting the practises of their "civilized" masters - so as to appear "civlized" as well.
The colonists kept justifying their colonization on the grounds that they were "civilized" and the people they were colonizing were "barbarians"
How ironic that the very "civlization" they adopted, are now held up as proof of their inferiority by the same colonial mindsets that STILL see them as "barbarians" and has never realized the simple truth - all cultures are EXACTLY equally advanced - because they all share the same origins, so they all are exactly the same age.
The fact that global warming is threatening to undo what DDT once achieved (the negative side effects aside) doesn't bother you then, does it ?
And reading that article - it's pretty clear the author is a rampant denier of climate change theory as a whole - despite having no expertise about it. All the usual crap about "bad science" and "pushing an agenda" that you get from fringe lunatics who think they are smarter than all other scientists.
That makes me doubt his word even on his actual field of expertise - because his judgement is clearly compromised.
Actually the reason we laugh at your lot is because you'd be among the first to die.
The people who ACTUALLY have the best odds of surviving are NOT the ones who stocked up on anything, because it's utterly impossible to predict what you would need in an unpredictable scenario. The most likely to survive are the ones most adaptable, the ones best able to fashion equipment and resources out of whatever is to hand.
Because it doesn't matter WHAT he needs- he has a way of finding it - he can make it. The guys who go to maker shows, the engineers, hell even the less sedentary programmers - THOSE guys will survive. The ones who know something about stealth will defeat all the ones with huge assault rifles every time. You can't hit what you can't see. Hell my ancestors won a war against the biggest army on earth by being good at stealth, and damn near did it again 10 years later.
3-5 Guys who are good at stealth, and who will kill somebody with every shot - using single shot guns, could and repeatedly DID kill entire batallions armed with the latest and greatest multi-shot Lee-Henry's.
Imagine being a battalion facing a small squadron of people who all shot as well as the best army snipers - but were about a thousand times better at hiding. Imagine trying to fight back when the only evidence that they are there at all is every few minutes one of your men collapses with a giant hole in his head. And knowing those guys have no supplies, no food, no more water than they can carry...
When they finished destroying your entire battalion without ever showing themselves... they will walk down and take yours. Imagine being part of that, desperately scanning the hills hoping to find a target, knowing you probably won't... knowing that sometime in the next hour - one of those bullets are going to rip through your head too - and there is nothing you can do about it ?
Those are the people who survive- the ones who never take anything much WITH them into a difficult situation because WHATEVER is there, they can turn to their advantage. They'll beet you paranoid nutters every time.
Besides which, the fist major killer in the climate change scenario is likely to be diseases as the heat increases the range of pest-insects, good luck fighting off mosquitos with your AR15 and your crate of canned goods.
If your conspiracy theory was right- all the scientists would be publishing climate denial papers and a few crazy kooks would be publishing papers saying the theory is right. The exact opposite of what actually happens - because the biggest corporate funders have a massive vested interest in climate change being false.
That's just the start. One of the worst outcomes is greatly increasing the range of disease carrying insects - meaning things like Zika and Malaria can hit a LOT more people than it does now.
And lets put that in context. Malaria is now basically confined to a single continent - and even there, just 25% of the continent lies within the range of the single mosquito that spreads it.
Even so, that mosquito is the deadliest living creature on the planet- killing millions of people every year.
Imagine what happens if it's range is increased by just 5% ? If we double it - millions could easily become hundreds of millions.
Imagine if North America was getting as many Malaria cases as Africa is ? Don't imagine the death toll would be any lower - the higher availability of drugs would simply favour the extreme drug-resistant strains, so EVERY infection would be deadly.
I've had Malaria, I was one of the lucky ones who lived through it (mostly because I could afford good medical care and it wasn't an extreme drug resistant strain)... BELIEVE me - you do not want to experience it. It's hell on earth. It may well be somewhere near the top of the list of worst possible ways to die. And climate deniers are basically people who want their kids to die that horrible death.
Why move? In just 2 weeks an authoritarian tyrant will be ruling America.
Get these rounds.
Commit murder.
Hide body for several months.
When found - no bullet, just an odd tree growing out of their chest...
There is one other possibility, if people who are harmed by cybercrime start suing manufacturers for making insecure IoT devices that get owned and led to the attacks on themselves. Judges are, generally, much harder to buy off than politicians and because of the multi-level appeals process it's much less practical to do. The worst judicial corruption the US has seen in a century were a few small town judges who took massive bribes to send kids to private prisons for truancy. Note that the targets in this case were (1) too poor to afford good lawyers (2) appearing for something so minor that they never expected jailtime to be on the cards (3) children who didn't know better.
Civil suits are a whole different ballgame, and you just need one large, successful class action to hit a company like LG for a 10 million dollar payment, even if the claimants only end up getting 2$ and a starbucks giftcard, before the others will seriously be thinking "maybe investing in some people with the skills to properly secure these things, running pen-tests before we sell them etc. is good business, if only so if we DO get sued we got a bunch of paperwork we can show the jury to prove we really did our due diligence and made every reasonable effort to ensure the devices were safe".
Frankly - such a case is at least potentially viable. It's a bit tricky since the victims generally are not the customers (when your internet fridge joins a botnet - chances are you personally will not be the one whose credit card is wiped out by that botnet) but it makes a lot more sense as an allocation of genuine liability from a harmed party than many other cases that succeed.
powerful != important (at least for most meanings of "important").
Yes, but the very next sentence reads: "It is important to note that gender dysphoria is not an illness as such".
It goes on to say that, if the effects are severe enough to significantly harm the patients ability to live as a functioning member of society it can become an illness. But that is incredibly rare, and generally, how bad the effects are, are entirely divorced from anything related to the patient - they are determined by how accepting the people around the patient are.
Patients with plenty of people around them who accept and respect their identity generally live happy lives, those without frequently end up committing suicide.
Assistance in transitioning greatly reduces that suicide risk. Some here have tried to diminish transitioning-assistance by citing the high rate of post-op suicides, but conveniently ignore that, despite being high - that risk is still massively lower than the risk of suicide among transgender people who do not transition (a group which, in fact, has the highest suicide risk of all people by far).
Read up on the Tanzimat for a start - a series of civil rights reforms in the Ottoman empire which, among others, legalized homosexuality.
But that just put an official stamp on something which had been de facto legal all along. Sultans and other elites had been including young men in their harems for centuries - and if the sultans did it, it was by default legal (as per the way the Ottoman society was structured),
It wasn't complete equality, there were some weird restrictions (It was only legal if the other man was quite young and the only the older man could be the penetrator).
Yes, I know what "fringe" means - and an empire that spanned the entire Arab world is just about the exact OPPOSITE of that.
No. It is not.
The DSM specifically states that it is not an illness per se, but a potential CAUSE of mental illnesses (including depression).
That would be the same Muslims who legalized gay marriage in the Ottoman empire ?
Nice stereotype there douchbag.
Except that the supposed discrimination never happened. The trans women was hired, as an out trans person, worked there a few years and was let go - as happens at times.
The libreboot person decided she was let go because of her gender (she never claimed to think it had played a role) the FSF said her gender played no role and she was let go simply because the job she was doing had become redundant. Sad but true.
So there is no evidence that there ever *was* any trans discrimination - on the contrary, they were happy to hire a transwomen, knowing she was trans and employed her for a very long time.
Actually - I would add - that getting to pay workers so little that they need welfare to eat AFTER earning a paycheck - is itself another form of corporate welfare. It's allowing the wallmarts' of America to outsource a huge chunk of their wagebill to taxpayers. Which raises valid questions about whether they are really cheaper - considering that you're paying a chunk of the price difference in taxes so the people who work there can eat.
No wonder so few businesses can compete with them - the other businesses have to pay their workers a living wage in order to have workers, they don't get to make you pay their wages for them like wallmart does.
>Wanna behave like a private company? Get treated like one. No taxpayer soup for you.
This is America, they are more likely to get INCREASED taxpayer soup by acting like a private company - considering vast chunk of America's taxes that get used to pay favours to big corporations. BP and Wallmart get far more of your taxes than their welfare dependent workers ever did.
There is another factor - which is that wealth multiplies effect. I really spend my life trying to do good to other people, to uplift people, to help people, to empower people. You know what, all I've done pales into invisibility compared to what the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has done - and I think Bill Gates is a terribly evil person, yet he has done more good in a year than I could achieve if I live to be a thousand.
Why ? Because he has far more financial resources at his disposal, which enables him to do good that affects far more people than I ever could.
But the same goes for evil. A crazy killer may poison a well, it takes a greedy corporation to poison an entire river and killed hundreds or thousands of innocent people downstream. A crazy, evil person may become a rapist killer. How many could victims can he conceivably affect ? Even the most successfull serial killers are in the low-twenties. Harold Shipman got (probably) around 300 but he was much richer than the average serial killer and his lucrative job also gave him very good cover to hide his crimes. But the vast majority don't even get to 5 - and that's serial killers (3 or more - the vast majority of potential serial killers are caught without ever becoming serial killers).
So a few tens of victims... maybe.
How many people have been killed by wall street corruption ? How many people took their own lives after a bank corruptly foreclosed on a house in a fraudulent matter ? There were millions of cases like that just in 2009, so it's inconceivable that the death toll is not at least in the thousands.
When Katrina hit New Orleans - how much worse was the outcomes made for poor people, when the insurance companies found a million reasons not to pay their claims ? Sure the insurance companies feared they'd be bankrupted... but that was their PURPOSE - that's what htose people paid them for ! The sole reason we tolerate their existence is so that, when a hurrican destroys people's homes THEY go bankrupt instead of those people. How many more died in that floodwater thanks to greed? There is overwhelming evidence that wealthy people got prioritized rescue and other advantages which ultimately made the death toll far higher than it otherwise would have been.
When the average person commits evil - it affects only a small number of people. When the extremely wealthy commit evil - thousands suffer. Their very wealth magnifies the effect of their actions.
>Everything you do at work, for example, is "for personal profit". Would fewer or more women die, if the profiteer you are denouncing did not exist — and, consequently, his test was not available at any cost?
That scenario is impossible - and your claim is disproven by history. The correct counter-example is Jonas Salk. Created a vaccine that prevented one of the most debilitating diseases in human history (a disease which has killed at least one beloved US president by the way). Did not patent it. Did not even TRY to profit from it (was very happy with his middle-class professor's salary)... gave it to the world for free, and eradicated a disease entirely.
And since myriad are not staffed by gods knowing forbidden knowledge - had they not existed other researchers WOULD without any doubt have discovered those genes too - and NOT tried to see how many women they could kill.
You know what it's called when you tell somebody "give me a crapload of money or die ?" it's called robbery and extortion. It is definitely not called "doing honest business".
Aaah yes, steam engines, the number one argument against patents.
Watt gets the credit for inventing the steam engine - but he did nothing of the kind. Steam engines have been around since the ancient greeks. Getting progressively better over the centuries. By the 15th century there were more than a few steam powered mills in Britain.
What Watt did do was come up with a good mathematically concise way of measuring the amount of work a machine did, which allowed him to compare various designs for efficiency and come up with the best combination of known technologies at that time. Not a single one of the designs was his own - he merely figured out which designs for various parts were the best performing and then put them all together. Along with a wealthy financier -they then pushed steam power for trains.
Great inventions are never the work of one man or company - they are always the culmination of thousands of years of gradual improvement by thousands of people, and the INEVITABLE result of the state of human knowledge at any given time. Which is why, for any invention you wish to think off, you will find several competing claims as to who made it (besides whoever got the common credit) and generally at least 2 of them will have genuinely and independently come up with the same design without any knowledge of one another's work at teh same time.
Invention is a consequence of the collective history of all science, when the science reaches the point where an invention becomes possible it WILL happen - and it SEVERAL people will see the possibility.
So why does ONE of those people get a piece of paper saying the others aren't allowed to be rewarded for it ? Why does the government interfere with the market by giving one of those people a monopoly ?
The ostensible argument is - if you allow them to compete right away then (all) the inventors will keep the working of their products secret, which means the product could be lost when they go. This is certainly a concern - but patents are a very poor solution to that problem. Even if you do accept it, it has nothing to do with the absolutely ridiculous notion that ideas can be owned.
Except that what you think is some amazing breakthrough - is the very point we are making when we say "they don't get to negotiate fares with passengers" - when we say "this makes them employees" we just don't bother to add "because the passengers are not their customers" because it's so utterly bleeding obvious that it's not worth mentioning.
You're taking the reason why what we're saying matters, and pretending it's some amazing revelation that alters the conclusion - no, it's just the premise that's too obvious to say out loud.
Then there is the thing you're ignoring - which is the REASON these specific points keep coming up - they aren't being raised HERE. They are, consistently, the points being raised by the judges in the cases that Uber keeps losing - because they are the points of law. They are the basis on which the law defines the difference. There are, of course, jurisdictional differences in the law but they are not huge. The basic legal considerations are pretty much the same across the free world because they are the only ones that make sense. The judges keep bringing up these points - because that's what the law says they have to decide on.
It doesn't matter if you think it's a better logical argument to raise something else or not. Any debate we have is completely inconsequential. In the courts of law, where these cases are decided, the lawyers are expected to bring up LEGAL points - and the judges are expected to rule on those legal points. And that's why they keep coming up - because they are in every article and summary about this. Because these are the legal points.
Whether you can negotiate your rates is one of the legal considerations for "are you a contractor or an employee" hence it's always brought up. Your issue may have mattered if you could say 'but they can negotiate prices with Uber". If Uber is their CUSTOMER rather than their EMPLOYER that must be possible.
>Uber does not control the number of drivers that it has, while an employer chooses to have a specific number of employees.
That's NOT a legal consideration. Nowhere in any country is that a legal consideration. The law doesn't CARE if you hire as-needed or hire a fixed number of employees. Whether they are employees or contractors is determined by completely different things. This would be getting brought up - if it had been in any law, anywhere, and thus was raised in court (as Uber's defense lawyers certainly would) and judges were ruling on the point.