You are just making stuff up now. Authority is literally defined as "the ability to control". It has the same root-word as "author" (a word which describes the absolute power a writer has over his characters") and that root word is the Greek word for "Deity".
Authority is the ability control. Not all authority is absolute of course, and there are limits to the authority of an employer. But he most certainly does control you - when you agree to work for him, you agree to take orders regarding what to do, you agree to let him dictate what you can wear and even what you can say (at least on topics that affect the company). Violating any of these would get you fired - that is to say, end the employer/employee relationship by no longer subjecting yourself to his control/authority.
>I was explicitly trying to avoid buzz words like labor and capital so as to not trigger the Marxist/Leninist sympathizers. That line is a direct paraphrasing from John Locke's labour theory of value - which, it is true, from a lot of the basis of Marx... but it was ALSO the basis for Adam Smith. Capitalism and Communism are BOTH founded on that theory. They are both utterly dependent on it. It is not limited to one or the other.
> The ones who think that I have to voluntarily participate in some collective vision of the economy. It's simpler than that, no - you don't have to participate - but if you don't, then you don't get to share in anything the economy produces because ALL of it relies on the collectivist parts. No driving on roads, or buying goods that were transported on them. No sailing on the seas - or buying goods shipped across them. You can go live like a hermit on a mountaintop somewhere and even the IRS will ignore you. You want the benefits of living in civilization however, then that civilization has the right to demand you contribute your fair share tomaintaining ALL levels of it - including the collectivist levels.
How exactly did you calculate the GDP of pre-colonial Native Americans ? Oh right, you're just pretending their 15-thousand year history didn't happen right ?
Of course, who even CARES how greenhouses work ? The greenhouse effect describes what happens in the atmosphere, what hapens in your bloody panting shed is about as relevant as the exact chemical formulation that produces methane in your bowel and makes you fart when you eat beans.
>. We're territorial animals. Even during our nomadic phases, we had the concept of personal space and territory that we defended from others.
Yes, and even hardcore anarcho-socialists and communists recognize that - and it doesn't contradict what I said. There's a huge difference between the two concepts. The land you're using, you should be able to use freely to develop value from - and should not be imposed unduly upon. No what unduly would mean varied over time but we have some references. The Mosaic code is the oldest legal system of which we have a complete written record (because it is included in the holy book of the largest religion around). It, for example, recognizes the idea that you can own land. But it also places strong limits on what 'own' means. You could not prevent anybody from crossing over that land (in many modern countries that still exists as the common-law "right to wander"). If a hungry person was crossing your land, it says, he was allowed to leave with all the food from your fields that he could carry in his stomach. He couldn't bring a sack, take your crop, and go sell it. But he what he could eat while there -you were not allowed to stop him from eating that. And the final crop of the season you were not allowed to harvest at all - it was set aside to feed widows and orphans. That system lasted at least 4000 years because, some 4000 years later Ruth and her mother in law survive in their poverty by eating food from the last crops of the season.
Land that is unused - should be available to others who WILL use it. Large tracts being unused "wealth storage" for a few while millions starve ? That does not compute. When the nomadic tribe moved on - they didn't leave guards behind to ensure nobody could move into the land they had vacated.
Point being- there are multiple approaches one could take to how to organise an economy, even a free market economy doesn't have to look like the randroids want it to look. Poverty and starvation are not inevitable outcomes of progress, on the contrary, there is no reason they could not be entirely eradicated - and not only does this not intrude on the concept of a free and democratic society, it would be most easily achieved IN a free and democratic society.
Assuming they could capture all the CO2 - that would equal 2/3 of the total annual baking soda production world wide. Two of these and (since it's a secondary business which can afford to undercut) they can put every baking soda factory on earth out of business.... three and we have a problem of what the fuck to do with all that excess baking soda ?
So if I flip burgers at MacDonalds for 8 hours a day and then go wait tables at Marcos Pizzeria for 4 hours every night and earn some extra cash dancing at the local stripclub on a saturday night... I'm not an employee of any of those three business because I work for all three ?
The stripclub could argue I'm a casual worker - maybe even have an arrangement where I pay THEM for my slot on the pole and work for tips (I don't think this is done anywhere since I don't think tips are THAT good)... but the two restaurants are definitely BOTH employing me.
No, that's not a criteria - it can be a conseration when the actual criteria are fuzzy - but it's not a criteria. You don't become less of an employee if you work two jobs.
Your freedom ends where mine begins. You need a fucking drivers license because I drive on the same roads and I have thus got a RIGHT to demand nobody gets to do so who hasn't proven at least a minimum level of competency. You don't want freedom. You want the right to kill people. You want to take MY freedoms AWAY.
I'm less certain about car insurance - but I can see the logic. If you bang my car to hell then I have a right to be compensated. If you can't afford to do so I'm just screwed ? If you have insurance however, I can be assured of being compensated for the misfortune brought upon me by your fuckups. So I can see a compelling argument that I have a right to demand you not drive on public roads without insurance.
That's not a "nanny state" - that's a state that ensure your freedom is not allowed to intrude on mine. That's MORE freedom for EVERYBODY. WE're all MORE free because drivers licenses exist. We're all MORE free if its illegal to fire a gun in an urban area.
All of them... except one- and a lot of the third world countries too. In some ways - America has managed to not learn anything for 200 years and keep repeating mistakes everybody else has stopped making after seeing the results one too many times. And a significant chunk of the population wants to undo even the lesons they did learn. I suppose it's easy to think OSHA is just bothersome regulation which should be scrapped if you can't even remember the great New York City garment factory fire - and how well over a hundred people were, by any reasonable definition of the word, brutally murdered by their greedy bosses.
Actually it does. Though a special kind - ever heard of a "casual worker" - that is considered a type of employee.
You are not under the same regulations for that - because you're a private individual and some other factors, but you are their employer for the time being. If you pay a COMPANY to do it, then you're not. If you start a company where you pay kids $5 to snovel other people's snow and you charge those people 6 dollars taking a one dollar commission for matching snow-shovelers to driveway owners then sorry, you're a full on employee and it's not even casual work anymore.
In many countries it is still common for middle class people to have paid for house-cleaning staff (generally where there is a large poor population willing to do the work and a sufficient middle-class population willing to pay not to have to do it). Those people are, in at least some countries, considered employees - and, for example, you have to pay them minimum wage. The difference between casual work and employee is generally determined by the number of hours worked per month - if your house cleaner only works 4 hours a day, then in most places they will be a casual worker and you aren't liable to deduct pension and such (taxes depend on whether the salary is above the minimum taxable limit either way). If it's more than that - then it's a full-time worker and you have to do all the above. The exact line is drawn in different places but generally the common law principle is that it's a casual worker only if the hours worked is low enough that the person can feasibly have another job and still only work 40 hours a week.
By your argument - there are no such thing as employees then. Since what you say describes every employment contract ever. Ultimately an employer/employee relationship is defined by the existence of authority. Somebody sets your rates, sets your hours, and you agree to submit to their authority and let them do these things to you - if those things are present, then you're an employee.
A contractor does not submit to the authority of the client, they agree on a job - he does the job, he gets paid the agreed amount and he is there to complete one specific set of tasks after which he has no further obligation to you.
People contribute labour. Nobody has EVER contributed a resource. A resource BY DEFINITION is FOUND.
Just because you bought the land it's found on, does NOT make you a 'contributor' of it. We managed just fine for some 100-thousand years accessing resources WITHOUT the land they were on being attached by a piece of paper to one particular individual. The only thing THAT addition has added is to give some individuals the abiltiy to WITHHOLD resources from others.
It didn't make contributors, it created greater scarcity and suffering. Things that are made are not resources, resources are the things that are found and which the made things are made out off.
From just how primitive a species ? Hell even spiders and scorpions don't abandon their hatchlings. Ants and bees care for theirs.
The few creatures that leave hatchlings to fend for themselves (frogs, turtles etc.) they generally lay LOTS of eggs - so how were you not hatched along with loads of siblings ?
And dying alone is generally reserved for truly horrible people. If you were even a little nice to people during your life - there will be loved ones by your side when the time comes, not to mention - these days, probably a bunch of doctors and nurses too.
At least, not *only* technical. Avatar came out in 2009 - which was also the year of that same big marketing drive. But that was also the year when we were in the very heights of the great recession. That meant that the upper middle class buyers who are usually instrumental early adopters of new technology getting sales in until production costs can come down - weren't buying, because they were broke and the markets were struggling and credit was crunching etc. etc.
The stuff didn't sell because whatever the demand may have been - the ability to satisfy that demand was not there. By the time the recovery was strong enough that people would have considered buying it the fad was over, the market budgets spent and it was no longer shiny. I think it just missed it's moment by having the bad luck of coming onto the market just as Bush's chickens came home to roost.
Now it's of course possible that things like glasses were sufficient factors that it would have failed anyway - this may be why it didn't manage to recover when the economy did - but I don't think you can ignore the great recession's impact on why the initial sales were so low.
Paul Ryan will hold a press release where he announces that the republicans are against the plan, that this is too massive an expansion of government and the presidential overreach by trying to impose his will on asteroids without any constitutional right to look up at the sky.
In 20 days Trump will either scrap the plan, or keep it, if he keeps it - Ryan will pretend it was his idea all along.
Slashdot Mirror
You are just making stuff up now. Authority is literally defined as "the ability to control". It has the same root-word as "author" (a word which describes the absolute power a writer has over his characters") and that root word is the Greek word for "Deity".
Authority is the ability control. Not all authority is absolute of course, and there are limits to the authority of an employer. But he most certainly does control you - when you agree to work for him, you agree to take orders regarding what to do, you agree to let him dictate what you can wear and even what you can say (at least on topics that affect the company). Violating any of these would get you fired - that is to say, end the employer/employee relationship by no longer subjecting yourself to his control/authority.
>I was explicitly trying to avoid buzz words like labor and capital so as to not trigger the Marxist/Leninist sympathizers.
That line is a direct paraphrasing from John Locke's labour theory of value - which, it is true, from a lot of the basis of Marx... but it was ALSO the basis for Adam Smith. Capitalism and Communism are BOTH founded on that theory. They are both utterly dependent on it. It is not limited to one or the other.
> The ones who think that I have to voluntarily participate in some collective vision of the economy.
It's simpler than that, no - you don't have to participate - but if you don't, then you don't get to share in anything the economy produces because ALL of it relies on the collectivist parts. No driving on roads, or buying goods that were transported on them. No sailing on the seas - or buying goods shipped across them. You can go live like a hermit on a mountaintop somewhere and even the IRS will ignore you. You want the benefits of living in civilization however, then that civilization has the right to demand you contribute your fair share tomaintaining ALL levels of it - including the collectivist levels.
How exactly did you calculate the GDP of pre-colonial Native Americans ? Oh right, you're just pretending their 15-thousand year history didn't happen right ?
Of course, who even CARES how greenhouses work ? The greenhouse effect describes what happens in the atmosphere, what hapens in your bloody panting shed is about as relevant as the exact chemical formulation that produces methane in your bowel and makes you fart when you eat beans.
>. We're territorial animals. Even during our nomadic phases, we had the concept of personal space and territory that we defended from others.
Yes, and even hardcore anarcho-socialists and communists recognize that - and it doesn't contradict what I said. There's a huge difference between the two concepts. The land you're using, you should be able to use freely to develop value from - and should not be imposed unduly upon. No what unduly would mean varied over time but we have some references. The Mosaic code is the oldest legal system of which we have a complete written record (because it is included in the holy book of the largest religion around). It, for example, recognizes the idea that you can own land. But it also places strong limits on what 'own' means. You could not prevent anybody from crossing over that land (in many modern countries that still exists as the common-law "right to wander"). If a hungry person was crossing your land, it says, he was allowed to leave with all the food from your fields that he could carry in his stomach. He couldn't bring a sack, take your crop, and go sell it. But he what he could eat while there -you were not allowed to stop him from eating that. And the final crop of the season you were not allowed to harvest at all - it was set aside to feed widows and orphans. That system lasted at least 4000 years because, some 4000 years later Ruth and her mother in law survive in their poverty by eating food from the last crops of the season.
Land that is unused - should be available to others who WILL use it. Large tracts being unused "wealth storage" for a few while millions starve ? That does not compute.
When the nomadic tribe moved on - they didn't leave guards behind to ensure nobody could move into the land they had vacated.
Point being- there are multiple approaches one could take to how to organise an economy, even a free market economy doesn't have to look like the randroids want it to look. Poverty and starvation are not inevitable outcomes of progress, on the contrary, there is no reason they could not be entirely eradicated - and not only does this not intrude on the concept of a free and democratic society, it would be most easily achieved IN a free and democratic society.
>It's less a matter of authority than it is an issue of control.
Those are synonyms.
So the graph in your paper is just goatse ?
Nah, the Indians won't have to worry - they won't interbreed. None of the Indian women are their sisters.
I think I found my way to the Guinness book of records. World's largest soda/vinegar volcano - here we come !
Assuming they could capture all the CO2 - that would equal 2/3 of the total annual baking soda production world wide. Two of these and (since it's a secondary business which can afford to undercut) they can put every baking soda factory on earth out of business.... three and we have a problem of what the fuck to do with all that excess baking soda ?
I've heard of bomb-sniffing dogs (thought they aren't considered service dogs) ... but tax-evasion-sniffer dogs is new to me to.
That's the name of my acid ska band...
So if I flip burgers at MacDonalds for 8 hours a day and then go wait tables at Marcos Pizzeria for 4 hours every night and earn some extra cash dancing at the local stripclub on a saturday night... I'm not an employee of any of those three business because I work for all three ?
The stripclub could argue I'm a casual worker - maybe even have an arrangement where I pay THEM for my slot on the pole and work for tips (I don't think this is done anywhere since I don't think tips are THAT good)... but the two restaurants are definitely BOTH employing me.
No, that's not a criteria - it can be a conseration when the actual criteria are fuzzy - but it's not a criteria. You don't become less of an employee if you work two jobs.
>If they are employees, certainly Uber can demand that they work specific hours or not be employees anymore?
Uber already can and does do this. You lose access if you don't log in often enough.
Libertarianism: the mental illness that makes you think a traffic signal is an unconscionable intrusion on liberty.
Your freedom ends where mine begins.
You need a fucking drivers license because I drive on the same roads and I have thus got a RIGHT to demand nobody gets to do so who hasn't proven at least a minimum level of competency. You don't want freedom. You want the right to kill people. You want to take MY freedoms AWAY.
I'm less certain about car insurance - but I can see the logic. If you bang my car to hell then I have a right to be compensated. If you can't afford to do so I'm just screwed ? If you have insurance however, I can be assured of being compensated for the misfortune brought upon me by your fuckups. So I can see a compelling argument that I have a right to demand you not drive on public roads without insurance.
That's not a "nanny state" - that's a state that ensure your freedom is not allowed to intrude on mine. That's MORE freedom for EVERYBODY. WE're all MORE free because drivers licenses exist. We're all MORE free if its illegal to fire a gun in an urban area.
All of them ... except one- and a lot of the third world countries too. In some ways - America has managed to not learn anything for 200 years and keep repeating mistakes everybody else has stopped making after seeing the results one too many times. And a significant chunk of the population wants to undo even the lesons they did learn.
I suppose it's easy to think OSHA is just bothersome regulation which should be scrapped if you can't even remember the great New York City garment factory fire - and how well over a hundred people were, by any reasonable definition of the word, brutally murdered by their greedy bosses.
Actually it does. Though a special kind - ever heard of a "casual worker" - that is considered a type of employee.
You are not under the same regulations for that - because you're a private individual and some other factors, but you are their employer for the time being. If you pay a COMPANY to do it, then you're not. If you start a company where you pay kids $5 to snovel other people's snow and you charge those people 6 dollars taking a one dollar commission for matching snow-shovelers to driveway owners then sorry, you're a full on employee and it's not even casual work anymore.
In many countries it is still common for middle class people to have paid for house-cleaning staff (generally where there is a large poor population willing to do the work and a sufficient middle-class population willing to pay not to have to do it). Those people are, in at least some countries, considered employees - and, for example, you have to pay them minimum wage.
The difference between casual work and employee is generally determined by the number of hours worked per month - if your house cleaner only works 4 hours a day, then in most places they will be a casual worker and you aren't liable to deduct pension and such (taxes depend on whether the salary is above the minimum taxable limit either way). If it's more than that - then it's a full-time worker and you have to do all the above.
The exact line is drawn in different places but generally the common law principle is that it's a casual worker only if the hours worked is low enough that the person can feasibly have another job and still only work 40 hours a week.
By your argument - there are no such thing as employees then. Since what you say describes every employment contract ever. Ultimately an employer/employee relationship is defined by the existence of authority. Somebody sets your rates, sets your hours, and you agree to submit to their authority and let them do these things to you - if those things are present, then you're an employee.
A contractor does not submit to the authority of the client, they agree on a job - he does the job, he gets paid the agreed amount and he is there to complete one specific set of tasks after which he has no further obligation to you.
People contribute labour. Nobody has EVER contributed a resource.
A resource BY DEFINITION is FOUND.
Just because you bought the land it's found on, does NOT make you a 'contributor' of it. We managed just fine for some 100-thousand years accessing resources WITHOUT the land they were on being attached by a piece of paper to one particular individual. The only thing THAT addition has added is to give some individuals the abiltiy to WITHHOLD resources from others.
It didn't make contributors, it created greater scarcity and suffering. Things that are made are not resources, resources are the things that are found and which the made things are made out off.
From just how primitive a species ? Hell even spiders and scorpions don't abandon their hatchlings. Ants and bees care for theirs.
The few creatures that leave hatchlings to fend for themselves (frogs, turtles etc.) they generally lay LOTS of eggs - so how were you not hatched along with loads of siblings ?
>There is a 0.000023% chance that Anonymous Coward is a time traveling being who was born in a birthing pod.
I would LOVE to see the probability equation you used to come up with so exact a number...
And dying alone is generally reserved for truly horrible people. If you were even a little nice to people during your life - there will be loved ones by your side when the time comes, not to mention - these days, probably a bunch of doctors and nurses too.
At least, not *only* technical.
Avatar came out in 2009 - which was also the year of that same big marketing drive. But that was also the year when we were in the very heights of the great recession. That meant that the upper middle class buyers who are usually instrumental early adopters of new technology getting sales in until production costs can come down - weren't buying, because they were broke and the markets were struggling and credit was crunching etc. etc.
The stuff didn't sell because whatever the demand may have been - the ability to satisfy that demand was not there. By the time the recovery was strong enough that people would have considered buying it the fad was over, the market budgets spent and it was no longer shiny. I think it just missed it's moment by having the bad luck of coming onto the market just as Bush's chickens came home to roost.
Now it's of course possible that things like glasses were sufficient factors that it would have failed anyway - this may be why it didn't manage to recover when the economy did - but I don't think you can ignore the great recession's impact on why the initial sales were so low.
Paul Ryan will hold a press release where he announces that the republicans are against the plan, that this is too massive an expansion of government and the presidential overreach by trying to impose his will on asteroids without any constitutional right to look up at the sky.
In 20 days Trump will either scrap the plan, or keep it, if he keeps it - Ryan will pretend it was his idea all along.
>my opinion is your an idiot:
Thanks for this brilliantly clarifying demonstration of the difference between an opinion and a fact.