>That depends on how you want to live. Even minimum wage in America is more than is earned by 80% of the world. People don't work a second job to survive, they do it to improve their life and afford extra things.
Bullshit. Most Americans who work more than one job do, indeed, do it to survive. Nearly all those people are on welfare and, quite frequently, the REASON they have two or three jobs is because welfare-to-work laws say they can't get foodstamps if they don't.
Then you live in a very wealthy city/neighbourhood because that is definitely not the norm. In most of the world for the vast majority of Uber drivers that's their only income - and frequently it earns less than the cost per kilometer of just fueling and maintaining a car.
So what actually happens is that some rich people go and buy a fleet of cars, then rent these out to people who use them to work as uber drivers. These agents make good money, while the uber drivers still have to pay the car rent out of their meagre share of Uber's income. It's a lot cheaper to maintain a fleet of cars than a single one.
But it isn't really the same. Real freelancers/contractors are generally able to work for multiple companies, can negotiate the terms of their contracts and can select customers. These guys are generally tied to a single one - which controls every aspect of their work just like a full-time employee. They have all the *risks* of being a contractor - but none of the rewards. I've been a contractor - and I made a lot more money than I do as an employee, which compensated for the lack of benefits (I ultimately chose the security for a fixed income over the generally higher income which can fluctuate wildly). But I got to negotiate terms. I got to operate through a registered company and pay company rather than income tax - and I could have multiple clients depending on workloads from various ones.
None of these things are available to these people. The justification for the huge difference between worker incomes and owner-incomes is the financial risk assumed by owners. What the gig economy is doing is to shift that risk onto the workers - so now you still have that massive income disparity (in fact it's bigger) but the vast majority of the risk is being carried by people who are not getting the rewards. Instead of the company assuming the risk of paying somebody during a time that proves to be quiet - the worker now assumes the risk of being available during that time (as opposed to doing other, potentially more productive or profitable, things) and, if it's quiet making nothing.
There is also the problem that these companies operate in hundreds of countries with very different laws - and are effectively ignoring *all* those laws, and laws are not perfect either. In my country for example there is a law that if you're a contractor who earns more than 80% of your income from a single client and has less than 4 employees of your own, then you pay income tax - even if you're a registered company - which you can then claim back later (an arduous process). It was put in place to stop people from resigning their job, then continuing to do it as a contractor to dodge taxes. But logically then - if you define such people as a 'employees' for tax purposes - then you ought to define that way for labour purposes as well ? Too bad the law is not consistent in that regard, tax law and labour law don't agree on the definition of an employee. So here, Uber drivers pay income tax like employees - but don't get labour rights like employees.
This is NOT a simple thing. It's a very new approach to business, which is beneficial in many ways (consumers certainly love these services for one) - but also introduces new and very complicated problems. We simply don't know how to address them yet. We also can't take the libertarian "just don't regulate anything" approach here - the concept didn't even exist when Austrian economics were a thing - there is absolutely no way in hell therefore that ANYTHING Von Mises or Hayek said could POSSIBLY be true about something they could never have imagined. No principle can scale to cover concepts that were inconceivable when the principle was formulated. And that's without even considering all the empirical proof that nothing in libertarian/chicago school/Austrian school economics is right about anything anyway.
Between the French and American revolutions there was a whole lot of symbolic "Insult the monarchy" bullshit that got made into traditions by deliberately changing what has come before. Some places embraced these, others kicked back hard against them. America did a lot of that with punctuation and spelling for example, but the pattern goes much wider - so for example about half the world is left-hand-drive and the other half is right-hand-drive, mostly because the French revolutionaries changed which side of the road they travelled on (and this was still horse-drawn vehicles) to snub the old monarchic rules and the countries that followed them also copied that change.
All of which are little more than historical oddities that explain how some really weird things came to pass but utterly fails to provide a sane justification for keeping them. "It's tradition now" is not a justification, indeed it's a fallacy. But it can be an extremely tempting fallacy that readily convinces a great many people of really bad ideas... otherwise the US would not *still* be one of only two countries in the world (and the other is one of the worst third-world hellholes on earth) that has *not* embraced the metric system.
If a third party wants votes - let them earn it the right way. You don't run for president every four years... you need to be at the grassroots running for every office. Where's the libertarian candidate for postmaster, the green candidate for dogcatcher ? Run for those offices, prove your ideas at the ward level by running for seats at the low level and slowly wiinning. Then run for the councils of small towns and when you have a bunch of councilors then you run somebody for mayor of them. Prove your ideas in the towns that bite.
When you got a mayor in a 30% or more of the towns, then start running for cities and metros in the same way. When you got a bunch of those - THEN you can run for state government and eventually get some governors.
And then - 20 years from now,THEN you'll be a viable third party who can run for congress and the white house.
Like the Futurama episode where Hermes realizes the number one factor harming the company's performance is the ridiculous performance assessments he keeps doing and fires himself.
>The fact that these elected politicians sell legislation to the highest bidder has nothing to do with Capitalism and everything to do with Statism.
Sorry pal, but now you're moving the goalpost. You declared that capitalism is selling at the highest cost the market will bear. These politicians are being capitalists by selling their product, legislation to the highest bidder. Their supposed to sell it to the voters (who appointed them at the ballot box and pay their salaries with taxes) but the voters offer less than the market will bear.
That's capitalism - like it or not.
The thing is - this is not supposed to be a capitalist institution. A public university is part of the civil service. What you're seeing is the outcome of the long republican drive telling us "universities should be more like businesses" - which is what they are now doing, and this is exactly why that was always a terrible idea. The two types of organisation have nothing in common. Universities are not SUPPOSED to be profitable or efficient or even cost-effective. They are suppose to produce knowledge and to give that freely to the world. That's the exact opposite of what a business is supposed to do. If all you care about is the cheapest school the market will bear - private universities exist for that purpose, but public universities first and primary goal is supposed to be research and even their entire education section's sole real purpose is to pass the results of the research into the population and, coincidentally, train another generation of researchers to take over when the current batch dies.
Making money, even training people for a job, is nowhere on the list of things a university is supposed to do. The latter is, at most, a tangential benefit from sharing knowledge with students.
How about because they are funded by American taxpayers they have a higher duty to employ employ Americans - if nothing else so those Americans can earn money and keep paying taxes so they can keep their funding. Only an idiot bites the hand that feeds it. It's bad enough when corporations can't figure out that they rely on Americans having good paying jobs to BUY their products so replacing all the American workers with cheap Asian ones is a bad idea - the Asian ones can't buy your products, if they wanted to - they wouldn't be cheap anymore, but now the market that used to buy it can't either. But sadly - that is always the next CEO's problem, the current CEO only cares about this quarter's earnings because that determines his bonus and the impact of gradually reducing the average income of the entire country won't be felt for several years by the people selling shit.
But when public services - which are directly tax-funded, can't figure out that all their money comes out the pockets of people who earn wages, that's a whole other LEVEL of stupid. Especially since, as tax-funded public services - they are not beholden to shareholders and bonus incentives - they don't have any reason to care mostly about this quarter's earnings, and what they ARE beholden to is the public good - since the public pays them for that and should STOP paying them if they no longer serve it (i.e. take their taxfunding and give it to another university).
Universities aren't supposed to be profit making anyway. They are supposed to be KNOWLEDGE-making. University fees SHOULD be far below what is needed to pay for what it does and the taxpayer filling in the gap - because universities aren't supposed to make money, they are supposed to make something far more valuable: useful, freely-available, public knowledge. By the way: first step to get that back: make it illegal to patent university research again, if a university produces useful research it should be public domain for anybody else to develop into products. Encouraging researchers to do it themselves (the supposed justification for the law) is stupid. Firstly because good researchers are rarely good businessmen and you won't get the best companies selling the product this way, secondly because it denies the public as a whole the full fruits of their investment (which should be multiple competing products based on that research) and thirdly because it encourages the researchers with the best discoveries to actually leave academia and go and sell one of those discoveries instead of staying where they are and making many more discoveries.
>whether the excuse is that your senses are defective or reality doesn't exist.
So... ignore any philosopher who states a view which has since been absolutely and incontrovertibly proven by the hard sciences ?
Weird way to choose.
Human senses are just about the least reliable measuring devices ever invented and the evidence of their lack of reality only gets bigger with every new discovery in science. Your eyes measure radiation levels in a teeny-tiny band of the radiation spectrum, then processes those values through a huge and utterly opague process set of algorithms of which you have no knowledge where 'what you expect' is the single biggest tool used for filling in blanks and connecting dots (and that's about all we know about it)... and finally presents your conscious mind with an 'image' of 'things' - despite that image being a complete fabrication and not offering any evidence whatsoever that the 'things' are really there. Indeed cinema exists entirely to make our eyes present us images of things that are NOT there.
It has it's uses. There was a job-add posted on a local LUG a few years back by the owners of a major strip club chain offering lifetime VIP access in return for designing them a new website with video-streaming.
Because they aren't comparable. The proton's lift capacity is a good 20% lower than what the Falcon 9 can do - and they get to launch much closer to the equator so you need a lot less (expensive) orbital manoeuvring (Soviet launches end up in pretty terribly inclined orbits) so you can put less fuel on the satelite wihich means more of that already higher weight allowance can be used for the actual useful payload.
In short - a Falcon 9 is actually less expensive pound-for-pound than a proton.
It's a classic "you can't compete if you're the only one who isn't evil" problem - historically nothing but regulation can solve that problem.
Another example was smoking in shops. In the 1980s there was a big debate about whether this should be banned. Those opposed to the ban argued that it's a regulation you don't need since shops are free to do the ban themselves. Every single store owner opposed the ban in public - and every single one of them was praying for it in private. See no store owner WANTED smoking in their stores - it stinks up the place, it leaves ash and butts everywhere they gotta clean up and it annoys the non-smoking majority of your customers. But if you were the only store that didn't allow smoking you would drive all the smoking customers to your competitors - nobody could risk being the first to do it. If you said you supported the ban - the same would happen. But in private (even in interviews when anonymous) they all hoped it would pass - because then they could get rid of smoking in the store without being the only one to do it and go out of business.
Without regulation - it would never have happened, despite the majority of citizens and store owners alike wanting it.
While he would be a fantastic candidate (indeed better than any of the current crop) at the ripe old age of 78 I fear he has no chance, Americans are simply not willing to elect anybody over 70 to the white house anymore.
So this means Mike McAfee can be sued over McAfee plumbing services ?
That's not how trademark law works. Trademarks only apply in the same sphere of trade - and where using a similar name could cause confusion for consumers. I suspect he has good odds in this case - very few judges (and all but the most pliant of juries) would accept the idea that this company is in the same sphere of trade as antivirus software.
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Globally or just inside the US ? Which is hardly representative of Uber drivers - you do realize about 99.99% of them are not in America right ?
>That depends on how you want to live. Even minimum wage in America is more than is earned by 80% of the world. People don't work a second job to survive, they do it to improve their life and afford extra things.
Bullshit. Most Americans who work more than one job do, indeed, do it to survive. Nearly all those people are on welfare and, quite frequently, the REASON they have two or three jobs is because welfare-to-work laws say they can't get foodstamps if they don't.
Then you live in a very wealthy city/neighbourhood because that is definitely not the norm. In most of the world for the vast majority of Uber drivers that's their only income - and frequently it earns less than the cost per kilometer of just fueling and maintaining a car.
So what actually happens is that some rich people go and buy a fleet of cars, then rent these out to people who use them to work as uber drivers. These agents make good money, while the uber drivers still have to pay the car rent out of their meagre share of Uber's income.
It's a lot cheaper to maintain a fleet of cars than a single one.
But it isn't really the same. Real freelancers/contractors are generally able to work for multiple companies, can negotiate the terms of their contracts and can select customers.
These guys are generally tied to a single one - which controls every aspect of their work just like a full-time employee. They have all the *risks* of being a contractor - but none of the rewards. I've been a contractor - and I made a lot more money than I do as an employee, which compensated for the lack of benefits (I ultimately chose the security for a fixed income over the generally higher income which can fluctuate wildly). But I got to negotiate terms. I got to operate through a registered company and pay company rather than income tax - and I could have multiple clients depending on workloads from various ones.
None of these things are available to these people. The justification for the huge difference between worker incomes and owner-incomes is the financial risk assumed by owners. What the gig economy is doing is to shift that risk onto the workers - so now you still have that massive income disparity (in fact it's bigger) but the vast majority of the risk is being carried by people who are not getting the rewards.
Instead of the company assuming the risk of paying somebody during a time that proves to be quiet - the worker now assumes the risk of being available during that time (as opposed to doing other, potentially more productive or profitable, things) and, if it's quiet making nothing.
There is also the problem that these companies operate in hundreds of countries with very different laws - and are effectively ignoring *all* those laws, and laws are not perfect either. In my country for example there is a law that if you're a contractor who earns more than 80% of your income from a single client and has less than 4 employees of your own, then you pay income tax - even if you're a registered company - which you can then claim back later (an arduous process). It was put in place to stop people from resigning their job, then continuing to do it as a contractor to dodge taxes.
But logically then - if you define such people as a 'employees' for tax purposes - then you ought to define that way for labour purposes as well ? Too bad the law is not consistent in that regard, tax law and labour law don't agree on the definition of an employee. So here, Uber drivers pay income tax like employees - but don't get labour rights like employees.
This is NOT a simple thing. It's a very new approach to business, which is beneficial in many ways (consumers certainly love these services for one) - but also introduces new and very complicated problems. We simply don't know how to address them yet. We also can't take the libertarian "just don't regulate anything" approach here - the concept didn't even exist when Austrian economics were a thing - there is absolutely no way in hell therefore that ANYTHING Von Mises or Hayek said could POSSIBLY be true about something they could never have imagined. No principle can scale to cover concepts that were inconceivable when the principle was formulated.
And that's without even considering all the empirical proof that nothing in libertarian/chicago school/Austrian school economics is right about anything anyway.
Between the French and American revolutions there was a whole lot of symbolic "Insult the monarchy" bullshit that got made into traditions by deliberately changing what has come before. Some places embraced these, others kicked back hard against them. America did a lot of that with punctuation and spelling for example, but the pattern goes much wider - so for example about half the world is left-hand-drive and the other half is right-hand-drive, mostly because the French revolutionaries changed which side of the road they travelled on (and this was still horse-drawn vehicles) to snub the old monarchic rules and the countries that followed them also copied that change.
All of which are little more than historical oddities that explain how some really weird things came to pass but utterly fails to provide a sane justification for keeping them. "It's tradition now" is not a justification, indeed it's a fallacy. But it can be an extremely tempting fallacy that readily convinces a great many people of really bad ideas... otherwise the US would not *still* be one of only two countries in the world (and the other is one of the worst third-world hellholes on earth) that has *not* embraced the metric system.
If a third party wants votes - let them earn it the right way. You don't run for president every four years... you need to be at the grassroots running for every office. Where's the libertarian candidate for postmaster, the green candidate for dogcatcher ? Run for those offices, prove your ideas at the ward level by running for seats at the low level and slowly wiinning. Then run for the councils of small towns and when you have a bunch of councilors then you run somebody for mayor of them. Prove your ideas in the towns that bite.
When you got a mayor in a 30% or more of the towns, then start running for cities and metros in the same way. When you got a bunch of those - THEN you can run for state government and eventually get some governors.
And then - 20 years from now,THEN you'll be a viable third party who can run for congress and the white house.
You're not familiar with the 'plural you' ?
Like the Futurama episode where Hermes realizes the number one factor harming the company's performance is the ridiculous performance assessments he keeps doing and fires himself.
>The fact that these elected politicians sell legislation to the highest bidder has nothing to do with Capitalism and everything to do with Statism.
Sorry pal, but now you're moving the goalpost. You declared that capitalism is selling at the highest cost the market will bear. These politicians are being capitalists by selling their product, legislation to the highest bidder. Their supposed to sell it to the voters (who appointed them at the ballot box and pay their salaries with taxes) but the voters offer less than the market will bear.
That's capitalism - like it or not.
The thing is - this is not supposed to be a capitalist institution. A public university is part of the civil service. What you're seeing is the outcome of the long republican drive telling us "universities should be more like businesses" - which is what they are now doing, and this is exactly why that was always a terrible idea. The two types of organisation have nothing in common. Universities are not SUPPOSED to be profitable or efficient or even cost-effective. They are suppose to produce knowledge and to give that freely to the world. That's the exact opposite of what a business is supposed to do.
If all you care about is the cheapest school the market will bear - private universities exist for that purpose, but public universities first and primary goal is supposed to be research and even their entire education section's sole real purpose is to pass the results of the research into the population and, coincidentally, train another generation of researchers to take over when the current batch dies.
Making money, even training people for a job, is nowhere on the list of things a university is supposed to do. The latter is, at most, a tangential benefit from sharing knowledge with students.
The problem with bean counters is that they are usually not even very good at counting beans efficiently.
Then how come somebody with a Technical Education in India is about to take your job ?
How about because they are funded by American taxpayers they have a higher duty to employ employ Americans - if nothing else so those Americans can earn money and keep paying taxes so they can keep their funding.
Only an idiot bites the hand that feeds it. It's bad enough when corporations can't figure out that they rely on Americans having good paying jobs to BUY their products so replacing all the American workers with cheap Asian ones is a bad idea - the Asian ones can't buy your products, if they wanted to - they wouldn't be cheap anymore, but now the market that used to buy it can't either. But sadly - that is always the next CEO's problem, the current CEO only cares about this quarter's earnings because that determines his bonus and the impact of gradually reducing the average income of the entire country won't be felt for several years by the people selling shit.
But when public services - which are directly tax-funded, can't figure out that all their money comes out the pockets of people who earn wages, that's a whole other LEVEL of stupid. Especially since, as tax-funded public services - they are not beholden to shareholders and bonus incentives - they don't have any reason to care mostly about this quarter's earnings, and what they ARE beholden to is the public good - since the public pays them for that and should STOP paying them if they no longer serve it (i.e. take their taxfunding and give it to another university).
Universities aren't supposed to be profit making anyway. They are supposed to be KNOWLEDGE-making. University fees SHOULD be far below what is needed to pay for what it does and the taxpayer filling in the gap - because universities aren't supposed to make money, they are supposed to make something far more valuable: useful, freely-available, public knowledge.
By the way: first step to get that back: make it illegal to patent university research again, if a university produces useful research it should be public domain for anybody else to develop into products. Encouraging researchers to do it themselves (the supposed justification for the law) is stupid. Firstly because good researchers are rarely good businessmen and you won't get the best companies selling the product this way, secondly because it denies the public as a whole the full fruits of their investment (which should be multiple competing products based on that research) and thirdly because it encourages the researchers with the best discoveries to actually leave academia and go and sell one of those discoveries instead of staying where they are and making many more discoveries.
>whether the excuse is that your senses are defective or reality doesn't exist.
So... ignore any philosopher who states a view which has since been absolutely and incontrovertibly proven by the hard sciences ?
Weird way to choose.
Human senses are just about the least reliable measuring devices ever invented and the evidence of their lack of reality only gets bigger with every new discovery in science. ... and finally presents your conscious mind with an 'image' of 'things' - despite that image being a complete fabrication and not offering any evidence whatsoever that the 'things' are really there. Indeed cinema exists entirely to make our eyes present us images of things that are NOT there.
Your eyes measure radiation levels in a teeny-tiny band of the radiation spectrum, then processes those values through a huge and utterly opague process set of algorithms of which you have no knowledge where 'what you expect' is the single biggest tool used for filling in blanks and connecting dots (and that's about all we know about it)
It has it's uses. There was a job-add posted on a local LUG a few years back by the owners of a major strip club chain offering lifetime VIP access in return for designing them a new website with video-streaming.
You could sell things to little old ladies in return for favours right up to your 50's.
Or just build a Farraday cage around your house and cut all the wires leading out.
Because they aren't comparable. The proton's lift capacity is a good 20% lower than what the Falcon 9 can do - and they get to launch much closer to the equator so you need a lot less (expensive) orbital manoeuvring (Soviet launches end up in pretty terribly inclined orbits) so you can put less fuel on the satelite wihich means more of that already higher weight allowance can be used for the actual useful payload.
In short - a Falcon 9 is actually less expensive pound-for-pound than a proton.
And it blows the Soyuz entirely out of the water.
It completely fails to mention the IMPORTANT thing: what shirt was he wearing at the announcement ?
Making the irony obvious through tone implies the belief that the other person is not smart enough to recognize it otherwise - which is wounding.
In other words - what you said and what I said are both true.
It's Cape Canaveral man, I tell you, Florida is full of all the illegal space aliens who hitched a ride back on the shuttle man.
It's a classic "you can't compete if you're the only one who isn't evil" problem - historically nothing but regulation can solve that problem.
Another example was smoking in shops. In the 1980s there was a big debate about whether this should be banned. Those opposed to the ban argued that it's a regulation you don't need since shops are free to do the ban themselves. Every single store owner opposed the ban in public - and every single one of them was praying for it in private.
See no store owner WANTED smoking in their stores - it stinks up the place, it leaves ash and butts everywhere they gotta clean up and it annoys the non-smoking majority of your customers. But if you were the only store that didn't allow smoking you would drive all the smoking customers to your competitors - nobody could risk being the first to do it. If you said you supported the ban - the same would happen. But in private (even in interviews when anonymous) they all hoped it would pass - because then they could get rid of smoking in the store without being the only one to do it and go out of business.
Without regulation - it would never have happened, despite the majority of citizens and store owners alike wanting it.
While he would be a fantastic candidate (indeed better than any of the current crop) at the ripe old age of 78 I fear he has no chance, Americans are simply not willing to elect anybody over 70 to the white house anymore.
It being McAfee the label is more likely to read "Hold blunt end. Insert pointy end into opponent's liver by means of vigorous arm motion."
So this means Mike McAfee can be sued over McAfee plumbing services ?
That's not how trademark law works. Trademarks only apply in the same sphere of trade - and where using a similar name could cause confusion for consumers. I suspect he has good odds in this case - very few judges (and all but the most pliant of juries) would accept the idea that this company is in the same sphere of trade as antivirus software.
>Maybe he's some type of software idiot savant?
Is there such a thing as a psychopath-savant ? I nominate Reiser and McAfee for case studies.