The Gates Foundation will not provide immunizations for nations which do not provide strong patent protection for pharmaceutical companies. This is not necessary for immunizing the developing world. This is a clear conflict of interest when coupled with Gates' personal investments, to say nothing of those of the foundation itself.
Bullshit. They're saying that they will provide people with free medicine in exchange for their country not stealing the research of others. It actually IS necessary for everyone because once the companies developing new medicines stop making money, they'll stop making medicine - which is very bad for everyone.
You hate pharmaceutical companies because "OMG, they make more money than me!!!". They make big money because they spend big money on research - a lot of that research never pays off. They also have to spend the money to pay the highly educated people doing said research. In the delusional world you live in, people would spend 15 years getting advanced degrees and years inventing advanced medicine just because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy. In reality, people do it because they'll make a nice chunk of money from it.
You don't like that law ? You have several options.
Yes, you do. However, you are aware that it's been openly acknowledge that speed limits are kept below their efficient level due to local governments wanting ticket revenue and the federal government threatening to take away highway funding, right?
Anyways - I prefer the option of driving at the speed that SHOULD be the speed limit (so significantly faster than what's posted, but well within the safe speed range) and if I get pulled over, I accept that I broke the law and don't complain. I don't know about where you live, but the norm where I am is that the majority of people do around 15-20 mph over the speed limit and, as long as you slow down to acknowledge there's a cop there, the police don't care as long as you're driving safely and not swerving all over.
As for this law? Europe is full of laws like this that get passed due to the unions where the law exists to protect lazy workers from being fired. I'm surprised it took them this long to get a law like this on file.
First off, the only companies outsourcing are ones where the employees (normally in a union) demand an obscenely high wage for the value of the work they're doing.
Secondly, the world evolved - we have a global economy now. Eventually every country will be pretty much equal - that means that, eventually, Americans and Europeans will make lower wages and the rest of the world will earn higher wages to the point where the pay for any given job is the same, regardless of country. It's called economics - deal with it.
Third, Foxconn is Taiwanese company - not American, so your bs of "evil American companies" driving people to suicide is utter bullshit. Then theres the fact that you ignore that there is suicide everywhere in the world. A lot of people hate life - some hate it enough that they'd prefer to kill themselves and those that don't are normally just too scared to do it. That's a fact of life in every country and every career. Even actors, politicians, and CEO's commit suicide.
I suggest you get a job - you'll see very quickly that the mythical "horrible working conditions" do not exist in the US unless it's a job where the conditions are unavoidable (such as coal mining) and when that happens you are paid significantly more to compensate for it.
But no, you'd rather spout some bullshit and demonize anyone who has the arrogance to work hard and make more money than you. Grow up.
Yes, with GOG you own it forever and can re-download it at any time. They also provide updates so that the games will run perfectly on new OS's, even if it's an old DOS game and you're running Win 7 64-bit.
It's not just PC gaming - they're starting to do the same crap with consoles too. For some idiotic reason the gaming industry wants to run themselves out of business.
Homicide rate has nothing to do with guns. Now, if you had numbers for what percent of homicides involved guns, then you might have something close to a point.
It's been long known that Americans are much more likely to fight than people in Canada and the UK who resemble cows in their lethargic complacency.
Also, if you were from the US, you'd know that most people DON'T "carry" a gun. Very few states have laws where you're allowed to actually have a gun on you. Amusingly, it's the states where you're NOT allowed to carry a gun that usually have the highest crime rates.
Yes, because there was no violence before guns.....*rolls eyes*
People have always killed each other and needed to defend themselves. If you ban firearms, they'll use knives, if you ban knives, they'll use blunt objects, if you ban blunt objects, they'll use their fists.
Don't believe me? Look at the UK - they banned guns and then the crimes committed using knives skyrocketed.
Sorry, I was misinformed - the site I was reading had it wrong and I just read their correction - it is tracking recyclables in the trash.
I recycle and think people who can't take the 1/2 a second to throw something in a different can are just lazy. However, if my city passed this law I'd simply start burning all my non-metal recyclables in protest of their violation of my rights.
If you bothered to read up on the issue, you'd know that this isn't about people throwing away recyclable items, it's about people putting trash in the recycling bins - they will fine you if you have too much non-recyclable stuff in your recycling bin. They don't care if you just throw it all away instead of recycling.
I have a feeling that if people just started taking those bags and emptying them on the doorstep of the trash collectors who refused to do their job and collect the trash that they'd change their mind and do their damn job pretty quick.
Well thieves are an obvious negative. Methheads, depends on the person - if they still manage to get through life without causing issues for others, then what's the harm to you? As for open carry laws? Society would be a lot better if everyone was allowed to have a gun on them at all times - people wouldn't go out of their way to be jerks, criminals already have guns that they carry so the law abiding citizens would be able to defend themselves, and police abuse would stop pretty quick too.
I'm not in a union, but I have relatives in unions. So yes, I'm aware that the GP is correct. I'm also aware of the threats of violence against family members used by unions to get union employees to do as the union orders them. Unions served a purpose once - however, now that we have all sorts of laws regarding working conditions on the books, unions only serve now to 1) enrich the union management and 2) get union workers paid much more than they're worth (despite the fact that this frequently leads to companies going bankrupt or shutting down in the US and moving overseas).
Pretty dead on. I forget what the exact number is, but there is a very high percent (I believe over 50%) of the education budget that never gets close to a school because of all the administrators. In the US, the private catholic school system has 1/10 as many administrators per 1,000 students as the public school system does. They need to cut the useless bureaucracy and eliminate the administrators who serve no purpose.
We really do need to focus on math, reading, science, and history - all the multi-culti crap can wait until they're taking their useless general-ed classes in college.
Which is why teachers are so vehemently opposed to testing children and assessing how much they know - since this reflects directly on them, not the kids
Speaking as someone who knows a lot of teachers an is only a decade out of high school, I can tell you that it's not true by far. Teachers oppose basing their performance based on students because of the fact that public school teachers cannot throw out a kid who doesn't want to learn or is too dumb for the class yet they're in there due to No Child Left Behind. You can be the greatest teacher in the world, but if 75% of your class are spoiled brats who refuse to do any homework or study, then they're going to fail - why should the teacher be punished because they were given poor students?
For private schools where they can easily throw out poor performing students, that's not an issue to judge teachers based on student performance. In a public school where they HAVE to take everyone, even the ones who shouldn't be there and won't do any work, you can't use that metric.
Agreed - I also think that, for the many states that require teachers to have a masters degree, that if the teacher only teaches one subject, then their masters degree must be in that subject. We don't need history teachers getting an easy masters in helping kids read (that's what Language Arts teachers are for), we need history teachers who know history.
Business is war between labor and management over money. Of course they will be at each others throats. When one is "management", unions are the enemy. When one is "labor" business is the enemy.
And that is why I have a low opinion of the intelligence of union members. If you're in a union, you're working for someone else - which means that business is NOT the enemy because they are the ones signing your paycheck. There's that old saying "don't bite the hand that feeds you". Unions not only bite the hand that feeds them, they go out of their way to try to destroy their own jobs by bankrupting the companies they work for (in some cases, such as GM / Chrysler, they even succeed).
Yes, I get it - employees always want more money, that's natural. However, when you take it to the point of feeling entitled to more money without having done anything to earn it and when you push the company to the point of being unprofitable due to your greed, then there's a huge, huge problem.
1) On the link I read it from, they openly admit that the "science" behind it is a total joke.
2) That number (looking at what students earn later in life) is not "what the teacher is worth", it's ROI (return on investment) - that means that you pay the teacher $40,000 a year and the students go on to make $150,000 a year later in life.
Whoever told you that colleges in the US only look at SAT (or ACT) scores lied to you. Yes, the scores matter (the higher your scores, the better), but that's only one part of your application. They also look at your grades from high school, what classes you took (if you took advanced placement classes), your extracurricular activities, etc. The SAT / ACT are, at most, 50% of getting in to a college. Realistically, they probably only count for about 30%. Your grades however count for much more.
Schools are no more vital than any other public service, yet other public service jobs (such as police and fire fighters) get cuts when there's no money to pay for it.
Hell, even if you want to go so far as to claim that they're SO important that they can't be fired, it's pretty ridiculous for them to feel entitled to raises when not only is there no money to pay for it, but everyone else in the country is taking pay cuts or losing their job due to the economy.
What I suggest is that teachers get confronted with the reality that if there's no money to pay for something, that means that you don't get it and just drive things further into debt. That's why everyone I know who's married to a teacher laughs at them and openly admits that their spouse could never survive in a job where they'd actually have to deal with performance reviews, merit based raises / bonuses, and potential pay cuts / layoffs.
Does his job affect the future of thousands of people?
Most likely not. When you take a job that makes you responsible (in part) for what's going to happen to thousands of people over the next 50 years, then yea, you need to be held accountable if you're not going a good job.
Yes, some teachers are quite good. However, there are two problems with teacher pay. First, there's an oversupply of teachers which drives their pay down. Second, and more importantly, there's a limited amount of tax money to pay teachers.
I have several friends who are teachers and they talk about their raises (while everyone else during the recession is getting laid off or taking a pay cut because the company is losing money) and they make it quite clear that they think that everyone who's not a teacher should be forced to pay more taxes to pay for them to have higher salaries. Teachers unions have distorted teachers into thinking that even if there's no money to give raises, that they should be given them anyways. They also have been distorted into thinking that, no matter how much the amount of money available drops, they shouldn't ever have to worry about layoffs. Sorry, but in the real world when a business is losing money, some people get laid off and others take pay cuts until the company is no longer losing money. Instead, we get our wonderfully corrupt and union paid-for government that just keeps giving out billions and billions of dollars to keep union workers from losing their jobs, yet pisses aways almost a trillion dollars on a "stimulus" bill that is completely ineffective.
Only about 10% of the US workforce is in a union, yet politicians only care about saving union jobs. There's a BIG problem with that.
Well I apologize then. As I said, I'm so sick of seeing people spew that crap that I assumed you meant it as you believe we went to war for oil (since most people initially supported the war).
Jesus christ, I'm sick of trolls who claim that we went to war for oil. If we went to war for lower gas prices, then why the frak did gas prices double after the war started? Yes, some of it was due to price gouging on the parts of oil countries and speculators, but that's already been negated by the recession and gas STILL costs twice what it did before the war.
Yes, I get it, you hate Bush. So do I. I also think the war is pointless and unprovoked. However, you're only hurting your arguments with claims that we went to war over oil.
Slashdot Mirror
The Gates Foundation will not provide immunizations for nations which do not provide strong patent protection for pharmaceutical companies. This is not necessary for immunizing the developing world. This is a clear conflict of interest when coupled with Gates' personal investments, to say nothing of those of the foundation itself.
Bullshit. They're saying that they will provide people with free medicine in exchange for their country not stealing the research of others. It actually IS necessary for everyone because once the companies developing new medicines stop making money, they'll stop making medicine - which is very bad for everyone.
You hate pharmaceutical companies because "OMG, they make more money than me!!!". They make big money because they spend big money on research - a lot of that research never pays off. They also have to spend the money to pay the highly educated people doing said research. In the delusional world you live in, people would spend 15 years getting advanced degrees and years inventing advanced medicine just because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy. In reality, people do it because they'll make a nice chunk of money from it.
You don't like that law ? You have several options.
Yes, you do. However, you are aware that it's been openly acknowledge that speed limits are kept below their efficient level due to local governments wanting ticket revenue and the federal government threatening to take away highway funding, right?
Anyways - I prefer the option of driving at the speed that SHOULD be the speed limit (so significantly faster than what's posted, but well within the safe speed range) and if I get pulled over, I accept that I broke the law and don't complain. I don't know about where you live, but the norm where I am is that the majority of people do around 15-20 mph over the speed limit and, as long as you slow down to acknowledge there's a cop there, the police don't care as long as you're driving safely and not swerving all over.
As for this law? Europe is full of laws like this that get passed due to the unions where the law exists to protect lazy workers from being fired. I'm surprised it took them this long to get a law like this on file.
First off, the only companies outsourcing are ones where the employees (normally in a union) demand an obscenely high wage for the value of the work they're doing.
Secondly, the world evolved - we have a global economy now. Eventually every country will be pretty much equal - that means that, eventually, Americans and Europeans will make lower wages and the rest of the world will earn higher wages to the point where the pay for any given job is the same, regardless of country. It's called economics - deal with it.
Third, Foxconn is Taiwanese company - not American, so your bs of "evil American companies" driving people to suicide is utter bullshit. Then theres the fact that you ignore that there is suicide everywhere in the world. A lot of people hate life - some hate it enough that they'd prefer to kill themselves and those that don't are normally just too scared to do it. That's a fact of life in every country and every career. Even actors, politicians, and CEO's commit suicide.
I suggest you get a job - you'll see very quickly that the mythical "horrible working conditions" do not exist in the US unless it's a job where the conditions are unavoidable (such as coal mining) and when that happens you are paid significantly more to compensate for it.
But no, you'd rather spout some bullshit and demonize anyone who has the arrogance to work hard and make more money than you. Grow up.
I wish that they'd just get a new graphics engine and do a re-release of TIE Fighter with awesome new graphics.
Yes, with GOG you own it forever and can re-download it at any time. They also provide updates so that the games will run perfectly on new OS's, even if it's an old DOS game and you're running Win 7 64-bit.
It's not just PC gaming - they're starting to do the same crap with consoles too. For some idiotic reason the gaming industry wants to run themselves out of business.
Homicide rate has nothing to do with guns. Now, if you had numbers for what percent of homicides involved guns, then you might have something close to a point.
It's been long known that Americans are much more likely to fight than people in Canada and the UK who resemble cows in their lethargic complacency.
Also, if you were from the US, you'd know that most people DON'T "carry" a gun. Very few states have laws where you're allowed to actually have a gun on you. Amusingly, it's the states where you're NOT allowed to carry a gun that usually have the highest crime rates.
Yes, because there was no violence before guns.....*rolls eyes*
People have always killed each other and needed to defend themselves. If you ban firearms, they'll use knives, if you ban knives, they'll use blunt objects, if you ban blunt objects, they'll use their fists.
Don't believe me? Look at the UK - they banned guns and then the crimes committed using knives skyrocketed.
Sorry, I was misinformed - the site I was reading had it wrong and I just read their correction - it is tracking recyclables in the trash.
I recycle and think people who can't take the 1/2 a second to throw something in a different can are just lazy. However, if my city passed this law I'd simply start burning all my non-metal recyclables in protest of their violation of my rights.
If you bothered to read up on the issue, you'd know that this isn't about people throwing away recyclable items, it's about people putting trash in the recycling bins - they will fine you if you have too much non-recyclable stuff in your recycling bin. They don't care if you just throw it all away instead of recycling.
I have a feeling that if people just started taking those bags and emptying them on the doorstep of the trash collectors who refused to do their job and collect the trash that they'd change their mind and do their damn job pretty quick.
Well thieves are an obvious negative. Methheads, depends on the person - if they still manage to get through life without causing issues for others, then what's the harm to you? As for open carry laws? Society would be a lot better if everyone was allowed to have a gun on them at all times - people wouldn't go out of their way to be jerks, criminals already have guns that they carry so the law abiding citizens would be able to defend themselves, and police abuse would stop pretty quick too.
I'm not in a union, but I have relatives in unions. So yes, I'm aware that the GP is correct. I'm also aware of the threats of violence against family members used by unions to get union employees to do as the union orders them. Unions served a purpose once - however, now that we have all sorts of laws regarding working conditions on the books, unions only serve now to 1) enrich the union management and 2) get union workers paid much more than they're worth (despite the fact that this frequently leads to companies going bankrupt or shutting down in the US and moving overseas).
Pretty dead on. I forget what the exact number is, but there is a very high percent (I believe over 50%) of the education budget that never gets close to a school because of all the administrators. In the US, the private catholic school system has 1/10 as many administrators per 1,000 students as the public school system does. They need to cut the useless bureaucracy and eliminate the administrators who serve no purpose.
We really do need to focus on math, reading, science, and history - all the multi-culti crap can wait until they're taking their useless general-ed classes in college.
Which is why teachers are so vehemently opposed to testing children and assessing how much they know - since this reflects directly on them, not the kids
Speaking as someone who knows a lot of teachers an is only a decade out of high school, I can tell you that it's not true by far. Teachers oppose basing their performance based on students because of the fact that public school teachers cannot throw out a kid who doesn't want to learn or is too dumb for the class yet they're in there due to No Child Left Behind. You can be the greatest teacher in the world, but if 75% of your class are spoiled brats who refuse to do any homework or study, then they're going to fail - why should the teacher be punished because they were given poor students?
For private schools where they can easily throw out poor performing students, that's not an issue to judge teachers based on student performance. In a public school where they HAVE to take everyone, even the ones who shouldn't be there and won't do any work, you can't use that metric.
Agreed - I also think that, for the many states that require teachers to have a masters degree, that if the teacher only teaches one subject, then their masters degree must be in that subject. We don't need history teachers getting an easy masters in helping kids read (that's what Language Arts teachers are for), we need history teachers who know history.
Business is war between labor and management over money. Of course they will be at each others throats. When one is "management", unions are the enemy. When one is "labor" business is the enemy.
And that is why I have a low opinion of the intelligence of union members. If you're in a union, you're working for someone else - which means that business is NOT the enemy because they are the ones signing your paycheck. There's that old saying "don't bite the hand that feeds you". Unions not only bite the hand that feeds them, they go out of their way to try to destroy their own jobs by bankrupting the companies they work for (in some cases, such as GM / Chrysler, they even succeed).
Yes, I get it - employees always want more money, that's natural. However, when you take it to the point of feeling entitled to more money without having done anything to earn it and when you push the company to the point of being unprofitable due to your greed, then there's a huge, huge problem.
Two things about that article.
1) On the link I read it from, they openly admit that the "science" behind it is a total joke.
2) That number (looking at what students earn later in life) is not "what the teacher is worth", it's ROI (return on investment) - that means that you pay the teacher $40,000 a year and the students go on to make $150,000 a year later in life.
Whoever told you that colleges in the US only look at SAT (or ACT) scores lied to you. Yes, the scores matter (the higher your scores, the better), but that's only one part of your application. They also look at your grades from high school, what classes you took (if you took advanced placement classes), your extracurricular activities, etc. The SAT / ACT are, at most, 50% of getting in to a college. Realistically, they probably only count for about 30%. Your grades however count for much more.
Schools are no more vital than any other public service, yet other public service jobs (such as police and fire fighters) get cuts when there's no money to pay for it.
Hell, even if you want to go so far as to claim that they're SO important that they can't be fired, it's pretty ridiculous for them to feel entitled to raises when not only is there no money to pay for it, but everyone else in the country is taking pay cuts or losing their job due to the economy.
What I suggest is that teachers get confronted with the reality that if there's no money to pay for something, that means that you don't get it and just drive things further into debt. That's why everyone I know who's married to a teacher laughs at them and openly admits that their spouse could never survive in a job where they'd actually have to deal with performance reviews, merit based raises / bonuses, and potential pay cuts / layoffs.
Does his job affect the future of thousands of people?
Most likely not. When you take a job that makes you responsible (in part) for what's going to happen to thousands of people over the next 50 years, then yea, you need to be held accountable if you're not going a good job.
Yes, some teachers are quite good. However, there are two problems with teacher pay. First, there's an oversupply of teachers which drives their pay down. Second, and more importantly, there's a limited amount of tax money to pay teachers.
I have several friends who are teachers and they talk about their raises (while everyone else during the recession is getting laid off or taking a pay cut because the company is losing money) and they make it quite clear that they think that everyone who's not a teacher should be forced to pay more taxes to pay for them to have higher salaries. Teachers unions have distorted teachers into thinking that even if there's no money to give raises, that they should be given them anyways. They also have been distorted into thinking that, no matter how much the amount of money available drops, they shouldn't ever have to worry about layoffs. Sorry, but in the real world when a business is losing money, some people get laid off and others take pay cuts until the company is no longer losing money. Instead, we get our wonderfully corrupt and union paid-for government that just keeps giving out billions and billions of dollars to keep union workers from losing their jobs, yet pisses aways almost a trillion dollars on a "stimulus" bill that is completely ineffective.
Only about 10% of the US workforce is in a union, yet politicians only care about saving union jobs. There's a BIG problem with that.
Well I apologize then. As I said, I'm so sick of seeing people spew that crap that I assumed you meant it as you believe we went to war for oil (since most people initially supported the war).
Jesus christ, I'm sick of trolls who claim that we went to war for oil. If we went to war for lower gas prices, then why the frak did gas prices double after the war started? Yes, some of it was due to price gouging on the parts of oil countries and speculators, but that's already been negated by the recession and gas STILL costs twice what it did before the war.
Yes, I get it, you hate Bush. So do I. I also think the war is pointless and unprovoked. However, you're only hurting your arguments with claims that we went to war over oil.
It worries me that you didn't feel even remotely insecure about the government thug watching everything you do