It's all very easy, when the time to vote comes around you just consider the candidates, all of them, and vote for who you would actually like to run the country.
Forget this "lesser of 2 evils" crap and vote for someone who you like.
The goal isn't to vote for who you think will win, you don't get points for picking the right one.
Yes the guy you voted for probably won't get in but he might get say 5%.
and next election people saw that he got a noticeable percentage and some of the sheep who think voting for someone who isn't going to win is somehow a waste might throw in their votes as well.
Then the next perhaps someone who you'd actually like to see in charge might get 10%, the next election even more.
If you vote for someone you don't really want to see in charge then you're screwing up the system.
So you want dumping dangerous waste to be a crime?
What happened to no regulation?
Regulation on say dumping toxic waste is simply the application of minimum safety requirements with punishments for companies which do not comply.
unless you want to wait till people start dying before complaining about improper storage or dangerous material.
That's why there is more than one minimum wage where I live.
From for 15 to 17 year olds the minimum wages is much lower than for others.
When you hit 18 you're entitled to a higher wage than a 17 year old.
People with more than a certain number of years in a related field also have a higher minimum wage.
it's not that hard to deal with this.
"If the people producing them are not paid at least US minimum wage"
probably best to adjust this one for the local area.
ie rather than the exact ammount of money in the local currency converted from dollars you use something liked to the cost of living there.
Think minimum wage in america "$X per hour" X buys a certain ammount of say rice in america.
Require that local minimum wages be enough to buy the same ammount of food in a local market.
5 euro will buy me a burger and coke here. 5 euro in eastern europe will buy me a 3 course meal.
If a machine costs less than having people do the same thing then they'll use people.
and the great thing about electronics, the more units you build the cheaper each unit is.
raise the minimum wage and encourage automation and suddenly rather than 1 or 2 companies looking for machines to do a job there's thousands and it stays cheaper to use those machines.
And the best thing of all: those machines are then creating wealth and raising everyones standard of living.
Oh I agree to an extent.
Although the regulatory body can just lower the minimum wage.
And after the horrors of the industrial revolution behind us you'd think we could do something to help prevent people in countries which are starting to go through the same thing from having to endure the sort of conditions the poor in our own countries suffered in years past.
actually there are pleanty of examples but apart from the 3rd world examples they're countries where wages are set by a collective bargaining agreements, ie the countries have big unions which almost everyone is a part of.
Which boils down in practice to the same things.
I agree that sometimes unions go too far.
Particularly when they don't let anyone who isn't a member of the union do a job.
In the town where I live there is a park.
It's a mess.
The local boyscouts decided to clean up the park.
They got a permit from the local council.
They started work.
The council workers union decided that by cleaning up the park the boyscouts were potentially taking work away from union members and threatened to strike.
The permit was pulled.
No work was ever done.
The park is still a mess...
Of course there is a worthwile side to unions.
If a union is asking too much then a company can just fire everyone who's on strike and replace them.
if it's cheaper to give the union members better pay then it stands to reason that the union members were being undervalued up to this point.
"Pithy, frightening scenarios backed up by no evidence or rationale whatsoever should be disregarded no matter how frightening. "
and still you give no evidence at all yourself.
How about this: history
it's how things used to be when it was legal to put kids down a mine for pitiful pay.
pretty easy really.
I buy a chunk of land, make a mint by quietly putting lots of nasty chemicals under that chunk of land in containers which will take say... 40 years to degrade.
40 years later people start dropping dead from heavy metals in the groundwater.
consequences?
At this point I've been dead for 5 years from old age having died in a nice mansion.
I have to prove that minimum safety standards make it more expensive to set up a buisness?
People still need food/shelter to survive. it's true. Problem is that while getting rid of the minimum wage causes all those lovely efficient changes in the economy it also creates an underclass who get paid just enough to survive and nothing more.
those who benefit most are the people at the top who's buying power is suddenly multiplied.
You want an example? Pick some 3rd world countries with no minimum wage.
How about this, give me an example, any example at all of a country with no minimum wage where it hasn't lead to horrible living conditions for a large chunk of the population.
Let me guess, you've never really been in poverty.
The minimum wage exists for the same reason as usury laws.
Desperate people get taken advantage of.
Which is not ok.
It's all very easy to prattle on about market forces and everyone being free to not take a job when you've never been in a situation where you need money to get to the end of the month without starving or ending up on the street.
If you follow your logic forcing employers to minimum safety standards also makes it more profitable to set up somewhere without such standards.
But the workers are perfectly free to work somewhere where they won't get maimed by the machinery. Right? No need for laws on working conditions.
Personally I'm not mad on the idea of giving employers the chance to pay sweatshop wages.
Outsourcing in general is not caused by the minimum wage.Outsourcing in general is caused by the existance of countries which lack of any kind of workers rights, minimum wage or safety standards.
When I was a teenager I was traveling to australia to visit family and on the way I had to stop over in Singapore.
There was some screwup with the bags and long story short it turned out I had to get my bag and re-check it in for the second hop of my flight. I'm told that in that case I should not have had to do that. I mean I even had to fill out an immigration form to get my bag to check it in.
Now since this was my first time traveling alone I was quite stressed and the airport was hot as hell. As I was filling out my form I realised I'd got a papercut. Blood was running down the pen and mixing with the ink. When I noticed this I flinched and a drop of blood was spattered the whole way up the page.uh oh
There was no time to fill out another form since I had to catch my flight.
So I go up to the girl at the desk, I'm a young guy who's red in the face with sweat pouring down my face, I have an odd story about needing to get my bags to re check them in with a form I'd scrawled out in a hurry, partly written in blood with blood drops all across it, blood dripping from my hand onto my clothes because with the heat it bled really badly for a papercut.
and she lets me through, no problem.
Can you imagine how this would go if it were at an american airport?
But if you use TrueCrypt then you can have a hidden volume.
Say you have a 200gig hard drive.
You start with an outer volume and put in say 10 gigs of "sensitive information".
something you only keep as a pretext for the encryption ex: banking details or cofidential info.
When you open it with password A then you see a 200gig drive with 190 gigs of free space.
When you open it with password B however you see a 190gig drive filled with every document from wikileaks, exact plans for building a pocket nuke, your contact list of terrorist leaders, illegal music and your detailed plan to assasinate every public official everywhere.
The problem for the border guard is that there is no way at all to prove that that 190gigs even exists. He asked you for the password and you gave him password A. You very well may have set up the system with no password B at all and that 10 gigs is really all that you have.
A question comes to mind, if they grab my 10 gigs of customer banking details and keep a copy how do I know they'll keep it secure? a corrupt guard could be selling everything he copies to a gang who are using the details for fraud.
Say i keep my private key on my laptop I don't want people being sent signed emails claiming to be from me because some 10 bucks an hour border monkey decided to sell my information.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all very easy, when the time to vote comes around you just consider the candidates, all of them, and vote for who you would actually like to run the country.
Forget this "lesser of 2 evils" crap and vote for someone who you like.
The goal isn't to vote for who you think will win, you don't get points for picking the right one.
Yes the guy you voted for probably won't get in but he might get say 5%.
and next election people saw that he got a noticeable percentage and some of the sheep who think voting for someone who isn't going to win is somehow a waste might throw in their votes as well.
Then the next perhaps someone who you'd actually like to see in charge might get 10%, the next election even more.
If you vote for someone you don't really want to see in charge then you're screwing up the system.
So you want dumping dangerous waste to be a crime?
What happened to no regulation?
Regulation on say dumping toxic waste is simply the application of minimum safety requirements with punishments for companies which do not comply.
unless you want to wait till people start dying before complaining about improper storage or dangerous material.
That's why there is more than one minimum wage where I live. From for 15 to 17 year olds the minimum wages is much lower than for others. When you hit 18 you're entitled to a higher wage than a 17 year old. People with more than a certain number of years in a related field also have a higher minimum wage. it's not that hard to deal with this.
"If the people producing them are not paid at least US minimum wage" probably best to adjust this one for the local area. ie rather than the exact ammount of money in the local currency converted from dollars you use something liked to the cost of living there. Think minimum wage in america "$X per hour" X buys a certain ammount of say rice in america. Require that local minimum wages be enough to buy the same ammount of food in a local market. 5 euro will buy me a burger and coke here. 5 euro in eastern europe will buy me a 3 course meal.
If a machine costs less than having people do the same thing then they'll use people. and the great thing about electronics, the more units you build the cheaper each unit is. raise the minimum wage and encourage automation and suddenly rather than 1 or 2 companies looking for machines to do a job there's thousands and it stays cheaper to use those machines. And the best thing of all: those machines are then creating wealth and raising everyones standard of living.
*"with" not "after"
Oh I agree to an extent. Although the regulatory body can just lower the minimum wage. And after the horrors of the industrial revolution behind us you'd think we could do something to help prevent people in countries which are starting to go through the same thing from having to endure the sort of conditions the poor in our own countries suffered in years past.
You know you live in a fantasy world.
Such a situation isn't fantastic at all.
actually there are pleanty of examples but apart from the 3rd world examples they're countries where wages are set by a collective bargaining agreements, ie the countries have big unions which almost everyone is a part of.
Which boils down in practice to the same things.
I agree that sometimes unions go too far.
Particularly when they don't let anyone who isn't a member of the union do a job.
In the town where I live there is a park.
It's a mess.
The local boyscouts decided to clean up the park.
They got a permit from the local council.
They started work.
The council workers union decided that by cleaning up the park the boyscouts were potentially taking work away from union members and threatened to strike.
The permit was pulled.
No work was ever done.
The park is still a mess...
Of course there is a worthwile side to unions.
If a union is asking too much then a company can just fire everyone who's on strike and replace them. if it's cheaper to give the union members better pay then it stands to reason that the union members were being undervalued up to this point.
"Pithy, frightening scenarios backed up by no evidence or rationale whatsoever should be disregarded no matter how frightening. " and still you give no evidence at all yourself. How about this: history it's how things used to be when it was legal to put kids down a mine for pitiful pay.
pretty easy really.
I buy a chunk of land, make a mint by quietly putting lots of nasty chemicals under that chunk of land in containers which will take say... 40 years to degrade.
40 years later people start dropping dead from heavy metals in the groundwater.
consequences?
At this point I've been dead for 5 years from old age having died in a nice mansion.
I have to prove that minimum safety standards make it more expensive to set up a buisness?
People still need food/shelter to survive. it's true. Problem is that while getting rid of the minimum wage causes all those lovely efficient changes in the economy it also creates an underclass who get paid just enough to survive and nothing more.
those who benefit most are the people at the top who's buying power is suddenly multiplied.
You want an example? Pick some 3rd world countries with no minimum wage.
How about this, give me an example, any example at all of a country with no minimum wage where it hasn't lead to horrible living conditions for a large chunk of the population.
Let me guess, you've never really been in poverty. The minimum wage exists for the same reason as usury laws. Desperate people get taken advantage of. Which is not ok. It's all very easy to prattle on about market forces and everyone being free to not take a job when you've never been in a situation where you need money to get to the end of the month without starving or ending up on the street. If you follow your logic forcing employers to minimum safety standards also makes it more profitable to set up somewhere without such standards. But the workers are perfectly free to work somewhere where they won't get maimed by the machinery. Right? No need for laws on working conditions. Personally I'm not mad on the idea of giving employers the chance to pay sweatshop wages. Outsourcing in general is not caused by the minimum wage.Outsourcing in general is caused by the existance of countries which lack of any kind of workers rights, minimum wage or safety standards.
When I was a teenager I was traveling to australia to visit family and on the way I had to stop over in Singapore.
There was some screwup with the bags and long story short it turned out I had to get my bag and re-check it in for the second hop of my flight.
I'm told that in that case I should not have had to do that.
I mean I even had to fill out an immigration form to get my bag to check it in.
Now since this was my first time traveling alone I was quite stressed and the airport was hot as hell.
As I was filling out my form I realised I'd got a papercut.
Blood was running down the pen and mixing with the ink.
When I noticed this I flinched and a drop of blood was spattered the whole way up the page.uh oh
There was no time to fill out another form since I had to catch my flight.
So I go up to the girl at the desk, I'm a young guy who's red in the face with sweat pouring down my face, I have an odd story about needing to get my bags to re check them in with a form I'd scrawled out in a hurry, partly written in blood with blood drops all across it, blood dripping from my hand onto my clothes because with the heat it bled really badly for a papercut.
and she lets me through, no problem.
Can you imagine how this would go if it were at an american airport?
But if you use TrueCrypt then you can have a hidden volume.
Say you have a 200gig hard drive.
You start with an outer volume and put in say 10 gigs of "sensitive information".
something you only keep as a pretext for the encryption ex: banking details or cofidential info.
When you open it with password A then you see a 200gig drive with 190 gigs of free space.
When you open it with password B however you see a 190gig drive filled with every document from wikileaks, exact plans for building a pocket nuke, your contact list of terrorist leaders, illegal music and your detailed plan to assasinate every public official everywhere.
The problem for the border guard is that there is no way at all to prove that that 190gigs even exists. He asked you for the password and you gave him password A. You very well may have set up the system with no password B at all and that 10 gigs is really all that you have.
A question comes to mind, if they grab my 10 gigs of customer banking details and keep a copy how do I know they'll keep it secure? a corrupt guard could be selling everything he copies to a gang who are using the details for fraud.
Say i keep my private key on my laptop I don't want people being sent signed emails claiming to be from me because some 10 bucks an hour border monkey decided to sell my information.