I'm not really surprised, but for a company with a long, high-profile track record of treating their customers' privacy and property rights the way a starving Doberman treats a pork chop it's terribly depressing to see that so many people still give them so much money they can afford billion dollar acquisitions.
P.S. By property rights I mean the constant fucking around with firmware to revoke features that were once specifically advertised (OtherOS in PS3, etc.) and other related sleazy behaviors. I couldn't think of a better term.
I love the way stupid ways companies try to discourage product copying. Like the way they insist, no matter the type of product, that knockoffs are a safety hazard.
If you believe these idiots everything from blue jeans to DVDs will kill you unless it comes from the right factory and has a little hologram on the label.
Not to mention that tons of illicit product out there is perfectly authentic; it's just not licensed. Just because a license gets pulled doesn't always mean the owners stop churning out the product, and even while the place is licensed there's often some after-hours manufacturing to make extra money on the black market.
At some point we'll have to accept that intellectual property isn't a natural law; some people and some entire nations won't follow it simply because they don't believe in it, and America won't regain its economic prowess via all of this endless arm twisting, extortion, and bribery aimed at exporting our intellectual property law.
We won't get away with basing our entire economy on licensing payments, Hollywood fantasies, and financial products. The sooner people just accept that the sooner we can start fixing shit.
I'm just pointing out that some gendered double standards are better dissolved by raising gender x to the higher standard we once enforced only on gender y, than by simply saying "Gender y, you can act just like those fuckers over there now!"
It's not some straw man; it's an analogy suggesting that maybe we should prefer men learn from the stereotypical woman in business rather than the other way around.
Here we are celebrating another newly minted female CEO of a powerhouse corporation. Meanwhile, with the other side of our mouths, we're constantly bemoaning the fact that most Fortune 500 CEOs are greedy parasites, not to mention the large minority who seem to be sociopaths (and not in a figurative way, either).
It reminds me of that small number of feminists who seem to view sexual liberation not in terms of respect, mature dialogue, and winning their freedom from chauvanism, but merely as the freedom for women to be as sex-crazed and/or misandropic as some men are chauvanist and misogynistic.
Perhaps we shouldn't be so proud of women breaking into a job dominated by assholes? Are we assuming that women, unlike the men with whom they successfully competed to get these jobs, will suddenly be nice people when they're the ones on top?
I try to understand when people say the pendulum is still swinging, that women need to make further explicit gains before we can just call it all equal, but I still wish we could reserve admiration and outright celebration for simply people who do good things, rather than continuing to break it out into Men and
Women.
At some point the lauding of the "first female" this and the constant keeping of score has to stop if you want to say you achieved real equality.
Re:Not a Real Problem Unless Vacations Are Evil
on
The Real Job Threat
·
· Score: 1
Yes, a 40 hour work week might still be prevalent during the weeks in which you're actually working, but you're not counting vacation time or doing any averages.
The vast majority of professional Americans (i.e. the lucky ones) are allowed two weeks vacation per year. That can increase as you spend time with a company, but the number of people staying in one place long enough to accumulate real vacation time is vanishingly small these days. For everyone outside the white collar world they usually get zero vacation. Even of those people who do get paid vacation, slightly more than half don't even use the little that they get.
Even if you work 40 hours a week while you're actively working, the yearly average goes way below that when you get to take 4-6 weeks off per year (which is the EU labor standard).
So we're comparing people who generally take 4-6 weeks off per year with people who, those of them who even *get* vacation, take an average of 1 week.
And you're saying Europeans work just as much as Americans?
Great, I see the social Darwinists are out in force here.
At least I don't see any eugenicists spouting off. Although I do see people arguing that not abandoning the crippled to die of exposure constitutes some massive leap forward in social good.
That's what I like to hear people say in a dense, irreversibly interdependent global society: that merely not letting people die is the extent of our social responsibility.
They're not saying there's any 'extra robustness' being generated here, and you can't reasonably infer that possibility, either..
They're saying that the DNA changes, and it makes these people more likely to die of heart disease. If those changes are permanent and affect their germ cells, then their children will also be more likely to die of heart disease.
If those changes aren't permanent, then their children are only as likely to get heart disease as they were before they lived in a shitty childhood home. Provided they don't raise their kids in the same type of home, of course.
No trait increasing disease rates and no degree of permanence/heritability ever result in someone or their children being better at resisting disease than when they started. That's not how genetics or evolution work.
The only way a bad trait ever makes anyone stronger at the function for which the trait is bad is at the species level, by killing the holder so that the species as a whole has less of that trait.
Yes, but changes in fundamental sequence aren't the only way genes 'change'. Changes in expression constitute almost all of the biological changes that affect to an organism during its lifetime, as opposed to merely affecting its offspring; it's only because of expression changes that you ever go from a fetus to an adult (or from a fetus to a slightly larger fetus, for that matter).
I mean, presumably you understand this, unless you're able to talk about methylation solely from reading the article, but I don't want anyone to get the impression that 'only' changing the way DNA is expressed is a small feat.
Expression is *everything*. Almost nothing can be accomplished in any eukaryotic organism without deliberate changes in expression like this; basal transcription (the rate at which your genes are used entirely because the right parts randomly came together with nothing else - like methylation - helping or preventing them) accomplishes almost nothing.
The human genome is a lot like a computer in that way: almost nothing happens without something specifically telling it to work, and these guys just discovered a whole damn code library.
Ok, that's cool. I thought from the first post that you were one of those social Darwinist fucks who thinks that, even with less obvious and strictly necessary work to do every year, anyone who doesn't find or invent a way to work 40 hours a week doesn't deserve the breathe of life, much less food and shelter.
Some people can't equate high unemployment with high misery, or accept that maybe at some point total hours worked should go down in a world with increasing automation. I call those people assholes.
Um, why? Do you hate the monarchy? Can you just not stand the Christian goobers who think AD means 'after death'?
If it's clear then they can use it. It's not like biology or chemistry, where the old term is a serious waste of brain space and thousands of things were named or numbered completely wrong in the first place, based on limited knowledge or overzealous use of bad Greek or something. It's a completely clear and simple synonym that you want to eliminate, I presume, solely for the sake of consistency.
Which sounds nice until you realize that most companies manage productivity-based workforces with performance goals, which almost always turn into moving targets. Not to mention that pay never, ever scales linearly with skill level.
"You work twice as as fast as Bob and you want me to pay you twice as much? HAHAHAHAHA!!"
I've heard people claim that a minimum wage is worthless, but I've never seen a source or heard it explained just how else we're supposed to protect workers from being royally fucked.
Care to give me some reading material from a reputable, neutral source?
I mean, I get that minimum wage and price indices can spiral in correlation to one another, but I still can't easily think of a better way and I'm suspicious when someone claims to have some absolutely brilliant strategy to solve our problems that NO ONE will listen to. It reminds me of those loons who say that hemp can be food, clothing, soap, and a god damn rocket ship IF ONLY people would just listen to the wisdom and tear out all their other crops.
He argued that while the new technology leads to lower prices of goods and services, which would appear to benefit workers, he pointed out that employers would then adjust to the lower cost of living by lowering real wages, which meant that the lowest-level workers don't benefit at all from the technology.
Which is exactly what you're doing when you hire someone in China for $3 a day to replace someone in America who made a ridiculously overpaid $50 a day.
Although you still charge the Americans, many of them now out of work, $30 for a cheap pair of jeans. Seriously, them things is expensive to make.
Not a Real Problem Unless Vacations Are Evil
on
The Real Job Threat
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
All of these ways in which people are losing work wouldn't be a problem if we let go of one fundamental idiocy in American job policy: the idea that more time worked is better.
Americans, in general, seem to think you're only worthy of a respectable income and worthy of overall economic security if you work at least 32 - 40 hours a week, and we're perfectly happy to see doctors, lawyers, programmers, and entrepreneurs pump out 80+ hours per week.
We're just about the only country dumb enough to do this. As automation and industrialization took a firm hold through Europe in the 20th century most of them allowed people more leisure time, effectively spreading the shrinking pool of necessary work across the population.
America, on the other hand, converted all or nearly all of the gains into standard of living increases, most of them not even measured in infrastructure or public works (much of which is in disasterously bad shape at the moment), but in personal possessions like luxury goods and larger homes.
So we watch the pool of strictly necessary jobs, that is to say those that deal directly with food, sanitation, manufacturing, etc. and haven't yet been replaced by robots, shrink by the day, but we still absolutely demand that people work 40 hours a week and take less vacation time than any of their European counterparts.
Less work, more people, absolutely no reduction in hours worked. Where did we think that was going to get us? The invention of entirely new fields and the expansion of academia, research, new bullshit financial positions, etc. isn't enough to replace all of the lost work that simply isn't needed anymore.
So we let people go without. And then we send even more jobs overseas.
He can't. His stash of information is like a gun with one bullet. He can shoot, but if he doesn't kill his enemy dead then he's finished--and he's facing multiple enemies. So he's dangerous only as long as he doesn't pull the trigger
He was finished as soon as he started pulling shit like 'insurance policies' and scheduled weekly leaks out of his ass. Rather than being a paragon of honesty and open deliberation he's chosen to showboat, counter-extort, obfuscate, and generally do everything possible to start a personal Cold War between him and the entire western world.
In fact, the Cold War is an extremely apt analogy. He's basically saying exactly what the US and Soviets said about each other: "If I'm doing anything bad it's because I absolutely have to or they'll annihilate me in an instant, and anyway they started it and they're doing ten times worse!"
It may be perfectly true that wikileaks can't survive any other way, but if this is how they're going to operate then they're effectively no more than an independent intelligence agency, minus the torturing. The CIA isn't exactly a wonderful, admirable organization, even if you believe it has to exist, and neither is wikileaks.
Either they are independently wealthy, and they have no right to ask us to stand on our own two feet, or they take money from the government, and therefore they are hypocrites.
Where the hell did you get that second part? He only dislikes politicians who are independently wealthy and then bitch about the social services given to people who aren't. He didn't say anything negative about politicians who actually need their salaries, or even about wealthy politicians who don't go after services.
Way to refute the wrong argument with extreme self-satisfaction.
Despite what Republicans would have you believe, there's not enough scholarship money out there to put even a tenth of us through college.
It's just another way they convince themselves there's more than enough private money around for anyone who truly deserves a college education to receive one...all while defining someone who deserves a college education as someone who successfully competes for a private scholarship. There's no actual link between funding levels and quantity of talented, prospective students in such a model. You're just preventing inflation or declines in quality by preventing the vast majority of people from attending college at all.
Go ask the AMA how suppressing enrollments worked out for them: getting into medical school is a nightmare, we're dangerously short on doctors in every specialty that pays less than $200,000/year, and those who do get in will work 80 hours a week for life. But it's all worth it if we minimize the amount of federal money and make sure those who graduate can be filthy rich, right? Right?!?
You're kidding, right? The labs are the most important part and you want to save money by making kids take them at a community college? Unless your plan involves giving every community college an NMR, a cyclotron, a GCMS, a clean room, etc. it's worse than not offering those kids a degree at all. The laboratory work is where you discover whether you actually like or have any talent in your field. That's the place in which schools legitimately need even more money, not a place to save.
Online class and whatever, fine, but we don't put enough money into labs as it is.
One anecdote may not be data, but you made a universal statement, so one counter-example is sufficient to prove your statement wrong.
You didn't even read my statement if you think you proved it wrong. I said that military sentences are not lax, and that cases in which the military police remove the soldier and ship him home don't result in simply hiding the guy or letting him off scot free. I never said the US military does or must agree with the opinion of other nation's law enforcement, nor did I say that a combat officer such as a navy captain would never mishandle an accusation, nor did I say that the military would voluntarily assist in extraditing a soldier. Your anecdote is so vague it's almost not worth responding to; for all you know the JAG spent weeks on the case and decided there was really nothing to it.
I said that the military takes their prosecutions very seriously, not that they prosecute or extradite soldiers in every single case. You haven't disproved anything.
You could have just stuck with the first sentence. There's no need to go spouting curses just because you disagree with me. It's absolutely astonishing and inexcusable how many times I'm told to fuck myself when I dare express a contrary and unpopular opinion on this so-called forum.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not really surprised, but for a company with a long, high-profile track record of treating their customers' privacy and property rights the way a starving Doberman treats a pork chop it's terribly depressing to see that so many people still give them so much money they can afford billion dollar acquisitions.
P.S. By property rights I mean the constant fucking around with firmware to revoke features that were once specifically advertised (OtherOS in PS3, etc.) and other related sleazy behaviors. I couldn't think of a better term.
The question is, since the government is this huge corporation which cannot go bankrupt, what should it invest in?
That bit in the middle seems doubtful these days...
I love the way stupid ways companies try to discourage product copying. Like the way they insist, no matter the type of product, that knockoffs are a safety hazard.
If you believe these idiots everything from blue jeans to DVDs will kill you unless it comes from the right factory and has a little hologram on the label.
Not to mention that tons of illicit product out there is perfectly authentic; it's just not licensed. Just because a license gets pulled doesn't always mean the owners stop churning out the product, and even while the place is licensed there's often some after-hours manufacturing to make extra money on the black market.
At some point we'll have to accept that intellectual property isn't a natural law; some people and some entire nations won't follow it simply because they don't believe in it, and America won't regain its economic prowess via all of this endless arm twisting, extortion, and bribery aimed at exporting our intellectual property law.
We won't get away with basing our entire economy on licensing payments, Hollywood fantasies, and financial products. The sooner people just accept that the sooner we can start fixing shit.
I'm just pointing out that some gendered double standards are better dissolved by raising gender x to the higher standard we once enforced only on gender y, than by simply saying "Gender y, you can act just like those fuckers over there now!"
It's not some straw man; it's an analogy suggesting that maybe we should prefer men learn from the stereotypical woman in business rather than the other way around.
Here we are celebrating another newly minted female CEO of a powerhouse corporation. Meanwhile, with the other side of our mouths, we're constantly bemoaning the fact that most Fortune 500 CEOs are greedy parasites, not to mention the large minority who seem to be sociopaths (and not in a figurative way, either).
It reminds me of that small number of feminists who seem to view sexual liberation not in terms of respect, mature dialogue, and winning their freedom from chauvanism, but merely as the freedom for women to be as sex-crazed and/or misandropic as some men are chauvanist and misogynistic.
Perhaps we shouldn't be so proud of women breaking into a job dominated by assholes? Are we assuming that women, unlike the men with whom they successfully competed to get these jobs, will suddenly be nice people when they're the ones on top? I try to understand when people say the pendulum is still swinging, that women need to make further explicit gains before we can just call it all equal, but I still wish we could reserve admiration and outright celebration for simply people who do good things, rather than continuing to break it out into Men and Women.
At some point the lauding of the "first female" this and the constant keeping of score has to stop if you want to say you achieved real equality.
Yes, a 40 hour work week might still be prevalent during the weeks in which you're actually working, but you're not counting vacation time or doing any averages.
The vast majority of professional Americans (i.e. the lucky ones) are allowed two weeks vacation per year. That can increase as you spend time with a company, but the number of people staying in one place long enough to accumulate real vacation time is vanishingly small these days. For everyone outside the white collar world they usually get zero vacation. Even of those people who do get paid vacation, slightly more than half don't even use the little that they get.
Even if you work 40 hours a week while you're actively working, the yearly average goes way below that when you get to take 4-6 weeks off per year (which is the EU labor standard).
So we're comparing people who generally take 4-6 weeks off per year with people who, those of them who even *get* vacation, take an average of 1 week.
And you're saying Europeans work just as much as Americans?
Great, I see the social Darwinists are out in force here.
At least I don't see any eugenicists spouting off. Although I do see people arguing that not abandoning the crippled to die of exposure constitutes some massive leap forward in social good.
That's what I like to hear people say in a dense, irreversibly interdependent global society: that merely not letting people die is the extent of our social responsibility.
Jesus Christ this place is depressing.
They're not saying there's any 'extra robustness' being generated here, and you can't reasonably infer that possibility, either..
They're saying that the DNA changes, and it makes these people more likely to die of heart disease. If those changes are permanent and affect their germ cells, then their children will also be more likely to die of heart disease.
If those changes aren't permanent, then their children are only as likely to get heart disease as they were before they lived in a shitty childhood home. Provided they don't raise their kids in the same type of home, of course.
No trait increasing disease rates and no degree of permanence/heritability ever result in someone or their children being better at resisting disease than when they started. That's not how genetics or evolution work.
The only way a bad trait ever makes anyone stronger at the function for which the trait is bad is at the species level, by killing the holder so that the species as a whole has less of that trait.
Yes, but changes in fundamental sequence aren't the only way genes 'change'. Changes in expression constitute almost all of the biological changes that affect to an organism during its lifetime, as opposed to merely affecting its offspring; it's only because of expression changes that you ever go from a fetus to an adult (or from a fetus to a slightly larger fetus, for that matter).
I mean, presumably you understand this, unless you're able to talk about methylation solely from reading the article, but I don't want anyone to get the impression that 'only' changing the way DNA is expressed is a small feat.
Expression is *everything*. Almost nothing can be accomplished in any eukaryotic organism without deliberate changes in expression like this; basal transcription (the rate at which your genes are used entirely because the right parts randomly came together with nothing else - like methylation - helping or preventing them) accomplishes almost nothing.
The human genome is a lot like a computer in that way: almost nothing happens without something specifically telling it to work, and these guys just discovered a whole damn code library.
Ok, that's cool. I thought from the first post that you were one of those social Darwinist fucks who thinks that, even with less obvious and strictly necessary work to do every year, anyone who doesn't find or invent a way to work 40 hours a week doesn't deserve the breathe of life, much less food and shelter.
Some people can't equate high unemployment with high misery, or accept that maybe at some point total hours worked should go down in a world with increasing automation. I call those people assholes.
Um, why? Do you hate the monarchy? Can you just not stand the Christian goobers who think AD means 'after death'?
If it's clear then they can use it. It's not like biology or chemistry, where the old term is a serious waste of brain space and thousands of things were named or numbered completely wrong in the first place, based on limited knowledge or overzealous use of bad Greek or something. It's a completely clear and simple synonym that you want to eliminate, I presume, solely for the sake of consistency.
Consistency is a means, not an end.
Ah, I see. If you can provide a single example your contribution to the discussion is concluded. It's my problem to ask the question and answer it.
Thank you so much for all your help.
Which sounds nice until you realize that most companies manage productivity-based workforces with performance goals, which almost always turn into moving targets. Not to mention that pay never, ever scales linearly with skill level.
"You work twice as as fast as Bob and you want me to pay you twice as much? HAHAHAHAHA!!"
And hence why people have got to start equating higher unemployment as often being a good thing, instead of a bad.
Except for that whole 'not eating' thing. I'm pretty sure most people can agree that's bad.
Eliminating unnecessary work: good. Deciding that someone doesn't deserve their home or their dignity because their job is now unnecessary: bad.
High unemployment is never a good thing so long as employment and raw, cash standard of living continue to be our only social barometers.
That's an anecdote, not a source.
An example isn't a complete argument.
I've heard people claim that a minimum wage is worthless, but I've never seen a source or heard it explained just how else we're supposed to protect workers from being royally fucked.
Care to give me some reading material from a reputable, neutral source?
I mean, I get that minimum wage and price indices can spiral in correlation to one another, but I still can't easily think of a better way and I'm suspicious when someone claims to have some absolutely brilliant strategy to solve our problems that NO ONE will listen to. It reminds me of those loons who say that hemp can be food, clothing, soap, and a god damn rocket ship IF ONLY people would just listen to the wisdom and tear out all their other crops.
He argued that while the new technology leads to lower prices of goods and services, which would appear to benefit workers, he pointed out that employers would then adjust to the lower cost of living by lowering real wages, which meant that the lowest-level workers don't benefit at all from the technology.
Which is exactly what you're doing when you hire someone in China for $3 a day to replace someone in America who made a ridiculously overpaid $50 a day.
Although you still charge the Americans, many of them now out of work, $30 for a cheap pair of jeans. Seriously, them things is expensive to make.
All of these ways in which people are losing work wouldn't be a problem if we let go of one fundamental idiocy in American job policy: the idea that more time worked is better.
Americans, in general, seem to think you're only worthy of a respectable income and worthy of overall economic security if you work at least 32 - 40 hours a week, and we're perfectly happy to see doctors, lawyers, programmers, and entrepreneurs pump out 80+ hours per week.
We're just about the only country dumb enough to do this. As automation and industrialization took a firm hold through Europe in the 20th century most of them allowed people more leisure time, effectively spreading the shrinking pool of necessary work across the population.
America, on the other hand, converted all or nearly all of the gains into standard of living increases, most of them not even measured in infrastructure or public works (much of which is in disasterously bad shape at the moment), but in personal possessions like luxury goods and larger homes.
So we watch the pool of strictly necessary jobs, that is to say those that deal directly with food, sanitation, manufacturing, etc. and haven't yet been replaced by robots, shrink by the day, but we still absolutely demand that people work 40 hours a week and take less vacation time than any of their European counterparts.
Less work, more people, absolutely no reduction in hours worked. Where did we think that was going to get us? The invention of entirely new fields and the expansion of academia, research, new bullshit financial positions, etc. isn't enough to replace all of the lost work that simply isn't needed anymore.
So we let people go without. And then we send even more jobs overseas.
Seriously, we had it coming.
Oh my God....an accurate and applicable quotation of Orwell.
I don't think I've ever seen such a think on slashdot. I tip my hat to you, sir.
He can't. His stash of information is like a gun with one bullet. He can shoot, but if he doesn't kill his enemy dead then he's finished--and he's facing multiple enemies. So he's dangerous only as long as he doesn't pull the trigger
He was finished as soon as he started pulling shit like 'insurance policies' and scheduled weekly leaks out of his ass. Rather than being a paragon of honesty and open deliberation he's chosen to showboat, counter-extort, obfuscate, and generally do everything possible to start a personal Cold War between him and the entire western world.
In fact, the Cold War is an extremely apt analogy. He's basically saying exactly what the US and Soviets said about each other: "If I'm doing anything bad it's because I absolutely have to or they'll annihilate me in an instant, and anyway they started it and they're doing ten times worse!"
It may be perfectly true that wikileaks can't survive any other way, but if this is how they're going to operate then they're effectively no more than an independent intelligence agency, minus the torturing. The CIA isn't exactly a wonderful, admirable organization, even if you believe it has to exist, and neither is wikileaks.
Put another way, a necessary evil is still evil.
Either they are independently wealthy, and they have no right to ask us to stand on our own two feet, or they take money from the government, and therefore they are hypocrites.
Where the hell did you get that second part? He only dislikes politicians who are independently wealthy and then bitch about the social services given to people who aren't. He didn't say anything negative about politicians who actually need their salaries, or even about wealthy politicians who don't go after services.
Way to refute the wrong argument with extreme self-satisfaction.
Despite what Republicans would have you believe, there's not enough scholarship money out there to put even a tenth of us through college.
It's just another way they convince themselves there's more than enough private money around for anyone who truly deserves a college education to receive one...all while defining someone who deserves a college education as someone who successfully competes for a private scholarship. There's no actual link between funding levels and quantity of talented, prospective students in such a model. You're just preventing inflation or declines in quality by preventing the vast majority of people from attending college at all.
Go ask the AMA how suppressing enrollments worked out for them: getting into medical school is a nightmare, we're dangerously short on doctors in every specialty that pays less than $200,000/year, and those who do get in will work 80 hours a week for life. But it's all worth it if we minimize the amount of federal money and make sure those who graduate can be filthy rich, right? Right?!?
...exams and labs at local community colleges
You're kidding, right? The labs are the most important part and you want to save money by making kids take them at a community college? Unless your plan involves giving every community college an NMR, a cyclotron, a GCMS, a clean room, etc. it's worse than not offering those kids a degree at all. The laboratory work is where you discover whether you actually like or have any talent in your field. That's the place in which schools legitimately need even more money, not a place to save.
Online class and whatever, fine, but we don't put enough money into labs as it is.
One anecdote may not be data, but you made a universal statement, so one counter-example is sufficient to prove your statement wrong.
You didn't even read my statement if you think you proved it wrong. I said that military sentences are not lax, and that cases in which the military police remove the soldier and ship him home don't result in simply hiding the guy or letting him off scot free. I never said the US military does or must agree with the opinion of other nation's law enforcement, nor did I say that a combat officer such as a navy captain would never mishandle an accusation, nor did I say that the military would voluntarily assist in extraditing a soldier. Your anecdote is so vague it's almost not worth responding to; for all you know the JAG spent weeks on the case and decided there was really nothing to it.
I said that the military takes their prosecutions very seriously, not that they prosecute or extradite soldiers in every single case. You haven't disproved anything.
You could have just stuck with the first sentence. There's no need to go spouting curses just because you disagree with me. It's absolutely astonishing and inexcusable how many times I'm told to fuck myself when I dare express a contrary and unpopular opinion on this so-called forum.