The problem is this. Some time ago, maybe 100-200 years back, that worked out fine. Unskilled labor was enough to get by and support yourself, maybe a family, if you were willing to work hard and get your hands dirty. You might be dirt poor, but you probably wouldn't starve. Today that's not the case. Unskilled human labor just isn't nearly as valuable as it once was. Even low-skilled isn't that valuable anymore.
In some ways this makes classical measures of unemployment a poor measure of the actual important factors - who's out of work, and why? How employable are those people? What about in a particular field? Do employers just not want to pay the wages that are actually warranted, instead trying to import cheap foreign replacements, or are there really no more people with this skill no matter what they pay?
The last thing that needs to be noted is that in general, people who are capable of performing high skilled labor are not the simple result of "training". You can't take just any high school graduate, and through the magic of training, turn them into a skilled worker. There is a percentage of the population that can never be trained to handle a particular job. The higher the skill level, the larger the percentage. What we are seeing in Spain is the natural progression of this process. Most of those 5 million unemployed people simply cant handle the work that needs to be done. Some small percentage of them could probably handle it if given the opportunity, but the majority of them are effectively untrainable to fit the needs of the work that is in demand.
Absolutely. Not everyone is capable of doing every job, no matter how much training you give them. Even of those who can be trained, some are going to be a lot better than others. This has a lot of consequences, because the low-skilled but high-paying jobs of the old days are vanishing at an increasing rate, and they're not coming back. When we put 3 million professional truck/etc drivers out of work, we can't just stick them all in a web development class and call it even. At some point - maybe not today, but eventually the day will come, where we have to entirely rethink our employment paradigm, institute a minimum basic income or the like, and accept that not everyone will be directly employed the way they used to be.
A lot of the newer high end cars, like Mercedes, etc, have "cruise control" that includes things like lane detection, as well as detection of cars in front and to the side of you - meaning that it does a lot more than just maintain a set speed, because it also keeps you in your lane, and slows down if it detects a slower car in front of you.
Part of the problem is that we're discussing a lot of things that really aren't classic (speed only) cruise control, but aren't full autopilot systems either. Instead, they're on a spectrum somewhere in between. And yet, people continue to use one of those two terms for them, which causes confusion.
They'd be fools, then, because the private prison companies lose money by providing healthcare. It's in the company's interest to spend as little money as possible, and they can get away with it far, far more than any insurance company or HMO on the outside could ever dream of.
By your logic, if someone broke into my bank, but decided for whatever reason not to take anything in my deposit box (even though they could), my bank wouldn't have to tell me. Something doesn't have to be a HIPAA violation to be a data breach, or to trigger those rules.
Probably the analogy would be the laws making it illegal to record abuses at places like food processing plants. There have been several states that have attempted to outlaw undercover video, after activists managed to get hired, and later released video of the horrible and illegal stuff that was going on in those plants. Or consider bans against recording the police on video, that wind up making any video recording of the police, even of the police committing a blatant crime, illegal.
That doesn't mean the law needs to go away entirely, but having some sort of affirmative defense should play a part, for instance.
The CFAA is the "X with a computer" of criminal law, where X is just about anything they want to enforce it as. And that's the problem. It's stupid and BS for patents, and it shouldn't be any more valid in criminal cases.
It's always a slippery slope, isn't it? "But what happens next? What aren't they telling you? More regulations! Scary!"
Sorry, I'm not buying it - not when the alternative is so patently insane. I'm being asked to choose between there -maybe- being something scary in a new regulation that's coming down the line, versus the abuses that I'm already seeing from Comcast et al? It's not even close.
I realize that for you this may seem antithetical, but the Republican party has become so absolutely knee-jerk dogmatic that I can't take them seriously as a responsible governing party. We're not hearing what they suggest should be done to fix the complete lack of competition in the ISP market. Instead, we simply get a complete BS line about why "Free Market" principles mean letting Comcast/AT&T/etc do whatever the hell they want (even to the point of using de-facto monopoly status to strangle any semblance of an actual market into a rent-seeking cash cow). And this is just one example of many where they've decided that it's easier to pretend the problem doesn't exist than to propose solutions. They've stopped caring about having a good government that takes care of the needs of its citizens, and addresses the problems that we as a country face.
It's not a binary question though - we're not forced to choose between "All regulation is good" or "All regulation is bad." We can choose to set an appropriate level, and degree. Like anything, it's a tool, and it can be used for good or for ill. Some regulations are good and some are bad - I'm not sure why this is difficult to understand.
For instance, Net Neutrality isn't telling them in exacting detail how to manage their network, specifying that they have to use this kind of switch but not that kind, or that they have to use specific government approved connectors or things like that. It's merely saying "your role is to pass traffic along, and you can't abuse that by charging extra or degrading service based on whose traffic it is". That's a regulation that encourages competition in the provision of services over the internet.
On the other hand, we could certainly do with removing regulations that serve solely as a barrier to competition or entry, such as those in the ISP market, which is desperately in need of real competition. If anything, my complaint with her 'plan' is that she doesn't really address this, but then, the politicians that you would think should be championing free market mechanisms are instead too busy trying to defend monopolistic rent-seeking behavior.
It's a permanent resident status, meaning there's nothing "Guest" about it. If you think that immigration is bad, then that's a bad thing, but if your concern is about temporary status workers being taken advantage of, to the detriment of normal workers (as well as themselves), then, giving permanent (no strings) status instead is a vast improvement.
I'm not sure you can lay the blame solely on Bill Clinton for signing that. The idea itself was fine - the problem was that nobody held them to that promise, nor punished them for failing to live up to it. That's partly on Clinton, but partly on Congress, and on Clinton's successor, and also on all the rest of the voting public for apparently forgetting all about it, or not caring enough to make a big deal out of it.
An H-1B isn't a green card - far from it. A green card lacks the restrictions and limitations of an H-1B. Now, you might think "doesn't that make it worse, then?" - but you would be incorrect. If I'm working in the US on an H-1B Visa, I'm largely tied to my current job, and thereby my employer. If I'm fired, I have 30 days to find a new job or I get kicked out of the country. If I want to quit, it's possible to get the Visa transferred to a new employer, but it makes things an order of magnitude more difficult to switch jobs than it would be if I wasn't an H-1B.
This means that when my boss starts pressing me to work extra hours without reporting it, to come in on Saturday, or to ignore the illegal shit they're doing, or things like that, they've got a lot more leverage over me than they would over a regular employee.
By contrast, someone with a green card competes on a normal even playing field with everyone else, and is free to accept or reject job offers, get poached for a better salary, or to give the finger and quit, just like everyone else.
Yes, exactly. One of the biggest problems with the H-1B program isn't the fact that "there's more people here", it's that they're largely stuck on that particular job, with the threat of being sent home for good if they get fired, which means they'll put up with a lot of crap that normal workers wouldn't, even stuff that's supposed to be against the laws about working hours/conditions/etc. Even though they technically can move to another position with another company, it's far more difficult to do that on an H-1B than as a citizen or permanent resident, and if you get fired, you only have a very narrow window to find a new job before you get kicked out (something like 30 days).
On the contrary, the Founding Fathers installed it in our core laws (root, if you will) for that very reason - as a check against the powers of the other branches. It's one of many, and it's certainly not infallible, partly because the Founding Fathers in no way envisioned the sort of breakdowns in political norms and virulent factionalism that's taken hold today, but pardons were put in for explicit reasons.
The UK already had a pretty good deal, in that it basically was able to pick and choose - and even got extra concessions a few months back, in advance of the vote. At this point, further conciliation will only hurt the EU, because it will encourage other countries in the bloc to try the same, at which point, it won't be much of a bloc at all.
No, the EU is probably going to react very negatively, if only to make an example out of Britain. They'll play hardball, because economically speaking, Britain needs the other EU members more than the EU needs them (even if there will be pain all around). Look at where British trade goes now - something like 36% of it goes to major EU members. That's more than they trade with the USA and China combined (~20%), and that's aside from the fact that right now it's Britain using EU trade deals with the USA and China, not its own separate ones. The EU is going to insist that all its regulations apply to any products made in Britain that are sold in the EU, and at that point, it becomes cheaper for the manufacturers in Britain to apply the same to their domestic market. The reason the EU will do this is simple - they don't want France going "well we want our own special deal too." No, they'd rather freeze Britain out as an example.
It's a combination of three things, most of which have been touched on in various posts by others here:
1: There's a lot of money in it.
2: The healthcare industry can't afford downtime or failures, so they pay up quickly.
3: Insurance covers a lot of it.
4: Generally poor security practices make it easier, on top of all that (typical of an industry that hasn't been targeted a lot in the past, their security is focused on other things, to the extent they have it).
So in summary, it's a relatively large/easy target, with lots of money, that can't afford downtime. The only surprising thing is that it took this long to become a target.
Of all the things out there, Windows 10 is pretty low on my hierarchy of worries. That doesn't mean it's not concerning, but there are far bigger threats to my (and your) privacy and legal rights.
The real problem, I think, is that a lot of older judges just don't understand technology. Now, that doesn't mean it was the case here, certainly (I have no idea who the judge was), but judges like the one in the Oracle vs Google trial, who took the time to learn to code in Java just to understand what was going on, are few and far between. There's probably a lot more older ones who are about as computer savvy as your parents or grandparents, who think computers are for Facebook and cat pictures. They don't understand that when the Founding Fathers were talking about the privacy of one's personal letters and effects, those EXACT things are today stored on your computer and your phone. Almost nobody has a locked drawer full of paper documents anymore, it's all electronic, and on your computer (well, hopefully you store it locally, rather than in the cloud). It absolutely should be protected.
Slashdot Mirror
In some ways this makes classical measures of unemployment a poor measure of the actual important factors - who's out of work, and why? How employable are those people? What about in a particular field? Do employers just not want to pay the wages that are actually warranted, instead trying to import cheap foreign replacements, or are there really no more people with this skill no matter what they pay?
The last thing that needs to be noted is that in general, people who are capable of performing high skilled labor are not the simple result of "training". You can't take just any high school graduate, and through the magic of training, turn them into a skilled worker. There is a percentage of the population that can never be trained to handle a particular job. The higher the skill level, the larger the percentage. What we are seeing in Spain is the natural progression of this process. Most of those 5 million unemployed people simply cant handle the work that needs to be done. Some small percentage of them could probably handle it if given the opportunity, but the majority of them are effectively untrainable to fit the needs of the work that is in demand.
Absolutely. Not everyone is capable of doing every job, no matter how much training you give them. Even of those who can be trained, some are going to be a lot better than others. This has a lot of consequences, because the low-skilled but high-paying jobs of the old days are vanishing at an increasing rate, and they're not coming back. When we put 3 million professional truck/etc drivers out of work, we can't just stick them all in a web development class and call it even. At some point - maybe not today, but eventually the day will come, where we have to entirely rethink our employment paradigm, institute a minimum basic income or the like, and accept that not everyone will be directly employed the way they used to be.
A lot of the newer high end cars, like Mercedes, etc, have "cruise control" that includes things like lane detection, as well as detection of cars in front and to the side of you - meaning that it does a lot more than just maintain a set speed, because it also keeps you in your lane, and slows down if it detects a slower car in front of you.
Part of the problem is that we're discussing a lot of things that really aren't classic (speed only) cruise control, but aren't full autopilot systems either. Instead, they're on a spectrum somewhere in between. And yet, people continue to use one of those two terms for them, which causes confusion.
They'd be fools, then, because the private prison companies lose money by providing healthcare. It's in the company's interest to spend as little money as possible, and they can get away with it far, far more than any insurance company or HMO on the outside could ever dream of.
By your logic, if someone broke into my bank, but decided for whatever reason not to take anything in my deposit box (even though they could), my bank wouldn't have to tell me. Something doesn't have to be a HIPAA violation to be a data breach, or to trigger those rules.
Probably the analogy would be the laws making it illegal to record abuses at places like food processing plants. There have been several states that have attempted to outlaw undercover video, after activists managed to get hired, and later released video of the horrible and illegal stuff that was going on in those plants. Or consider bans against recording the police on video, that wind up making any video recording of the police, even of the police committing a blatant crime, illegal.
That doesn't mean the law needs to go away entirely, but having some sort of affirmative defense should play a part, for instance.
The CFAA is the "X with a computer" of criminal law, where X is just about anything they want to enforce it as. And that's the problem. It's stupid and BS for patents, and it shouldn't be any more valid in criminal cases.
It's always a slippery slope, isn't it? "But what happens next? What aren't they telling you? More regulations! Scary!"
Sorry, I'm not buying it - not when the alternative is so patently insane. I'm being asked to choose between there -maybe- being something scary in a new regulation that's coming down the line, versus the abuses that I'm already seeing from Comcast et al? It's not even close.
I realize that for you this may seem antithetical, but the Republican party has become so absolutely knee-jerk dogmatic that I can't take them seriously as a responsible governing party. We're not hearing what they suggest should be done to fix the complete lack of competition in the ISP market. Instead, we simply get a complete BS line about why "Free Market" principles mean letting Comcast/AT&T/etc do whatever the hell they want (even to the point of using de-facto monopoly status to strangle any semblance of an actual market into a rent-seeking cash cow). And this is just one example of many where they've decided that it's easier to pretend the problem doesn't exist than to propose solutions. They've stopped caring about having a good government that takes care of the needs of its citizens, and addresses the problems that we as a country face.
It's not a binary question though - we're not forced to choose between "All regulation is good" or "All regulation is bad." We can choose to set an appropriate level, and degree. Like anything, it's a tool, and it can be used for good or for ill. Some regulations are good and some are bad - I'm not sure why this is difficult to understand.
For instance, Net Neutrality isn't telling them in exacting detail how to manage their network, specifying that they have to use this kind of switch but not that kind, or that they have to use specific government approved connectors or things like that. It's merely saying "your role is to pass traffic along, and you can't abuse that by charging extra or degrading service based on whose traffic it is". That's a regulation that encourages competition in the provision of services over the internet.
On the other hand, we could certainly do with removing regulations that serve solely as a barrier to competition or entry, such as those in the ISP market, which is desperately in need of real competition. If anything, my complaint with her 'plan' is that she doesn't really address this, but then, the politicians that you would think should be championing free market mechanisms are instead too busy trying to defend monopolistic rent-seeking behavior.
A Green Card isn't a guest worker, though.
It's a permanent resident status, meaning there's nothing "Guest" about it. If you think that immigration is bad, then that's a bad thing, but if your concern is about temporary status workers being taken advantage of, to the detriment of normal workers (as well as themselves), then, giving permanent (no strings) status instead is a vast improvement.
I'm not sure you can lay the blame solely on Bill Clinton for signing that. The idea itself was fine - the problem was that nobody held them to that promise, nor punished them for failing to live up to it. That's partly on Clinton, but partly on Congress, and on Clinton's successor, and also on all the rest of the voting public for apparently forgetting all about it, or not caring enough to make a big deal out of it.
An H-1B isn't a green card - far from it. A green card lacks the restrictions and limitations of an H-1B. Now, you might think "doesn't that make it worse, then?" - but you would be incorrect. If I'm working in the US on an H-1B Visa, I'm largely tied to my current job, and thereby my employer. If I'm fired, I have 30 days to find a new job or I get kicked out of the country. If I want to quit, it's possible to get the Visa transferred to a new employer, but it makes things an order of magnitude more difficult to switch jobs than it would be if I wasn't an H-1B.
This means that when my boss starts pressing me to work extra hours without reporting it, to come in on Saturday, or to ignore the illegal shit they're doing, or things like that, they've got a lot more leverage over me than they would over a regular employee.
By contrast, someone with a green card competes on a normal even playing field with everyone else, and is free to accept or reject job offers, get poached for a better salary, or to give the finger and quit, just like everyone else.
Yes, exactly. One of the biggest problems with the H-1B program isn't the fact that "there's more people here", it's that they're largely stuck on that particular job, with the threat of being sent home for good if they get fired, which means they'll put up with a lot of crap that normal workers wouldn't, even stuff that's supposed to be against the laws about working hours/conditions/etc. Even though they technically can move to another position with another company, it's far more difficult to do that on an H-1B than as a citizen or permanent resident, and if you get fired, you only have a very narrow window to find a new job before you get kicked out (something like 30 days).
There is nothing to worry about, Professor Falken.
Now, how about a nice game of chess?
More like Macross Plus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I love the smell of IT deployments in the morning. Smells like... job security for geeks.
On the contrary, the Founding Fathers installed it in our core laws (root, if you will) for that very reason - as a check against the powers of the other branches. It's one of many, and it's certainly not infallible, partly because the Founding Fathers in no way envisioned the sort of breakdowns in political norms and virulent factionalism that's taken hold today, but pardons were put in for explicit reasons.
All is not lost. Clearly they didn't bother to test if the nuclei remain pear shaped when traveling at 88 mph.
The UK already had a pretty good deal, in that it basically was able to pick and choose - and even got extra concessions a few months back, in advance of the vote. At this point, further conciliation will only hurt the EU, because it will encourage other countries in the bloc to try the same, at which point, it won't be much of a bloc at all.
No, the EU is probably going to react very negatively, if only to make an example out of Britain. They'll play hardball, because economically speaking, Britain needs the other EU members more than the EU needs them (even if there will be pain all around). Look at where British trade goes now - something like 36% of it goes to major EU members. That's more than they trade with the USA and China combined (~20%), and that's aside from the fact that right now it's Britain using EU trade deals with the USA and China, not its own separate ones. The EU is going to insist that all its regulations apply to any products made in Britain that are sold in the EU, and at that point, it becomes cheaper for the manufacturers in Britain to apply the same to their domestic market. The reason the EU will do this is simple - they don't want France going "well we want our own special deal too." No, they'd rather freeze Britain out as an example.
My anecdotal experiences have clearly shown that prayer has at least a 50% chance of success, far better than web petitions.
And by three, I mean four.
;)
You know what they say - there are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors.
It's a combination of three things, most of which have been touched on in various posts by others here:
1: There's a lot of money in it.
2: The healthcare industry can't afford downtime or failures, so they pay up quickly.
3: Insurance covers a lot of it.
4: Generally poor security practices make it easier, on top of all that (typical of an industry that hasn't been targeted a lot in the past, their security is focused on other things, to the extent they have it).
So in summary, it's a relatively large/easy target, with lots of money, that can't afford downtime. The only surprising thing is that it took this long to become a target.
Does this mean Ireland is the Canada of Great Britain?
Of all the things out there, Windows 10 is pretty low on my hierarchy of worries. That doesn't mean it's not concerning, but there are far bigger threats to my (and your) privacy and legal rights.
Impeachment, probably.
The real problem, I think, is that a lot of older judges just don't understand technology. Now, that doesn't mean it was the case here, certainly (I have no idea who the judge was), but judges like the one in the Oracle vs Google trial, who took the time to learn to code in Java just to understand what was going on, are few and far between. There's probably a lot more older ones who are about as computer savvy as your parents or grandparents, who think computers are for Facebook and cat pictures. They don't understand that when the Founding Fathers were talking about the privacy of one's personal letters and effects, those EXACT things are today stored on your computer and your phone. Almost nobody has a locked drawer full of paper documents anymore, it's all electronic, and on your computer (well, hopefully you store it locally, rather than in the cloud). It absolutely should be protected.