My theory is that organic economic growth in the capitalist West has somehow stalled, and corporations looking for increasing profits are increasingly relying on cost cutting to boost profits.
Organic growth has stalled so now corporations, driven by the stock market, are focusing on cancerous growth. A company could be regularly turning a net profit of tens or millions of dollars annually, but if it misses an arbitrary growth rate by a percentage point or 2 the stock drops. Just like a cancer, incessant growth will eventually kill the host organism, whether a person or a company.
My friends are all in their 30s and most their acquaintances are in their 30s. So without saying or intending that, this procedure is a) not visible to the majority of job seekers of any age and b) mostly excludes those that can remember the 70s just by virtue of the social circle to which the question went.
That's the point -- I've cast a net out for prospective employees but done so in a way that targets a particular demographic.
What's more, in this hypothetical, I haven't posted the job anywhere else. So if you are not an acquaintance of one of mine, you literally cannot find out about this job.
If the law makes this is illegal, I'd be quite surprised.
Again, it depends. In your specific example, the criteria preventing people from getting hired is you (or by extension, your friends) don't know the (potential) applicant. You are not (by reasonable assumption) explicitly avoiding people based upon a protected class and would presumably hire someone that is qualified and in a protected class.
Now, if one of your friends said his 45 year old next door neighbor just got downsized and needs a job, but is a good worker and qualified for the job and your response is "hell no, no one over 40" then yes, you've got an issue on your hands. Of course the usual defense for that is "It's not because he is old, we just feel that the salary we are offering (near-slave or starvation level) would be less than what he would ask for (because he's old)"
Kind of hard to apply for a job you don't know exists.....
Why would Facebook be your goto job-hunting source? It is close to my last choice, right above maybe the help-wanted ads in the old fashioned physical newspaper thing.
You are looking at this wrong. In this case Facebook isn't a job-hunting source, it is an employee recruitment source. Companies are paying for ads advertising their open positions, and the allegation is that these companies are using Facebook's ad-targeting data to only serve ads to people who are younger and presumably cheaper. It will be interesting to see how the court interprets the anti-discrimination laws in this case, especially if they are able to show in court precisely what criteria was used to determine who to serve the ad to.
No, it does not. The thought of discrimination against an older person is the motivation behind your act, but it is the act itself that is illegal
It is not illegal to not hire an older person. It is precisely my thoughts about it, that may make the not-hiring illegal.
That's not a thought crime though. Once you have taken the action of not hiring that person (yes, for those of you are trying to be pedantic, not acting is still acting) because they are old you have committed an actual, physical crime. Your thought is the motive for the crime.
When you ask your friends for recommendations do you say "no one that can remember the 70s?" If so, then quite possibly yes, you have violated the law.
In other words, whether or not your action is a crime depends on your thoughts during the act.
Which makes it a thought-crime
No, it does not. The thought of discrimination against an older person is the motivation behind your act, but it is the act itself that is illegal. Let's take your logic: I break into a house to steal something. The owner is home and I end up killing them. I didn't plan to kill them, therefore I am not guilty of murder because it wasn't my thought to kill them.
Thought crime is when you can be arrested simply for having a thought or an idea. Once you have moved beyond thought into action, you are no longer in thought crime territory but actual crime territory. And this happens regularly during criminal proceedings, for example when to attach hate crime charges. A white guy beats up a black guy, and it's assault. The white guy says white supremacist/derogatory things while beating up the black guy? That speaks to his motivations for the crime and lends evidence towards a hate crime.
If I wanted to hire for my business and just asked around my friends for recommendations/referrals without doing a "public" job offering, have I violated either the law or your sense of ethics?
Depends. When you ask your friends for recommendations do you say "no one that can remember the 70s?" If so, then quite possibly yes, you have violated the law. If these companies are focusing on one class of people over another based on a criteria that is not inherently necessary to the job function then they are definitely breaking the spirit of the law, if not necessarily the letter.
It was partly a product of my financial situation at the time, but my wife picked out a white sapphire for her center stone. 1/3 the price of a comparable diamond, but nearly indistinguishable to a diamond unless side by side
Yes, many of the people i work with, that do the same work as me, have pensions because they were lucky enough to be born 30 years before me. And I just recently started putting money into a 401k because, even with a Masters degree, I was stuck in a $13 an hour job until I got my current job which now pays 3 times what I was making a few years ago.
How is removing insurance companies and inserting Government going to be cheaper or more efficient? At least now, insurance companies have to offer some level of service, or they lose clients. With single payer - you have, effectively, a single insurer who does not have to answer to anyone.
Barring the fact government is (or at least should be, except for tax collection) a non-profit entity, you are effectively removing 3 different layers that derive profit off of the money you spend on health insurance premiums before you even see a doctor. Removing those is an automatic cost savings, even if you still have to pay out of pocket like most insurance plans make you do now. As for one single insurer, yes, that would be great. That means that everything is already negotiated out and everyone is charged the same. No more treatment costs X, is priced at 4X, and negotiated down to 2X (for you, it might be 2.5X for the person next to you, because reasons). When it comes to negotiation, how can you have more power than having literally every single customer on your side? And as a government agency, it would most certainly answer to someone: us. We would want to make sure our taxes and our premiums (if we have them) are being spent correctly.
All it takes is allowing people to fully deduct the cost of their own healthcare. As it is now, it's a tax benefit for consumers to have healthcare paid for by their employers. Change it so consumers can deduct the cost of health insurance/healthcare and there will be zero reason to stay with the existing approach. And a side benefit is they employee will now be in direct control of the expenditure on their own healthcare, most likely resulting in reduced expenditures on healthcare.
How about just taking the middlemen out of healthcare? Get rid of the insurance companies and private insurance. Sure, the government might not be as efficient as private companies, but single payer still has to be cheaper when you realize that right now you are paying for the overhead/profit for the insurance companies, profits for the insurance company stockholders, the overhead/profit for local brokers and plan administrators, etc. You have at least 3 layers of people making money off your healthcare dollars before you even see a doctor! Add countless other layers of profit out of your healthcare dollars once you actually see the doctor and it gets even worse(can you say "chargemaster"?)
The point is, take out multiple layers of middlemen and costs will already go down, regardless of any loss of efficiency (which may not even occur).
As someone who will never get to touch a pension while Boomers guaranteed themselves thousands of dollars a month on top of social security, yes, they did. I'm only 31 and have been putting money into a 401k for a only a few years now, so I'll be lucky if I even get to retire before 70.
The problem is that the prices aren't dropping. As a previous poster said, the money saved on robots is filtering UP and creating wealth rather than reducing prices. Not sure who to blame for that. It's gotta be the people who are willing to pay 'human' price for 'robot' service.
There is no incentive for the owners to drop the prices as automation reduces cost, because currently all or most of those paying human prices can continue to do so. It's not until the amount of un/under -employed reaches a critical mass and are unable to pay human prices for robot goods that the price of those goods will move towards robot prices. But even that will be a slow transition if allowed to happen naturally.
You'll mind. About the only starwars movie that was even remotely interesting of late was Rogue One.
You know what makes me sad? The part of Rogue One that got me most excited was the ambush on Jedha. Finally some actual military tactics in a Star Wars movie, and guerilla tactics to boot! Everything before that was frontal assaults, everyone standing straight up, etc (although the Rebels were at least smart enough to entrench themselves on Hoth, but they really should have done a better job on their heavy weapon emplacement). Hell, in RotJ when they spring the trap the Empire is just standing there chilling in perfect parade formation in the middle of a clearing. Who does that?
I was joking of course. It could be great, as long as they look at the already available fiction around the Mandalores.
Wasn't Boba Fett not Mandalorean though? I thought he just wore the armor. Accord to the googles opinions are mixed on whether or not Fett was (or became/was accepted as/whatever) a Mandalorean. So I'll just stick with him not being from Mandalore. Mandalores could make a decent story, but it would probably end up being 300 in space.
Well, yes, that would be a perfect plot point. The intrigue and drama of competing factions, one trying to keep the new government democratic, one wanting revenge on the remnants of the Empire and the planets that supported it and therefore becoming more and more draconian, more like the Empire. Basically an exploration of how, when you might so hard to gain power you have to fight even harder to use that power sparingly and justly, as well as how easy it is to justify the misuse of that power.
One day I would understand why people hate The Last Jedi, I really enjoyed it.
I thought it was "meh". Pretty enough, but they keep rehashing scenes from the original trilogy-VII was almost a scene for scene rehash of IV, but VIII had a lot of V in it, with a little IV thrown in.
Plus, I really don't get how, if at the end of RotJ, (in the special edition) they show worlds all over the galaxy celebrating the fall of the Empire, how the Rebels are still, well, rebels. It's like if the US, after winning the Revolutionary War, just sat around doing nothing waiting until the British re-invaded in 1812 instead of trying to form a government. The new trilogy should have been about the Rebels' new government hunting down the remnants of the Empire and cleaning up the galaxy.
Supposedly that is coming after the finish up the current trilogy. Knowing the way Hollywood writes, it will probably just be a Star Wars version of Indiana Jones. Just replace the Nazis with the Empire and the Ark of the Covenant with an ancient Jedi artifact.
You mean the testing site they basically already destroyed in an accident? Given it's proximity to China there is a good chance the Chinese were wanting them to cap it to keep any potential radiation from getting out. It was a token gesture at best
Dang man... You just want cops to die needlessly. Why don't we just take their guns away?
Look, cops have the right to defend themselves and go home to the wife and kids. This means that they MUST be allowed to use deadly force. The reality of policing is that it's a split second decision between going home and being buried. In dangerous situations the police are empowered to use deadly force to defend themselves, other officers and the general public and generally they save many from harm by using force. The unfortunate side effect is that there is a chance, however slim, that bad things will happen to innocent people.
The question you need to ask and answer is how your ill-conceived theories about how policing is done will affect both the police and the public. In my view, you *might* keep one or two innocents from harm from the police, but you will condemn an order of magnitude more people to being harmed because you tied the police down to some ridiculous PC driven rules of engagement that make no sense and make police's lives more complicated and dangerous.
No, I don't want them to die needlessly, and I want them to go home to their wife and kids if at all possible. What I am saying is, their duty is to first make sure WE, the American citizens that they serve, go home safe to our wives and children. As cliche as it sounds, their first duty is to "protect and serve", and that means running the risk of bodily injury or death every day to ensure the safety of others. There are plenty of cases where deadly force could be and should be authorized, but none of those cases should involve the words "might", "thought", or "maybe". Bad things happen to people because of other bad people, and they always will. You can't change that. What you can change is people needlessly dying at the hands of the people we have entrusted to protect them.
You have to realize that if the situation describe over the phone was actual true, not taking the shot could have gotten an entire family killed.
You have to realize that, since the police arrived with guns drawn, waiting an extra half second to see that the suspect was in fact armed or reaching for a gun would have saved his life while not endangering the potential hostages inside because the police could still have shot him before get could even get the gun aimed.
Slashdot Mirror
My theory is that organic economic growth in the capitalist West has somehow stalled, and corporations looking for increasing profits are increasingly relying on cost cutting to boost profits.
Organic growth has stalled so now corporations, driven by the stock market, are focusing on cancerous growth. A company could be regularly turning a net profit of tens or millions of dollars annually, but if it misses an arbitrary growth rate by a percentage point or 2 the stock drops. Just like a cancer, incessant growth will eventually kill the host organism, whether a person or a company.
Even a lot of older people can't remember the 70's....
I guess you could argue that if you remember the 70s you were either very young, very old, or you did the 70s very wrong.
My friends are all in their 30s and most their acquaintances are in their 30s. So without saying or intending that, this procedure is a) not visible to the majority of job seekers of any age and b) mostly excludes those that can remember the 70s just by virtue of the social circle to which the question went.
That's the point -- I've cast a net out for prospective employees but done so in a way that targets a particular demographic.
What's more, in this hypothetical, I haven't posted the job anywhere else. So if you are not an acquaintance of one of mine, you literally cannot find out about this job.
If the law makes this is illegal, I'd be quite surprised.
Again, it depends. In your specific example, the criteria preventing people from getting hired is you (or by extension, your friends) don't know the (potential) applicant. You are not (by reasonable assumption) explicitly avoiding people based upon a protected class and would presumably hire someone that is qualified and in a protected class.
Now, if one of your friends said his 45 year old next door neighbor just got downsized and needs a job, but is a good worker and qualified for the job and your response is "hell no, no one over 40" then yes, you've got an issue on your hands. Of course the usual defense for that is "It's not because he is old, we just feel that the salary we are offering (near-slave or starvation level) would be less than what he would ask for (because he's old)"
I'd be more worried about the Spectacles fiasco and the fact that you are doubling down on failure by trying to resurrect them.
Kind of hard to apply for a job you don't know exists.....
Why would Facebook be your goto job-hunting source? It is close to my last choice, right above maybe the help-wanted ads in the old fashioned physical newspaper thing.
You are looking at this wrong. In this case Facebook isn't a job-hunting source, it is an employee recruitment source. Companies are paying for ads advertising their open positions, and the allegation is that these companies are using Facebook's ad-targeting data to only serve ads to people who are younger and presumably cheaper. It will be interesting to see how the court interprets the anti-discrimination laws in this case, especially if they are able to show in court precisely what criteria was used to determine who to serve the ad to.
It is not illegal to not hire an older person. It is precisely my thoughts about it, that may make the not-hiring illegal.
That's not a thought crime though. Once you have taken the action of not hiring that person (yes, for those of you are trying to be pedantic, not acting is still acting) because they are old you have committed an actual, physical crime. Your thought is the motive for the crime.
In other words, whether or not your action is a crime depends on your thoughts during the act.
Which makes it a thought-crime
No, it does not. The thought of discrimination against an older person is the motivation behind your act, but it is the act itself that is illegal. Let's take your logic: I break into a house to steal something. The owner is home and I end up killing them. I didn't plan to kill them, therefore I am not guilty of murder because it wasn't my thought to kill them.
Thought crime is when you can be arrested simply for having a thought or an idea. Once you have moved beyond thought into action, you are no longer in thought crime territory but actual crime territory. And this happens regularly during criminal proceedings, for example when to attach hate crime charges. A white guy beats up a black guy, and it's assault. The white guy says white supremacist/derogatory things while beating up the black guy? That speaks to his motivations for the crime and lends evidence towards a hate crime.
If I wanted to hire for my business and just asked around my friends for recommendations/referrals without doing a "public" job offering, have I violated either the law or your sense of ethics?
Depends. When you ask your friends for recommendations do you say "no one that can remember the 70s?" If so, then quite possibly yes, you have violated the law. If these companies are focusing on one class of people over another based on a criteria that is not inherently necessary to the job function then they are definitely breaking the spirit of the law, if not necessarily the letter.
Not presenting an ad to someone does not block them from applying to a job.
Kind of hard to apply for a job you don't know exists.....
It was partly a product of my financial situation at the time, but my wife picked out a white sapphire for her center stone. 1/3 the price of a comparable diamond, but nearly indistinguishable to a diamond unless side by side
Yes, many of the people i work with, that do the same work as me, have pensions because they were lucky enough to be born 30 years before me. And I just recently started putting money into a 401k because, even with a Masters degree, I was stuck in a $13 an hour job until I got my current job which now pays 3 times what I was making a few years ago.
How is removing insurance companies and inserting Government going to be cheaper or more efficient? At least now, insurance companies have to offer some level of service, or they lose clients. With single payer - you have, effectively, a single insurer who does not have to answer to anyone.
Barring the fact government is (or at least should be, except for tax collection) a non-profit entity, you are effectively removing 3 different layers that derive profit off of the money you spend on health insurance premiums before you even see a doctor. Removing those is an automatic cost savings, even if you still have to pay out of pocket like most insurance plans make you do now. As for one single insurer, yes, that would be great. That means that everything is already negotiated out and everyone is charged the same. No more treatment costs X, is priced at 4X, and negotiated down to 2X (for you, it might be 2.5X for the person next to you, because reasons). When it comes to negotiation, how can you have more power than having literally every single customer on your side? And as a government agency, it would most certainly answer to someone: us. We would want to make sure our taxes and our premiums (if we have them) are being spent correctly.
All it takes is allowing people to fully deduct the cost of their own healthcare. As it is now, it's a tax benefit for consumers to have healthcare paid for by their employers. Change it so consumers can deduct the cost of health insurance/healthcare and there will be zero reason to stay with the existing approach. And a side benefit is they employee will now be in direct control of the expenditure on their own healthcare, most likely resulting in reduced expenditures on healthcare.
How about just taking the middlemen out of healthcare? Get rid of the insurance companies and private insurance. Sure, the government might not be as efficient as private companies, but single payer still has to be cheaper when you realize that right now you are paying for the overhead/profit for the insurance companies, profits for the insurance company stockholders, the overhead/profit for local brokers and plan administrators, etc. You have at least 3 layers of people making money off your healthcare dollars before you even see a doctor! Add countless other layers of profit out of your healthcare dollars once you actually see the doctor and it gets even worse(can you say "chargemaster"?)
The point is, take out multiple layers of middlemen and costs will already go down, regardless of any loss of efficiency (which may not even occur).
Battle Royale is the genre term but it pretty much got its idea from the hunger games
Because we never had death match modes until Hunger Games....
As someone who will never get to touch a pension while Boomers guaranteed themselves thousands of dollars a month on top of social security, yes, they did. I'm only 31 and have been putting money into a 401k for a only a few years now, so I'll be lucky if I even get to retire before 70.
The problem is that the prices aren't dropping. As a previous poster said, the money saved on robots is filtering UP and creating wealth rather than reducing prices. Not sure who to blame for that. It's gotta be the people who are willing to pay 'human' price for 'robot' service.
There is no incentive for the owners to drop the prices as automation reduces cost, because currently all or most of those paying human prices can continue to do so. It's not until the amount of un/under -employed reaches a critical mass and are unable to pay human prices for robot goods that the price of those goods will move towards robot prices. But even that will be a slow transition if allowed to happen naturally.
You'll mind. About the only starwars movie that was even remotely interesting of late was Rogue One.
You know what makes me sad? The part of Rogue One that got me most excited was the ambush on Jedha. Finally some actual military tactics in a Star Wars movie, and guerilla tactics to boot! Everything before that was frontal assaults, everyone standing straight up, etc (although the Rebels were at least smart enough to entrench themselves on Hoth, but they really should have done a better job on their heavy weapon emplacement). Hell, in RotJ when they spring the trap the Empire is just standing there chilling in perfect parade formation in the middle of a clearing. Who does that?
I was joking of course. It could be great, as long as they look at the already available fiction around the Mandalores.
Wasn't Boba Fett not Mandalorean though? I thought he just wore the armor. Accord to the googles opinions are mixed on whether or not Fett was (or became/was accepted as/whatever) a Mandalorean. So I'll just stick with him not being from Mandalore. Mandalores could make a decent story, but it would probably end up being 300 in space.
Well, yes, that would be a perfect plot point. The intrigue and drama of competing factions, one trying to keep the new government democratic, one wanting revenge on the remnants of the Empire and the planets that supported it and therefore becoming more and more draconian, more like the Empire. Basically an exploration of how, when you might so hard to gain power you have to fight even harder to use that power sparingly and justly, as well as how easy it is to justify the misuse of that power.
One day I would understand why people hate The Last Jedi, I really enjoyed it.
I thought it was "meh". Pretty enough, but they keep rehashing scenes from the original trilogy-VII was almost a scene for scene rehash of IV, but VIII had a lot of V in it, with a little IV thrown in.
Plus, I really don't get how, if at the end of RotJ, (in the special edition) they show worlds all over the galaxy celebrating the fall of the Empire, how the Rebels are still, well, rebels. It's like if the US, after winning the Revolutionary War, just sat around doing nothing waiting until the British re-invaded in 1812 instead of trying to form a government. The new trilogy should have been about the Rebels' new government hunting down the remnants of the Empire and cleaning up the galaxy.
Supposedly that is coming after the finish up the current trilogy. Knowing the way Hollywood writes, it will probably just be a Star Wars version of Indiana Jones. Just replace the Nazis with the Empire and the Ark of the Covenant with an ancient Jedi artifact.
You mean the testing site they basically already destroyed in an accident? Given it's proximity to China there is a good chance the Chinese were wanting them to cap it to keep any potential radiation from getting out. It was a token gesture at best
I've watched numerous vevo videos on YouTube, but I never knew they had a standalone website
Dang man... You just want cops to die needlessly. Why don't we just take their guns away?
Look, cops have the right to defend themselves and go home to the wife and kids. This means that they MUST be allowed to use deadly force. The reality of policing is that it's a split second decision between going home and being buried. In dangerous situations the police are empowered to use deadly force to defend themselves, other officers and the general public and generally they save many from harm by using force. The unfortunate side effect is that there is a chance, however slim, that bad things will happen to innocent people.
The question you need to ask and answer is how your ill-conceived theories about how policing is done will affect both the police and the public. In my view, you *might* keep one or two innocents from harm from the police, but you will condemn an order of magnitude more people to being harmed because you tied the police down to some ridiculous PC driven rules of engagement that make no sense and make police's lives more complicated and dangerous.
No, I don't want them to die needlessly, and I want them to go home to their wife and kids if at all possible. What I am saying is, their duty is to first make sure WE, the American citizens that they serve, go home safe to our wives and children. As cliche as it sounds, their first duty is to "protect and serve", and that means running the risk of bodily injury or death every day to ensure the safety of others. There are plenty of cases where deadly force could be and should be authorized, but none of those cases should involve the words "might", "thought", or "maybe". Bad things happen to people because of other bad people, and they always will. You can't change that. What you can change is people needlessly dying at the hands of the people we have entrusted to protect them.
You have to realize that if the situation describe over the phone was actual true, not taking the shot could have gotten an entire family killed.
You have to realize that, since the police arrived with guns drawn, waiting an extra half second to see that the suspect was in fact armed or reaching for a gun would have saved his life while not endangering the potential hostages inside because the police could still have shot him before get could even get the gun aimed.