The only way this works is if everyone has to pay a tax. And basically we are then back to government paid for higher education. Which is probably more equitable and should be what we are discussing instead of some new loan scheme.
Unless this is a universal tax, then this just reminds me of the 50 year mortgage that people were talking about right before the housing market bubble burst. Students won't need as large of a loan when the education bubble bursts and tuition costs come down, just like people didn't need 50 year mortgages just to prop up absurdly high prices in the housing market.
- Eliminate a year of high school for some students and put that money towards University or trade school education. (And/or put the money towards universal 4 year old education)
- Eliminate one years worth of classes for a bachelors education. Make it the equivalent of 30 classes instead of 40.
- Make an associates degree a one year degree instead of a two year degree and make an associates degree automatically part of a bachelor's degree as something get after successfully completing the first year.
For those of us that paid too much for college, yes it sucks, but stop whining. But student loans should be able to be discharged in bankruptcy after 5 years or so.
Just to add... yes The Weather Channel is owned by Comcast which has in turn raised rates on DirecTV. So this is what is happening. ESPN is owned by Disney, but Comcast has its own Sports network. So there is a convoluted web of corporate interests here which is very likely to work itself out against the consumer interest
If net neutrality isn't enforced on the Internet side and we don't see a greater portion of the network devoted to the Internet versus these non-Internet content subscription channels.
You are focusing on Comcast as a cable and Internet provider, but they themselves are content companies... Comcast owns NBC Universal and Time Warner does content also. These are vertically Integrated companies with a lot of local monopolies in the Cable and Internet businesses. If anything they will simply look to squeeze out the competition in the content areas. Already you are seeing the Cable and Satellite providers squeezing the content providers and cutting them out whenever they aren't getting a big enough cut. Look at the current situation where DirecTV has created their own "weather nation" channel instead of paying the weather channel. With more market power Comcast will be able to be more anti-competitive in content.
Force the monopoly cable and telephone companies to open up their networks. Then you will have real competition which will result in real consumer choice. It will also mean the end of stupid shit like monthly bandwidth caps.
Agreed. The DoJ should require that Comcast agrees to net neutrality for this to go through. But I think they also really need to divest NBC Universal and any other content business because even with net neutrality it is far too likely that they will grow their own content business at the expense of competition and at the expense of consumer choice.
Funny, but I am guessing this will be pretty much how the Department of "Justice" determines how to rubber stamp this acquisition. They will probably just force the companies to divest in areas where they currently overlap in service.
If I were the DoJ I would force Comcast to provide net neutral service in places where there is no equivalent or better competition. And put their pricing under ongoing review and demand prior authorization of pricing changes in areas where there is no competition. Otherwise block the acquisition. This is far too critical a part of our infrastructure to allow such complete control by so few.
And LADEE recently demonstrated a laser communications system with data rates about ten times over what Artemis demonstrated.
I think these articles and summaries that appear on Slashdot would better serve the community if they took a moment to figure out what the new part of "the news" really is. This sounds like an improvement which will enable more efficient laser communication over longer distances than was demonstrated with LADEE. So, an improvement more applicable to deep space probes or maybe allow the packing of more sensors on Earth observing satellites which will then have more bandwidth to transmit all that data.
If the network can't identify that something accessing the network sporadically and in repeated succession is a bot and should be stopped maybe the NSA shouldn't have access to this much data to start with....
What if a legitimate foreign hacker was able to get in and do the exact same thing? Obviously, they have very shitty standards when it comes to network security - you'd expect thousands of honey pots, ability to intercept attempted attacks, flat out network filtering of these kinds of requests. But alas, that would make sense!
This is the other big glaring issue... Forgetting that the constitution prohibits the sort of forced collection of people's data for a second, which we really really shouldn't forget... with the ability and clear intention to eventually put all the business and communications data in the US into one giant repository the NSA is saying they can protect access to it, but the Snowden leaks are a very big glaring example that some policy isn't in control, people are.
And let's not forget that Snowden knew he would get caught because otherwise if he had just submitted the documents anonymously then the reporters couldn't verify their authenticity and the story would have died there. So in all likelihood Snowden could have walked out the door with all this data and if he had sold it to some foreign intelligence agency then he could have probably laundered the money somehow or kept it in a suitcase for ten years or for however long it took for anyone to remember that he ever worked for the government and everyone would have thought security of all this data was just fine.
The NSA and US government in general is probably the biggest target in the world for intelligence agencies, terrorist groups and criminal gangs even. To think that a huge central repository by which you can piece together all the relationships that people in the US have, all their financial interests, etc etc is somehow going to be more tightly controlled than was access to the nations other top secret information is ludicrously absurd. The bigger the database gets, the bigger the efforts will be to exploit it for other than its originally intended purposes and the more damage that will be done with all that data.
I'd have thought he went in each day with wheelbarrow full of 1.44" floppies and just copied until he got it all... That's some mighty fine detective work, Lou.
Apparently the "wheelbarrow full of 1.44" floppies" was actually what their security was set up to prevent.
What makes the page special is that people can discuss those topics here in a way that has become virtually nonexistent anywhere else on the internet: Uncensored.
Nope have to disagree with you there... The built in peer rating system is the key difference between Slashdot and other discussion platforms and not any perceived lack of centralized censorship or editing. Most discussion boards or comment sections are pretty flat showing you everything that has not been censored for whatever reason and the rating system pretty much a useless add-on because it is just a star or some piece of meta data that is available, but that meta data doesn't impact what you see and read very much. But the censorship on other discussion boards usually affects just the extreme comments like one would get modded down on Slashdot anyway.
Slashdot has a simple yet refined rating system with mod points being given to people that get modded up more frequently. It works. Good comments percolate to the front because they get expanded by default, but you can change your view of the comments threads easily if you want to see everything. Yet you only get mod points when you have contributed enough content that other moderators value. That peer moderation system is the heart of Slashdot and has been replicated very poorly by other websites or discussion platforms like disqus.
If anything I wish Slashdot's moderation system had more imitators among news website discussion boards or if disqus adopted a more slasdhot like interface for displaying and peer moderating discussion threads. Having taken a stab over a few weekends in the way way back at setting up a news website using an older version of the open source slashcode I can say with some experience that the lack of more imitators was probably because it was written in Perl by someone far too skilled at Perl for anyone else's good.
So far I don't have much opinion of the beta either way. Looks a bit slicker, so that is good. But I also assume that they will end up adding back in some of the ui features that make the discussion threads possible to follow a bit better.
Given it is being driven by the same database structure I doubt the ui changes are going to end up being that functionally different once features are added back in.
Just add a line to the State and Federal tax forms with your odometer reading since the last time and multiply by whatever is required. Or just pay for it as part of whatever tax your state likes. There are a variety of ways well short of tracking everyone's car movements in real time and spending millions or billions of dollars just on the tracking system.
V2V is happening today. Unregulated and with no standards at all. Why are you asserting that a nascent technology with no standards and no oversight is safer than one with?
I am asserting much more than that. I am saying that cars should rely on their own sensors (cameras, lidar and/or radar) for detecting other vehicles, people and objects rather than introduce and rely on yet another subsystem that has complex external infrastructure dependencies with some very real and commonly known failure modes with differential GPS.
There seems to be an assumption here that V2V is safer than not having V2V which I am challenging. I think in many scenarios it is actually less safe to be relying on V2V for any essential part of a collision avoidance or autonomous driving system. Maybe it works great on the test track, but I think it is going to fail quite often and in a variety of ways in the real world.
Maybe cars will require autonomous communications for coordinating traffic movements in a more efficient manner, but that is a different purpose and would be a different type of negotiation than the type of "Here I Am" message described as a supplement for collision avoidance. I could see V2V being used to instead communicate "intention" of autonomous vehicles in heavy traffic rather than be used as a transponder. So instead of "Here I Am" make it "Here is where I want to go now". So, a flashing blinker might be hard for a camera to distinguish versus just getting a signal that car at position xyz going v mph is trying to change into your lane. Therefore the car could then either accelerate or slow down to make room for the other vehicle to merge. And that would be data about the intention of the other vehicle, that might not be available otherwise from the cars sensors. But even then, we already have turn signals and to work harmoniously with non-autonomous cars then really we should be trying to use the cameras on the car to detect a turn signal and to react rather than introduce a separate communications channel that isn't human detectable.
As for the taxation question. If V2V was actually useful, then I wouldn't care if it was also used for taxation or even police monitoring. The roads need to be maintained and paid for equitably. My concern is that V2V is being sold to regulators as an aid to autonomous cars, plus a handy way to solve this gas tax replacement issue and 'by the way' it is also a very complicated system that will create all these jobs and require all these big government contracts to implement and improve upon... win, win and win. I just think it fails on the first test and there are also simpler ways to collect a use tax for roads like requiring people to send payments based on their odometer readings along with their yearly income tax forms.
As I posted above. I don't think cars reporting their locations is particularly useful for autonomous crash avoidance... Yes if you are using differential gps the resolution is optimally 10 cm which is adequate for crash avoidance, but that isn't going to hold true for all environmental conditions or with unintentional or intentional interference. This needs to be shown to be more effective both in terms of cost and safety than simply relying on the cars own sensors before being accepted as a safety standard.
Yes, absolutely we need autonomous car navigation and driving to reduce the carnage on our roads, but this seems a lot more like a tax collection scheme than something that is for the benefit of moving forward the goal of autonomous cars.
At this point state and local police are likely just figuring out that as we move to autonomous cars then that will likely eliminate speeding tickets unless people override their own systems. This is a fairly significant revenue stream that is threatened. Of course tens of thousands of lives might be saved every year if cars are crashing less, but some bean counters aren't going to see it that way and there is going to be push back to still keep drivers in control and legally responsible even though the computer is doing the driving.
It isn't even clear this will be at all useful for autonomous navigation or crash avoidance. Any crash avoidance and autonomous navigation system is going to have to deal with cars that aren't transmitting this type of data for at least a decade while cars were in transition and then even after that cars would have to deal with neighboring cars generating bad data, or if it relies on GPS for position then it is going to be completely useless for crash avoidance and even fine grained navigation... not to mention being able to cause accidents or traffic jams by simply creating bogus data and transmitting it. So if the computer has to do all this processing anyway using the cars own sensors to detect neighboring cars and it shouldn't rely on this position data transmitted from other cars because of the real likelihood of bad data, then it is just processing overhead to be doing calculations based upon what all these other cars on the highway are telling you. Either way this strikes me as a very naive approach and not one that should be mandated unless and until we have some real world trials that demonstrate its effectiveness over relying on the cars own sensors under a variety of conditions.
Or really most likely this proposal is just a transponder tax collection scheme under the guise of safety. Bureaucrats have been fretting for years about how they are going to fund road construction and repair as we move towards non-gas tax paying electric cars, more efficient (lower gas tax) or other more efficient non-gasoline powered cars that can't be effectively taxed at the pump.
What the government is doing now is the constitutional equivalent of house to house searches without a warrant on a daily basis just to make sure everything is okay.... which is not okay.
I am very interested in challenging the partisan primary system that is in place in most states.
Based on "California Democratic Party v. Jones" I don't think most of the partisan primaries in place across the US would pass constitutional muster because they do essentially the same thing that was found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Jones. The partisan primary forces the party by law to endorse the winner of that primary. And further in some states people not of that party are allowed by law to choose to vote in that party's primary. The partisan primary system essentially has the same freedom of speech and freedom of association issue as "California Democratic Party v. Jones"
Although Jones was about the California Democratic Party trying to keep its partisan primary system, I believe they established a larger constitutional principle that the state cannot create an election system which takes the place of Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association. Unwittingly they opened the door for a party or perhaps even an individual to challenge the partisan primary systems (that are enshrined by law and paid for with tax dollars)
Now if only the ACLU or some state party would step up and dismantle for once and for all the partisan primary system in the courts.
I don't accept that the definition of a free market doesn't allow for policing to prevent theft, fraud and the threat or use of force for intimidation.
Certainly many employers do oppose unions, especially real ones. But unions are fairly easy to co-opt and can then be used as a means of control and limitation. Just like their government counterparts, bribery of union officials elected by their membership is a time honored tradition. I've personally spoken to a former union rep about how they got extra jobs and extra pay from their employer because of their union position. Anecdotally this seems to have been a common practice that undermines the whole concept of an "independent" union negotiating in good faith purely for the benefit of workers. Sure even corrupt union officials are going to have to be concerned about appearances, but why wouldn't a business want a union especially if it was in their pocket? "Organized" unionization can be used to preempt real grass roots unionization.
I think the common and accepted definition of anarchy is something along the line of "absence of enforced rules" which invariably will lead to despotism or barbarism because the use of force to achieve aims is all too much a part of our nature. Someone will eventually use force, the most virtuous use of force is to preserve liberty.
That is a different problem... Forced unionization has often just become a tool by which employers actually force collective bargaining on workers. It seems all too common that employers are actually the ones creating the unions in order for impose standardization on the workforce and preempt competition. Mostly in government circles, the difference between the employers and the unions have become murky at best.
I'll say it again. Anarchy is not freedom. A free market is one free of the threat of force, intimidation or fraud and that always requires just regulations and policing.
Or put another way, a free market doesn't mean who has the fastest draw of their gun.
anarchy does not equal "Free". Liberty is about rules by which civil society respects the liberties of individuals and protects them. Anarchy is about whichever individuals or groups have the bigger bombs, biceps, knives or guns.
A bunch of billionaires conspiring to control costs by reducing the competition for talent is not about freedom rather it is about control.
Slashdot Mirror
The only way this works is if everyone has to pay a tax. And basically we are then back to government paid for higher education. Which is probably more equitable and should be what we are discussing instead of some new loan scheme.
Unless this is a universal tax, then this just reminds me of the 50 year mortgage that people were talking about right before the housing market bubble burst. Students won't need as large of a loan when the education bubble bursts and tuition costs come down, just like people didn't need 50 year mortgages just to prop up absurdly high prices in the housing market.
- Eliminate a year of high school for some students and put that money towards University or trade school education. (And/or put the money towards universal 4 year old education)
- Eliminate one years worth of classes for a bachelors education. Make it the equivalent of 30 classes instead of 40.
- Make an associates degree a one year degree instead of a two year degree and make an associates degree automatically part of a bachelor's degree as something get after successfully completing the first year.
For those of us that paid too much for college, yes it sucks, but stop whining. But student loans should be able to be discharged in bankruptcy after 5 years or so.
Just to add... yes The Weather Channel is owned by Comcast which has in turn raised rates on DirecTV. So this is what is happening. ESPN is owned by Disney, but Comcast has its own Sports network. So there is a convoluted web of corporate interests here which is very likely to work itself out against the consumer interest
If net neutrality isn't enforced on the Internet side and we don't see a greater portion of the network devoted to the Internet versus these non-Internet content subscription channels.
You are focusing on Comcast as a cable and Internet provider, but they themselves are content companies... Comcast owns NBC Universal and Time Warner does content also. These are vertically Integrated companies with a lot of local monopolies in the Cable and Internet businesses. If anything they will simply look to squeeze out the competition in the content areas. Already you are seeing the Cable and Satellite providers squeezing the content providers and cutting them out whenever they aren't getting a big enough cut. Look at the current situation where DirecTV has created their own "weather nation" channel instead of paying the weather channel. With more market power Comcast will be able to be more anti-competitive in content.
Force the monopoly cable and telephone companies to open up their networks. Then you will have real competition which will result in real consumer choice. It will also mean the end of stupid shit like monthly bandwidth caps.
Agreed. The DoJ should require that Comcast agrees to net neutrality for this to go through. But I think they also really need to divest NBC Universal and any other content business because even with net neutrality it is far too likely that they will grow their own content business at the expense of competition and at the expense of consumer choice.
Department of "Justice": Oh they were monopolies to begin with so who cares if they are just a bigger monopoly now!
Funny, but I am guessing this will be pretty much how the Department of "Justice" determines how to rubber stamp this acquisition. They will probably just force the companies to divest in areas where they currently overlap in service.
If I were the DoJ I would force Comcast to provide net neutral service in places where there is no equivalent or better competition. And put their pricing under ongoing review and demand prior authorization of pricing changes in areas where there is no competition. Otherwise block the acquisition. This is far too critical a part of our infrastructure to allow such complete control by so few.
And LADEE recently demonstrated a laser communications system with data rates about ten times over what Artemis demonstrated.
I think these articles and summaries that appear on Slashdot would better serve the community if they took a moment to figure out what the new part of "the news" really is. This sounds like an improvement which will enable more efficient laser communication over longer distances than was demonstrated with LADEE. So, an improvement more applicable to deep space probes or maybe allow the packing of more sensors on Earth observing satellites which will then have more bandwidth to transmit all that data.
If the network can't identify that something accessing the network sporadically and in repeated succession is a bot and should be stopped maybe the NSA shouldn't have access to this much data to start with....
What if a legitimate foreign hacker was able to get in and do the exact same thing? Obviously, they have very shitty standards when it comes to network security - you'd expect thousands of honey pots, ability to intercept attempted attacks, flat out network filtering of these kinds of requests. But alas, that would make sense!
This is the other big glaring issue... Forgetting that the constitution prohibits the sort of forced collection of people's data for a second, which we really really shouldn't forget ... with the ability and clear intention to eventually put all the business and communications data in the US into one giant repository the NSA is saying they can protect access to it, but the Snowden leaks are a very big glaring example that some policy isn't in control, people are.
And let's not forget that Snowden knew he would get caught because otherwise if he had just submitted the documents anonymously then the reporters couldn't verify their authenticity and the story would have died there. So in all likelihood Snowden could have walked out the door with all this data and if he had sold it to some foreign intelligence agency then he could have probably laundered the money somehow or kept it in a suitcase for ten years or for however long it took for anyone to remember that he ever worked for the government and everyone would have thought security of all this data was just fine.
The NSA and US government in general is probably the biggest target in the world for intelligence agencies, terrorist groups and criminal gangs even. To think that a huge central repository by which you can piece together all the relationships that people in the US have, all their financial interests, etc etc is somehow going to be more tightly controlled than was access to the nations other top secret information is ludicrously absurd. The bigger the database gets, the bigger the efforts will be to exploit it for other than its originally intended purposes and the more damage that will be done with all that data.
I'd have thought he went in each day with wheelbarrow full of 1.44" floppies and just copied until he got it all... That's some mighty fine detective work, Lou.
Apparently the "wheelbarrow full of 1.44" floppies" was actually what their security was set up to prevent.
What makes the page special is that people can discuss those topics here in a way that has become virtually nonexistent anywhere else on the internet: Uncensored.
Nope have to disagree with you there... The built in peer rating system is the key difference between Slashdot and other discussion platforms and not any perceived lack of centralized censorship or editing. Most discussion boards or comment sections are pretty flat showing you everything that has not been censored for whatever reason and the rating system pretty much a useless add-on because it is just a star or some piece of meta data that is available, but that meta data doesn't impact what you see and read very much. But the censorship on other discussion boards usually affects just the extreme comments like one would get modded down on Slashdot anyway.
Slashdot has a simple yet refined rating system with mod points being given to people that get modded up more frequently. It works. Good comments percolate to the front because they get expanded by default, but you can change your view of the comments threads easily if you want to see everything. Yet you only get mod points when you have contributed enough content that other moderators value. That peer moderation system is the heart of Slashdot and has been replicated very poorly by other websites or discussion platforms like disqus.
If anything I wish Slashdot's moderation system had more imitators among news website discussion boards or if disqus adopted a more slasdhot like interface for displaying and peer moderating discussion threads. Having taken a stab over a few weekends in the way way back at setting up a news website using an older version of the open source slashcode I can say with some experience that the lack of more imitators was probably because it was written in Perl by someone far too skilled at Perl for anyone else's good.
So far I don't have much opinion of the beta either way. Looks a bit slicker, so that is good. But I also assume that they will end up adding back in some of the ui features that make the discussion threads possible to follow a bit better.
Given it is being driven by the same database structure I doubt the ui changes are going to end up being that functionally different once features are added back in.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
And the real world is the enemy of the GPS signal.
Just add a line to the State and Federal tax forms with your odometer reading since the last time and multiply by whatever is required. Or just pay for it as part of whatever tax your state likes. There are a variety of ways well short of tracking everyone's car movements in real time and spending millions or billions of dollars just on the tracking system.
V2V is happening today. Unregulated and with no standards at all. Why are you asserting that a nascent technology with no standards and no oversight is safer than one with?
I am asserting much more than that. I am saying that cars should rely on their own sensors (cameras, lidar and/or radar) for detecting other vehicles, people and objects rather than introduce and rely on yet another subsystem that has complex external infrastructure dependencies with some very real and commonly known failure modes with differential GPS.
There seems to be an assumption here that V2V is safer than not having V2V which I am challenging. I think in many scenarios it is actually less safe to be relying on V2V for any essential part of a collision avoidance or autonomous driving system. Maybe it works great on the test track, but I think it is going to fail quite often and in a variety of ways in the real world.
Maybe cars will require autonomous communications for coordinating traffic movements in a more efficient manner, but that is a different purpose and would be a different type of negotiation than the type of "Here I Am" message described as a supplement for collision avoidance. I could see V2V being used to instead communicate "intention" of autonomous vehicles in heavy traffic rather than be used as a transponder. So instead of "Here I Am" make it "Here is where I want to go now". So, a flashing blinker might be hard for a camera to distinguish versus just getting a signal that car at position xyz going v mph is trying to change into your lane. Therefore the car could then either accelerate or slow down to make room for the other vehicle to merge. And that would be data about the intention of the other vehicle, that might not be available otherwise from the cars sensors. But even then, we already have turn signals and to work harmoniously with non-autonomous cars then really we should be trying to use the cameras on the car to detect a turn signal and to react rather than introduce a separate communications channel that isn't human detectable.
As for the taxation question. If V2V was actually useful, then I wouldn't care if it was also used for taxation or even police monitoring. The roads need to be maintained and paid for equitably. My concern is that V2V is being sold to regulators as an aid to autonomous cars, plus a handy way to solve this gas tax replacement issue and 'by the way' it is also a very complicated system that will create all these jobs and require all these big government contracts to implement and improve upon... win, win and win. I just think it fails on the first test and there are also simpler ways to collect a use tax for roads like requiring people to send payments based on their odometer readings along with their yearly income tax forms.
As I posted above. I don't think cars reporting their locations is particularly useful for autonomous crash avoidance... Yes if you are using differential gps the resolution is optimally 10 cm which is adequate for crash avoidance, but that isn't going to hold true for all environmental conditions or with unintentional or intentional interference. This needs to be shown to be more effective both in terms of cost and safety than simply relying on the cars own sensors before being accepted as a safety standard.
Yes, absolutely we need autonomous car navigation and driving to reduce the carnage on our roads, but this seems a lot more like a tax collection scheme than something that is for the benefit of moving forward the goal of autonomous cars.
At this point state and local police are likely just figuring out that as we move to autonomous cars then that will likely eliminate speeding tickets unless people override their own systems. This is a fairly significant revenue stream that is threatened. Of course tens of thousands of lives might be saved every year if cars are crashing less, but some bean counters aren't going to see it that way and there is going to be push back to still keep drivers in control and legally responsible even though the computer is doing the driving.
It isn't even clear this will be at all useful for autonomous navigation or crash avoidance. Any crash avoidance and autonomous navigation system is going to have to deal with cars that aren't transmitting this type of data for at least a decade while cars were in transition and then even after that cars would have to deal with neighboring cars generating bad data, or if it relies on GPS for position then it is going to be completely useless for crash avoidance and even fine grained navigation... not to mention being able to cause accidents or traffic jams by simply creating bogus data and transmitting it. So if the computer has to do all this processing anyway using the cars own sensors to detect neighboring cars and it shouldn't rely on this position data transmitted from other cars because of the real likelihood of bad data, then it is just processing overhead to be doing calculations based upon what all these other cars on the highway are telling you. Either way this strikes me as a very naive approach and not one that should be mandated unless and until we have some real world trials that demonstrate its effectiveness over relying on the cars own sensors under a variety of conditions.
Or really most likely this proposal is just a transponder tax collection scheme under the guise of safety. Bureaucrats have been fretting for years about how they are going to fund road construction and repair as we move towards non-gas tax paying electric cars, more efficient (lower gas tax) or other more efficient non-gasoline powered cars that can't be effectively taxed at the pump.
What the government is doing now is the constitutional equivalent of house to house searches without a warrant on a daily basis just to make sure everything is okay.... which is not okay.
I am very interested in challenging the partisan primary system that is in place in most states.
Based on "California Democratic Party v. Jones" I don't think most of the partisan primaries in place across the US would pass constitutional muster because they do essentially the same thing that was found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Jones. The partisan primary forces the party by law to endorse the winner of that primary. And further in some states people not of that party are allowed by law to choose to vote in that party's primary. The partisan primary system essentially has the same freedom of speech and freedom of association issue as "California Democratic Party v. Jones"
Although Jones was about the California Democratic Party trying to keep its partisan primary system, I believe they established a larger constitutional principle that the state cannot create an election system which takes the place of Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association. Unwittingly they opened the door for a party or perhaps even an individual to challenge the partisan primary systems (that are enshrined by law and paid for with tax dollars)
Now if only the ACLU or some state party would step up and dismantle for once and for all the partisan primary system in the courts.
I don't accept that the definition of a free market doesn't allow for policing to prevent theft, fraud and the threat or use of force for intimidation.
I'm pretty sure employers tend to oppose unions.
Certainly many employers do oppose unions, especially real ones. But unions are fairly easy to co-opt and can then be used as a means of control and limitation. Just like their government counterparts, bribery of union officials elected by their membership is a time honored tradition. I've personally spoken to a former union rep about how they got extra jobs and extra pay from their employer because of their union position. Anecdotally this seems to have been a common practice that undermines the whole concept of an "independent" union negotiating in good faith purely for the benefit of workers. Sure even corrupt union officials are going to have to be concerned about appearances, but why wouldn't a business want a union especially if it was in their pocket? "Organized" unionization can be used to preempt real grass roots unionization.
I think the common and accepted definition of anarchy is something along the line of "absence of enforced rules" which invariably will lead to despotism or barbarism because the use of force to achieve aims is all too much a part of our nature. Someone will eventually use force, the most virtuous use of force is to preserve liberty.
That is a different problem... Forced unionization has often just become a tool by which employers actually force collective bargaining on workers. It seems all too common that employers are actually the ones creating the unions in order for impose standardization on the workforce and preempt competition. Mostly in government circles, the difference between the employers and the unions have become murky at best.
There's a knock-on effect... for those of us not employed at the named offenders, the salaries are suppressed. I hope they're convicted.
Damn straight. This is a criminal conspiracy.
I'll say it again. Anarchy is not freedom. A free market is one free of the threat of force, intimidation or fraud and that always requires just regulations and policing.
Or put another way, a free market doesn't mean who has the fastest draw of their gun.
anarchy does not equal "Free". Liberty is about rules by which civil society respects the liberties of individuals and protects them. Anarchy is about whichever individuals or groups have the bigger bombs, biceps, knives or guns. A bunch of billionaires conspiring to control costs by reducing the competition for talent is not about freedom rather it is about control.