Why should a person not pay more into it (themselves) to guarantee a greater payout should the so-called "disaster" of unemployment happen
People are effectively paying into it themselves: if you place mandates on the employer, they just reduce the salary accordingly.
Sorry... I write the checks on this... it's a horrible system.
Yes, the funding is currently badly done. But by and large, the idea is right: (1) make unemployment insurance mandatory, (2) have the money collected by the employer (to reduce administrative costs), (3) generally make the benefits proportional to salary, (4) have per employer accounts where you keep track of how much each employer taps into it.
What needs to change is: (a) raise the contribution cap from $7000 to $100000, (b) stop proportionality at around $100000 (cap the benefits), (c) maybe adjust the contribution rate.
What statist twaddle. What is the meaning of one person's liberties when they are secured by trampling on another's?
What libertarian twaddle and stop reading intellectual midgets like Ayn Rand.
If you don't like PayPal or Amazon, don't be a customer. Collecting donations through PayPal, or hosting on an Amazon server, are not examples of political rights.
They are when those companies dominate their markets, and arguably they do.
what amounts to the private correspondence of American ambassadors
Private correspondence is if they send each other love letters.
Diplomatic cables are government business, not private correspondence. There may be legitimate reasons to keep them from being published, but privacy has nothing to do with it. By default, those cables, like all other correspondence among government employees created as part of their job, are the property of the public and should be available.
Show me something that's truly shocking from the American diplomacy bomb,
These cables are significant in their banality: why is this information not made public to begin with? Why are the attitudes of the Arab nations towards Iran kept secret? What is the reason for classifying these cables "Top Secret" to begin with?
You mean the same European governments that have an Interpol warrant out for Assange are going to go out of their way punishing Paypal for something they want done themselves? You're dreaming.
I agree that they curerntly have the right to do that and that in general, private companies should be free to make such choices.
However, when it comes to payment or cloud hosting services, we may want to change the rules in ways we have changed them for other businesses in the past: banks and telecom companies cannot arbitrarily refuse service because of the personal political views of their management, and we should probably have similar rules for Paypal and Amazon. That's not to protect Wikileaks, it's to protect our political process and liberties.
Which is it? Are these companies totally gutless? Unable to recognize the positive publicity they could spin from this?
Personally, I would prefer if they hadn't done this, but I don't think it's right to jump to conclusions: Paypal may be taking a principled stand, just not the one you prefer. I suspect about half of all Americans do not like what Wikileaks is doing.
in NO war after world war ii, there has been a situation in which american soldiers were dying for defending freedom and preventing oppression. in ALL situations, and that includes somalia, they were sent to those places to further private interests's aims in the region. Any zone either had strategic resources (panama canal, middle east), or, natural resources (somalia, middle east, oil).
Even WWI and WWII were about access to resources, the US economy, and strategic reasons. The US military will not become active without unless there is a strong security or economic interest involved.
There is nothing wrong with that, as long as the war is otherwise justifiable.
Both in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, the populations were oppressed by brutal and illegitimate regimes. In principle, I have no problem with the US going in there, even unilaterally, and kicking out those regimes. Furthermore, in the aftermath, the US generally tries to transition the nations to democracy and independence quickly.
That is in contrast to most European wars of the past, where Europe went in, crushed other governments solely for its own benefit, and then proceeded to occupy and oppress them for decades or centuries.
Since WWII, Europeans fancy themselves to be pacificists, but what they are actually doing is letting the US do the necessary dirty work while reaping the benefits of US military action; and the US has to play along because it can afford Europe failing no more today than during WWII.
So save us your self-righteous indignation. If Europeans were actually principled, they'd as US troops to leave Europe and would refuse to do business with nations that the US has liberated. Instead, European nations are fighting over where US troops stay, and European corporations are over any nation that the US has liberated like flies over a carcass, so much so that the US often doesn't benefit as much as it should
Apart from the general irritating bloviations, Simon Phipps' thinking is particularly fuzzy when it comes to cloud computing vs traditional hosting.
It doesn't matter how Wikileaks was hosted. If it had been hosted on a bunch of co-located machines, or on a bunch of machines in someone's basement, the company providing connectivity would still have turned it off.
In fact, it is cloud computing that allows Wikileaks to move quickly to other locations: instead of having to buy, move, install, and hook up server hardware and then get connectivity for it, when they get dumped Wikileaks can simply choose another provider anywhere in the world and move their data within minutes. And since they are charged by the hour, it's not even all that expensive.
Eventually, they may still run out of cloud providers to go to, but that's going to take a lot longer than in the bad old days of using your own hardware and hooking up to a telecom.
1) EmployEEs don't pay for unemployment insurance... the employER (does though there is talk of changing that).
That is a meaningless distinction.
2) Unemployment insurance is a fixed rate (that changes yearly) charged against the first $7000 (usually) that an employer pays an employee... so it is not based on how much you earn... just on what you earn... up to $7000.
It is based on how much you earn, it simply happens to be capped.
Employer's have an experience account where unemployment insurance contributions accumulate. When an employee gets laid off and starts to collect benefits, the employer's experience account is charged for that. If the experience account gets low (or is emptied) the employer is charged a higher rate the next year to compensate.
Well, which would be even a stronger argument that it is insurance, instead of a government handout.
Point is: the US system is an insurance system, like many such systems. You pay for it depending on your salary, and you get money back depending on your salary. That is why you get something proporational to your salary. The details of how it's paid for don't matter to that reasoning. You do pay proportional to what you earn, the cap is just ridiculously low.
The system should be reformed. A cap of $100k and benefits proportional to what you paid in would make sense. But it should remain a government-backed mandatory insurance system, not a government handout.
Threatening students for reading publicly available information is unacceptable. There doesn't seem to be anything security-relevant in these cables, it is simply a massive embarrassment to the government, both because of what's in them and in how poorly they protected them.
From a lowlife like Lieberman, I didn't expect any better than to call up Amazon and get them to block the site. But as someone who voted for Obama, I'm beginning to wonder whether I shouldn't just have stayed home, and that's just what I may do next time around.
In the US, unemployment benefits are based on what you used to earn???
They are in most of the world.
What the Hell is the rationale for that?
One rationale is that it is unemployment insurance that you paid for, and you pay for it proportionally to what you earn. Benefits beyond your unemployment insurance are then generally just a fixed amount.
A second rationale is that unemployment is supposedly something short term and you don't want to force people to dismantle their lives, in particular while you want them to go out looking for a new job. Selling your home, moving to a new place, even just selling off your investments itself takes time and if you're forced to do it on short notice, costs a lot of money.
In the UK, you are means tested. If you have savings over a large amount, (around £16,000), then you're expected to start using that.
Well, the UK is just full of bad ideas when it comes to social policies, isn't it?
I wrote "just because something is your private property does not automatically mean you have a right to exclude the public." You disagreed. You were wrong. Now get over it.
Google (and others) now know it's not okay to come on to private property for photogathering without permission, and can't play dumb next time. Google wasn't trespassing "innocently" or "by mistake"; they were engaged in commercial activity and did what they did intentionally.
Bullshit; there is not a shred of evidence that Google has been intentionally trespassing in order to gather photos. They hire a bunch of drivers who are probably not paid all that much to drive around, and those drivers make mistakes, just like you and me.
Furthermore, in many circumstances, it is OK to come onto private property and take photos; just because something is your private property does not automatically mean you have a right to exclude the public. That's the default, but there are many exceptions.
Back when Sun was still swimming in money (i.e., a long time ago), Sun "envisioned" exactly this and made a video about it. Backprojected displays and camera-based touch interfaces also already existed back then (imagine that).
I didn't see then what this gives me over monitors and keyboards, and I still don't. It's less modular, bulkier, harder to move, and less functional than what I have now. And a ton more expensive.
And your indications that the GP is working in an enterprise are... zilch. If you're an actual enterprise, you'll get support from Google.
But Google Apps is aimed at SMBs. SMBs are screwed no matter what. Try getting support from Microsoft; they'll respond to your E-mails, they just won't fix anything, and when Microsoft's software screws you and drops your money on the floor, they also just shrug their shoulders.
That's what IBM said about Microsoft as well, until it was too late.
Enterprises often are the last businesses to adopt new end-user technologies, or technologies that reduce staff requirements. You can figure out yourself why that might be...
Right, which is predicated on the doctrine of reincarnation and an infinite past
Buddhism doesn't have a "doctrine of reincarnation", is has a notion of rebirth. Reincarnation is a bizarre supernatural concept, rebirth is not necessarily. The close association of Buddhism and Hinduism causes people to confuse the two.
Furthermore, a meditation isn't "predicated" on anything. You can meditate on the sound of one hand clapping, that doesn't mean that Buddhism is invalid because one hand doesn't clap.
Beyond that the universe-is-eternal is a core concept in Buddhism?
We both agree that Buddhists generally believe that the universe is eternal (as do many non-Buddhists). I said that, hypothetically, if it were not, the rest of Buddhism would still hold up. You disagreed and cited this passage. Please explain how this passage could not possibly hold true if the universe was of finite duration.
You're assuming a pigeonhole principle that doesn't exist, or that the universe has some sort of fitting function to guarantee all combinations will happen.
I'm assuming nothing at all. I am saying that with a finite timeline, the statements of the passage are still possibly true.
Ah, good, a concrete example. That is a meditation on compassion. It does not say "you should love one another because you are all related", it says "think about the possibility that you may be related and you may find it easier to find compassion for one another". Relatedness doesn't justify compassion, it is just an aid to help you find compassion in yourself for others. And finding compassion in yourself isn't there in order to satisfy some rule or obligation, it is part of ending suffering.
But regardless of what the purpose and spiritual meaning of the dialog is, what makes you think it requires an infinite timeline? If there's a finite number of beings, even with random mixing, it only takes a finite number of generations until they have gone through all combinations of relationships.
Finally, in contrast to Christianity, no Buddhist writing claims absolute truth. Buddhism is defined by common principles and beliefs, not some fixed document or rules. You have to evaluate and think about what you read. This particular writing is compatible with mainstream Buddhism, you are just misinterpreting it. But there are some writings that indeed seem to contradict core Buddhist beliefs; they may be metaphorical, or dialectical, or they may simply get something wrong.
Show me a canonical text that actually says what you claim.
What you say makes no logical sense. In Buddhism, people end suffering and leave the cycle of rebirths. Imagine what you said was true: there was a finite number of beings and an infinite timeline. It follows logically that nobody alive today could ever leave the cycle of rebirths, so there would be no point in teaching people about how to leave the cycle of rebirths.
A teacher might use such a statement to help you feel compassion for others, in the same sense someone might talk about "the human family".
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's competitors have produced better software than Microsoft for decades and it didn't do them any good on the desktop.
Microsoft needs to be much better than Android and iOS or they have already lost. "Good" isn't good enough.
Why should a person not pay more into it (themselves) to guarantee a greater payout should the so-called "disaster" of unemployment happen
People are effectively paying into it themselves: if you place mandates on the employer, they just reduce the salary accordingly.
Sorry... I write the checks on this... it's a horrible system.
Yes, the funding is currently badly done. But by and large, the idea is right: (1) make unemployment insurance mandatory, (2) have the money collected by the employer (to reduce administrative costs), (3) generally make the benefits proportional to salary, (4) have per employer accounts where you keep track of how much each employer taps into it.
What needs to change is: (a) raise the contribution cap from $7000 to $100000, (b) stop proportionality at around $100000 (cap the benefits), (c) maybe adjust the contribution rate.
What statist twaddle. What is the meaning of one person's liberties when they are secured by trampling on another's?
What libertarian twaddle and stop reading intellectual midgets like Ayn Rand.
If you don't like PayPal or Amazon, don't be a customer. Collecting donations through PayPal, or hosting on an Amazon server, are not examples of political rights.
They are when those companies dominate their markets, and arguably they do.
what amounts to the private correspondence of American ambassadors
Private correspondence is if they send each other love letters.
Diplomatic cables are government business, not private correspondence. There may be legitimate reasons to keep them from being published, but privacy has nothing to do with it. By default, those cables, like all other correspondence among government employees created as part of their job, are the property of the public and should be available.
Show me something that's truly shocking from the American diplomacy bomb,
These cables are significant in their banality: why is this information not made public to begin with? Why are the attitudes of the Arab nations towards Iran kept secret? What is the reason for classifying these cables "Top Secret" to begin with?
You mean the same European governments that have an Interpol warrant out for Assange are going to go out of their way punishing Paypal for something they want done themselves? You're dreaming.
Huh? The equivalent for software is perfectly fine under either BSD or GPL.
And which ones would that be? Certainly not EB...
I agree that they curerntly have the right to do that and that in general, private companies should be free to make such choices.
However, when it comes to payment or cloud hosting services, we may want to change the rules in ways we have changed them for other businesses in the past: banks and telecom companies cannot arbitrarily refuse service because of the personal political views of their management, and we should probably have similar rules for Paypal and Amazon. That's not to protect Wikileaks, it's to protect our political process and liberties.
Which is it? Are these companies totally gutless? Unable to recognize the positive publicity they could spin from this?
Personally, I would prefer if they hadn't done this, but I don't think it's right to jump to conclusions: Paypal may be taking a principled stand, just not the one you prefer. I suspect about half of all Americans do not like what Wikileaks is doing.
in NO war after world war ii, there has been a situation in which american soldiers were dying for defending freedom and preventing oppression. in ALL situations, and that includes somalia, they were sent to those places to further private interests's aims in the region. Any zone either had strategic resources (panama canal, middle east), or, natural resources (somalia, middle east, oil).
Even WWI and WWII were about access to resources, the US economy, and strategic reasons. The US military will not become active without unless there is a strong security or economic interest involved.
There is nothing wrong with that, as long as the war is otherwise justifiable.
Both in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, the populations were oppressed by brutal and illegitimate regimes. In principle, I have no problem with the US going in there, even unilaterally, and kicking out those regimes. Furthermore, in the aftermath, the US generally tries to transition the nations to democracy and independence quickly.
That is in contrast to most European wars of the past, where Europe went in, crushed other governments solely for its own benefit, and then proceeded to occupy and oppress them for decades or centuries.
Since WWII, Europeans fancy themselves to be pacificists, but what they are actually doing is letting the US do the necessary dirty work while reaping the benefits of US military action; and the US has to play along because it can afford Europe failing no more today than during WWII.
So save us your self-righteous indignation. If Europeans were actually principled, they'd as US troops to leave Europe and would refuse to do business with nations that the US has liberated. Instead, European nations are fighting over where US troops stay, and European corporations are over any nation that the US has liberated like flies over a carcass, so much so that the US often doesn't benefit as much as it should
Apart from the general irritating bloviations, Simon Phipps' thinking is particularly fuzzy when it comes to cloud computing vs traditional hosting.
It doesn't matter how Wikileaks was hosted. If it had been hosted on a bunch of co-located machines, or on a bunch of machines in someone's basement, the company providing connectivity would still have turned it off.
In fact, it is cloud computing that allows Wikileaks to move quickly to other locations: instead of having to buy, move, install, and hook up server hardware and then get connectivity for it, when they get dumped Wikileaks can simply choose another provider anywhere in the world and move their data within minutes. And since they are charged by the hour, it's not even all that expensive.
Eventually, they may still run out of cloud providers to go to, but that's going to take a lot longer than in the bad old days of using your own hardware and hooking up to a telecom.
1) EmployEEs don't pay for unemployment insurance... the employER (does though there is talk of changing that).
That is a meaningless distinction.
2) Unemployment insurance is a fixed rate (that changes yearly) charged against the first $7000 (usually) that an employer pays an employee... so it is not based on how much you earn... just on what you earn... up to $7000.
It is based on how much you earn, it simply happens to be capped.
Employer's have an experience account where unemployment insurance contributions accumulate. When an employee gets laid off and starts to collect benefits, the employer's experience account is charged for that. If the experience account gets low (or is emptied) the employer is charged a higher rate the next year to compensate.
Well, which would be even a stronger argument that it is insurance, instead of a government handout.
Point is: the US system is an insurance system, like many such systems. You pay for it depending on your salary, and you get money back depending on your salary. That is why you get something proporational to your salary. The details of how it's paid for don't matter to that reasoning. You do pay proportional to what you earn, the cap is just ridiculously low.
The system should be reformed. A cap of $100k and benefits proportional to what you paid in would make sense. But it should remain a government-backed mandatory insurance system, not a government handout.
Threatening students for reading publicly available information is unacceptable. There doesn't seem to be anything security-relevant in these cables, it is simply a massive embarrassment to the government, both because of what's in them and in how poorly they protected them.
From a lowlife like Lieberman, I didn't expect any better than to call up Amazon and get them to block the site. But as someone who voted for Obama, I'm beginning to wonder whether I shouldn't just have stayed home, and that's just what I may do next time around.
In the US, unemployment benefits are based on what you used to earn???
They are in most of the world.
What the Hell is the rationale for that?
One rationale is that it is unemployment insurance that you paid for, and you pay for it proportionally to what you earn. Benefits beyond your unemployment insurance are then generally just a fixed amount.
A second rationale is that unemployment is supposedly something short term and you don't want to force people to dismantle their lives, in particular while you want them to go out looking for a new job. Selling your home, moving to a new place, even just selling off your investments itself takes time and if you're forced to do it on short notice, costs a lot of money.
In the UK, you are means tested. If you have savings over a large amount, (around £16,000), then you're expected to start using that.
Well, the UK is just full of bad ideas when it comes to social policies, isn't it?
I wrote "just because something is your private property does not automatically mean you have a right to exclude the public." You disagreed. You were wrong. Now get over it.
Well, no: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easements
And even if it were, the precedent would be "don't trespass", which has been, gosh, the precedent for centuries.
Google (and others) now know it's not okay to come on to private property for photogathering without permission, and can't play dumb next time. Google wasn't trespassing "innocently" or "by mistake"; they were engaged in commercial activity and did what they did intentionally.
Bullshit; there is not a shred of evidence that Google has been intentionally trespassing in order to gather photos. They hire a bunch of drivers who are probably not paid all that much to drive around, and those drivers make mistakes, just like you and me.
Furthermore, in many circumstances, it is OK to come onto private property and take photos; just because something is your private property does not automatically mean you have a right to exclude the public. That's the default, but there are many exceptions.
Back when Sun was still swimming in money (i.e., a long time ago), Sun "envisioned" exactly this and made a video about it. Backprojected displays and camera-based touch interfaces also already existed back then (imagine that).
I didn't see then what this gives me over monitors and keyboards, and I still don't. It's less modular, bulkier, harder to move, and less functional than what I have now. And a ton more expensive.
There is tons of technology on this, and, yeah, people working in forensics know about it. There are also countermeasures.
And your indications that the GP is working in an enterprise are... zilch. If you're an actual enterprise, you'll get support from Google.
But Google Apps is aimed at SMBs. SMBs are screwed no matter what. Try getting support from Microsoft; they'll respond to your E-mails, they just won't fix anything, and when Microsoft's software screws you and drops your money on the floor, they also just shrug their shoulders.
That's what IBM said about Microsoft as well, until it was too late.
Enterprises often are the last businesses to adopt new end-user technologies, or technologies that reduce staff requirements. You can figure out yourself why that might be...
Right, which is predicated on the doctrine of reincarnation and an infinite past
Buddhism doesn't have a "doctrine of reincarnation", is has a notion of rebirth. Reincarnation is a bizarre supernatural concept, rebirth is not necessarily. The close association of Buddhism and Hinduism causes people to confuse the two.
Furthermore, a meditation isn't "predicated" on anything. You can meditate on the sound of one hand clapping, that doesn't mean that Buddhism is invalid because one hand doesn't clap.
Beyond that the universe-is-eternal is a core concept in Buddhism?
We both agree that Buddhists generally believe that the universe is eternal (as do many non-Buddhists). I said that, hypothetically, if it were not, the rest of Buddhism would still hold up. You disagreed and cited this passage. Please explain how this passage could not possibly hold true if the universe was of finite duration.
You're assuming a pigeonhole principle that doesn't exist, or that the universe has some sort of fitting function to guarantee all combinations will happen.
I'm assuming nothing at all. I am saying that with a finite timeline, the statements of the passage are still possibly true.
Ah, good, a concrete example. That is a meditation on compassion. It does not say "you should love one another because you are all related", it says "think about the possibility that you may be related and you may find it easier to find compassion for one another". Relatedness doesn't justify compassion, it is just an aid to help you find compassion in yourself for others. And finding compassion in yourself isn't there in order to satisfy some rule or obligation, it is part of ending suffering.
But regardless of what the purpose and spiritual meaning of the dialog is, what makes you think it requires an infinite timeline? If there's a finite number of beings, even with random mixing, it only takes a finite number of generations until they have gone through all combinations of relationships.
Finally, in contrast to Christianity, no Buddhist writing claims absolute truth. Buddhism is defined by common principles and beliefs, not some fixed document or rules. You have to evaluate and think about what you read. This particular writing is compatible with mainstream Buddhism, you are just misinterpreting it. But there are some writings that indeed seem to contradict core Buddhist beliefs; they may be metaphorical, or dialectical, or they may simply get something wrong.
Show me a canonical text that actually says what you claim.
What you say makes no logical sense. In Buddhism, people end suffering and leave the cycle of rebirths. Imagine what you said was true: there was a finite number of beings and an infinite timeline. It follows logically that nobody alive today could ever leave the cycle of rebirths, so there would be no point in teaching people about how to leave the cycle of rebirths.
A teacher might use such a statement to help you feel compassion for others, in the same sense someone might talk about "the human family".