With open source you'd need to hike it up to a higher level.
If Tim Cook's lawyers figure out a way to declare Apple's entire development budget a charitable contribution it's their entire job to make that happen. OTOH Apple has historically contributed to some completely legitimate open source projects. As a tax geek I have no fucking clue how to tell the difference between Tim Cook's lawyers screwing the Feds and Tim Cook donating developer time to legitimate open source projects.
OTOH my manager probably has the email address of somebody who can tell the difference.
The point of an audit is to find out if you've done anything wrong. An audit is an investigation. If they only investigated everyone they knew with 100% certainty were guilty numerous people would be able to dodge their taxes easily. For example let's say an accountant does 60 tax returns and 57 have the exact income necessary to get maximum Earned Income Credit. Maybe another accountant turns in 43 of tax returns and all have more then half their housing expenses deducted as a Home Office. In both cases the IRS knows with near-100% certainty that most of those deductions and credits are wrong and should be paid back to the Federal government. But it has no way of knowing which of the 100 households on it's list owe the Feds money.
If they've got no reason to think you've done anything wrong, or they're treating you differently then they treat equivalent groups, then they shouldn't audit you. But if they have a reason to audit you it's kinda their entire job to audit your ass, and not go "While there's a 23% chance he's right, so we'll just not bother him."
That's tricky. As the OP says, for lots of applications it's quite possible the only people who could use the software are the for-profit company benefiting from the tax treatment. To figure out whether these maneuvers are legal you'd need somebody who was both a tax geek AND a computer geek.
If you read the article the Open Source apps don't get automatically denied, or sent to some heightened scrutiny status, they get sent to management. Presumably management sends it to their geek-squad. After all, if they were actually giving these projects a hard time we probably would have heard about it on Slashdot before now.
Read the article. Open Source apps get elevated to a manager. Presumably this is because having a deep understanding o tax law gives you no insight into which applications are legitimate open source projects, and which ones are Tim Cook's tax lawyers outsmarting the Feds.
Given that open source groups on Slashdot do not complain that the IRS denies their applications, or subjects them to tyrannical oversight before granting their applications; I strongly suspect the managers send these applications to somebody who act6ually knows what he's doing.
Hell, how can they not have these lists? They are tax geeks. They have no clue as to what to look for in an application to find a fake non-profit. It's true they don't have the right to target solely the members of one party or the other, but the practical options are a) build up a list like this so they know who to hassle, b) hassle everyone (which would cost a lot of money), and c) let everyone be a non-profit.
Let me put it to you this way: If Microsoft could make some fake open-source license, grant it to a fake non-profit, and then spend $10 Billion on Windows 9, and get a massive tax write-off because it all counts as a charitable donation would you be happy?
Because Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. would totally do that shit if they thought they could get away with it. Having a guy who actually knows something about open source actually read all these applications, so they know who to give a hard time is a Very Good Idea. Read the article. This is not "we deny open-source applications," it's "we send open-source application to this one guy, who is a manager."
Nowadays 'libertarian' has a much different meaning then even 10 years ago.
10 years ago most people identifying as libertarians opposed gay marriage because they thought the government shouldn't be in the marriage business, identified as pro-choice (or at least pro-birth-control), opposed Social Security on principle, thought a "free country" could not have a religion, strongly opposed all regulations against gay sex, opposed all forms of anti-discrimination legislation that apply to the private sector, etc.
Nowadays 'libertarian' means conservative who is choosing not to talk about social issues. Paul Ryan, who is strongly pro-life, opposed decriminalizing gay sex, thinks the US is a Christian Nation in a very real and legally binding sense of the term, supports many forms of anti-discrimination law, etc. Basically what he means when he says "I'm a libertarian," is "I really, really REALLY hate Obamacare."
This evolution of political terms isn't unusual. "Republican," for example, means completely different things to my cousins from Canada, Ireland, Sweden, and Florida. It just happens. If you were a libertarian prior to Dubya temporarily convincing everyone conservative = batshit stupid in the dying months of 2008 your options are a) become conservative in the sense of the term that applied in 2008, b) make up a new word for what you are, or c) try to convince everyone that 30% of Americans are evil for stealing your word.
Don't bet on that. In America you can successfully defend a libel claim by proving it was true, and or even that you thought it was true. Given that thequux (848795) verified what happened after the alleged attack, DarkOx (621550) confirmed that the alleged victim is not the type to make this up, that NOBODY has done the same for Gont, and that Slashdot should be full of people who know prominent security researcher Gont (and can attest to his non-rapey nature), it's damn hard for me to believe Weidman's claims rise to the level of libel.
In other words she may be lying, but Gont ain't never gonna get the evidence necessary to prove that in court.
I actually would not expect the American system to work any better in these circumstances.
All their witnesses live on other continents. The evidence in any date-rape-type prosecution is inherently ambiguous. It's mostly in English, and the rest is in other non-Polish languages like Spanish (the attempted rapist is Argentinean). None of the people they were sworn to "protect and serve" were involved because the victim is American, the person who was hurt most is the guy she wants prosecuted, and his injuries were superficial, it's almost impossible to convince many men an attempted date rape actually happened without video and an awful lot of Polish judges/prosecutors are men...
Cops in my hometown (Detroit) would probably get yelled at for even taking that police report. Police time is a finite resource, and the powers-that-be have bigger fish to fry.
How would you get evidence of Attempted Rape? Evidence of Actual Rape is pretty ambigous, because all you can physically prove is that the victim had sex with the alleged rapist.
In this case he went t her room. He got in a physical fight with her, and fled grabbing things she really needed (he was drunk so my best guess is he figured he could trade them back to her in exchange for her not filing a police report). What else would two drunk people in a hotel room fight about?
A world with evidence standards as high as you're implying is a world where no attempted rapist is put away until a) he becomes an actual rapist and b) he picks on a woman the cops think wasn't asking for it.
A genuinely innocent [erson has plenty of rason to give his side of tyhe story. He's not being prosecuted, because if he was being p[rosecuted he would not have been allowed to leave the country.
Which means his problem is that his colleagues think he's a rapist, and the only way to stop them from thinking that is present his side of the story.
As for a fair trial, you do realize this happened in Poland, and her blog is in English? His denial would also be in English. Even if Poland had Juries (it doesn't) to be biased, it would be trivial to find 12 Poes who don't read English-language tech sites.
This happened in Poland. They have their own Constitution, which is completely different then ours. The legal systems are much different. For example, Poland has no Juries.
I'm not saying it's a third-world hell-hole with a Fascist justice system (our founders were simply incorrect in their belief that Juries were necessary in a free country), but any argument based on a principle on US Law simply has no relevance to a crime committed in Poland.
Why does he have bruising from a punch to the eye, but she states she hit him with a mug? Hitting someone in the eye with a mug like that would put you in the hospital for eye trauma. Why would she lie about how she hit him?
Perhaps she doesn't remember?
Crime victims are notorious for not getting details right. Trauma isn't exactly a memory aid, and things are happening REALLY FAST. Maybe she swung with a mug, missed and broke it on the table, then swung again with her fist and connected, allin a two-second time-frame, but she only remembers swinging once.
The article tells you Oddworld:New and Tasty needs an official publisher to release on XBox, it tells you that Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning doesn't want to get a publisher, and it tells you why he doesn't want to get a publisher (he doesn't want to split the revenue), but it doesn't tell you Oddworld Interactive doesn't count as a publisher.
They clearly don't meet some requirement. Is the requirement stupid and obsolete (ie: the ability to ship boxed games), or is it reasonable (ie: the ability to correctly charge sales tax/VAT)? If it's not reasonable is it trivial?
Does it count as passing the FizzBuzz test if you just use printf?
Because I can't program at all, but I can google "HelloWorld" in any programming language you mention. Which means that to pass FizzBuzz in any language, all I have to do is type up a list of numbers (ie: 1, 2, Fizz, 4, Buzz...), find that HelloWorld, and copy my list there. If I got really ambitious I could probably use 100 separate printf functions because TextWrangler is really good at taking a list of words and putting them all into the exact same computer code. I type fast so this is probably a 30-45 minute process.
OTOH it would take me hours to reacquaint myself with the exact formats used by if-else function in C/C++, much less figure out an algorithm on the fly.
I didn't realize Federal law considered non-violent threats to be extortion.
But this still isn't going to count. The little shell companies have paperwork granting them the right to threaten to sue based on the patent, therefore they have the right to send you a letter threatening to sue. OTOH you do not have the right to a) file a false police report, or b) receive money in exchange for not reporting crimes. The difference between extortion and being a real hard-ass in negotiations is that an extorter would be breaking the law if he carried out his threats.
It's possible the 40-odd shell companies do not have the correct paper-work to sue based on these patents. It's equally possible they are misinterpreting the patent, or it was granted improperly. But since they don't actually file suit that never comes before the Courts, their right to sue is never challenged, and things like "extortion" simply don't come into play. They may be wrong, but they're idiots, not criminals, until a Judge rules against them.
That's why I love this case. It's pretty much the only way to get these trolls into court and figure out whether they are legally allowed to do this.
They have this patent. That means they have the right to sue you for infringing it. That means they have the right to tell you "we will sue your ass if you don't pay us." To be extortion they'd have to threaten actual violence.
The legal options to thwart them are basically a) creative prosecutions such as this one, and b) patent reform. Since the Federal government runs patents, and the Federal government is designed in such a way that reform requires lots of people to really want it, b) is not a practical option.
Patent trolls typically patent something that's obviously going to be needed in a few years, without doing any actual engineering work. Then when somebody does the engineering work they demand a cut of the profits. The technical "work" they do is about as difficult as that of Star Trek producers. There are actual diagrams of how a Phaser works, but nobody's ever built one. Patent trolls simply figure out how the parts of several potential future technologies would need to go together, diagram it, and then hope that everything turns out the way they want.
Sometimes trolls do the engineering work, but fail to bring anything to market. Australia's CSIRO actually invented things, but didn't do any of the engineering work required to bring products to a mass-market. They didn't publicize their findings very well, so when some people actually did the hard work of discovering this stuff independently and also the hard work of making the product easy to manufacture they could not patent it. The patent belonged to CSIRO already. So they paid CSIRO to use their own work.
RICO can only be used if they can prove you also committed another crime. Which means somebody has to convict these guys of something before ANY conspiracy charges stick, much less RICO which only applies to certain crimes.
None of those crimes seem to be relevant to Vermont's lawsuit.
In general I agree. The US social safety net is inadequate. If the European job market didn't suck moving would be on my to-do list.
But your sister may not know about several elements of the US Social Safety net. One is ObamaCare. As of January it will be very difficult to be priced out of health insurance. From a patient's point-of-view the system will be quite close to several European systems -- notably the Dutch, Swiss and German -- in that you will have to be insured by your employer or buy insurance on a private market, with insurance prices varying based on your ability to pay.
Higher Education is more complicated. It is very easy to end up with a degree that cost more then it's worth. This has happened to me.
But if you're talking about Undergraduate education (ie: a Bachelors degree), then there are plenty of options. High-status, extremely-high-cost Universities are actually the best bet. Most American kids could go to Harvard (sticker price: $37k a year for four years, plus room and board in Boston) for free if they can just get in.
Indeed, the major reason the sticker price is so goddamned high is that Harvard subsidizes most kids with the tuition of the richest ones. Emory and the other Ivy league schools offer similar deals, as do many state schools.
The problem is you have to plan this shit out way ahead-of-time. You need to find out the exact deadlines for applying for financial aid BEFORE you send in a college application, and since the programs are administered by the schools you have to know that for each school your kid might end up going to.
I don't think anyone except European workers seriously thinks the principle "a job is a job for life," is good for economic dynamism. Unfortunately for folks who prefer government policy to be as close to an economist's ideal as possible; European workers and European voters are pretty much the same group of people.
Moreover for about half of Europe dynamism would suck ass. Germany and Northern Europe are doing fine with their fossilized labor markets.
As for paid time off, you do realize that salaried Americans don't get that much less paid time off then Europeans? 20 days a year is exactly what the UK mandates. It's less then Germany, Denmark, or Greece (Germany is 24, the other two 25), but it's much more then our actual neighbors (Canada and Mexico are typically two weeks because they don't have a half-dozen holidays nobody remembers).
To an extent you're right. If both those employers had wanted to pay their prospective employee then the immigration rulings would not have mattered.
Thing is in both cases the "employee" was in a situation where they wouldn't have been paid anything as a native. In the UK six-month internships are unpaid. UK Labour law was basically protecting navite Brits right to do a six-month internship for free, not ensuring Brits got fairly paid.
As for the Canadian cousin, you do realize that a) Canada is not a low wage country, and b) at this very minute there are probably several hundred Brits helping family in London for room and board. Some of them are probably doing work that the government would call employment.
Slashdot Mirror
With open source you'd need to hike it up to a higher level.
If Tim Cook's lawyers figure out a way to declare Apple's entire development budget a charitable contribution it's their entire job to make that happen. OTOH Apple has historically contributed to some completely legitimate open source projects. As a tax geek I have no fucking clue how to tell the difference between Tim Cook's lawyers screwing the Feds and Tim Cook donating developer time to legitimate open source projects.
OTOH my manager probably has the email address of somebody who can tell the difference.
The point of an audit is to find out if you've done anything wrong. An audit is an investigation. If they only investigated everyone they knew with 100% certainty were guilty numerous people would be able to dodge their taxes easily. For example let's say an accountant does 60 tax returns and 57 have the exact income necessary to get maximum Earned Income Credit. Maybe another accountant turns in 43 of tax returns and all have more then half their housing expenses deducted as a Home Office. In both cases the IRS knows with near-100% certainty that most of those deductions and credits are wrong and should be paid back to the Federal government. But it has no way of knowing which of the 100 households on it's list owe the Feds money.
If they've got no reason to think you've done anything wrong, or they're treating you differently then they treat equivalent groups, then they shouldn't audit you. But if they have a reason to audit you it's kinda their entire job to audit your ass, and not go "While there's a 23% chance he's right, so we'll just not bother him."
That's tricky. As the OP says, for lots of applications it's quite possible the only people who could use the software are the for-profit company benefiting from the tax treatment. To figure out whether these maneuvers are legal you'd need somebody who was both a tax geek AND a computer geek.
If you read the article the Open Source apps don't get automatically denied, or sent to some heightened scrutiny status, they get sent to management. Presumably management sends it to their geek-squad. After all, if they were actually giving these projects a hard time we probably would have heard about it on Slashdot before now.
You've got it backwards.
Read the article. Open Source apps get elevated to a manager. Presumably this is because having a deep understanding o tax law gives you no insight into which applications are legitimate open source projects, and which ones are Tim Cook's tax lawyers outsmarting the Feds.
Given that open source groups on Slashdot do not complain that the IRS denies their applications, or subjects them to tyrannical oversight before granting their applications; I strongly suspect the managers send these applications to somebody who act6ually knows what he's doing.
In other words this is anti-corporate.
Under what law are they not allowed to do triage?
Hell, how can they not have these lists? They are tax geeks. They have no clue as to what to look for in an application to find a fake non-profit. It's true they don't have the right to target solely the members of one party or the other, but the practical options are a) build up a list like this so they know who to hassle, b) hassle everyone (which would cost a lot of money), and c) let everyone be a non-profit.
Let me put it to you this way:
If Microsoft could make some fake open-source license, grant it to a fake non-profit, and then spend $10 Billion on Windows 9, and get a massive tax write-off because it all counts as a charitable donation would you be happy?
Because Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. would totally do that shit if they thought they could get away with it. Having a guy who actually knows something about open source actually read all these applications, so they know who to give a hard time is a Very Good Idea. Read the article. This is not "we deny open-source applications," it's "we send open-source application to this one guy, who is a manager."
Nowadays 'libertarian' has a much different meaning then even 10 years ago.
10 years ago most people identifying as libertarians opposed gay marriage because they thought the government shouldn't be in the marriage business, identified as pro-choice (or at least pro-birth-control), opposed Social Security on principle, thought a "free country" could not have a religion, strongly opposed all regulations against gay sex, opposed all forms of anti-discrimination legislation that apply to the private sector, etc.
Nowadays 'libertarian' means conservative who is choosing not to talk about social issues. Paul Ryan, who is strongly pro-life, opposed decriminalizing gay sex, thinks the US is a Christian Nation in a very real and legally binding sense of the term, supports many forms of anti-discrimination law, etc. Basically what he means when he says "I'm a libertarian," is "I really, really REALLY hate Obamacare."
This evolution of political terms isn't unusual. "Republican," for example, means completely different things to my cousins from Canada, Ireland, Sweden, and Florida. It just happens. If you were a libertarian prior to Dubya temporarily convincing everyone conservative = batshit stupid in the dying months of 2008 your options are a) become conservative in the sense of the term that applied in 2008, b) make up a new word for what you are, or c) try to convince everyone that 30% of Americans are evil for stealing your word.
Don't bet on that. In America you can successfully defend a libel claim by proving it was true, and or even that you thought it was true. Given that thequux (848795) verified what happened after the alleged attack, DarkOx (621550) confirmed that the alleged victim is not the type to make this up, that NOBODY has done the same for Gont, and that Slashdot should be full of people who know prominent security researcher Gont (and can attest to his non-rapey nature), it's damn hard for me to believe Weidman's claims rise to the level of libel.
In other words she may be lying, but Gont ain't never gonna get the evidence necessary to prove that in court.
I actually would not expect the American system to work any better in these circumstances.
All their witnesses live on other continents. The evidence in any date-rape-type prosecution is inherently ambiguous. It's mostly in English, and the rest is in other non-Polish languages like Spanish (the attempted rapist is Argentinean). None of the people they were sworn to "protect and serve" were involved because the victim is American, the person who was hurt most is the guy she wants prosecuted, and his injuries were superficial, it's almost impossible to convince many men an attempted date rape actually happened without video and an awful lot of Polish judges/prosecutors are men...
Cops in my hometown (Detroit) would probably get yelled at for even taking that police report. Police time is a finite resource, and the powers-that-be have bigger fish to fry.
How would you get evidence of Attempted Rape? Evidence of Actual Rape is pretty ambigous, because all you can physically prove is that the victim had sex with the alleged rapist.
In this case he went t her room. He got in a physical fight with her, and fled grabbing things she really needed (he was drunk so my best guess is he figured he could trade them back to her in exchange for her not filing a police report). What else would two drunk people in a hotel room fight about?
A world with evidence standards as high as you're implying is a world where no attempted rapist is put away until a) he becomes an actual rapist and b) he picks on a woman the cops think wasn't asking for it.
A genuinely innocent [erson has plenty of rason to give his side of tyhe story. He's not being prosecuted, because if he was being p[rosecuted he would not have been allowed to leave the country.
Which means his problem is that his colleagues think he's a rapist, and the only way to stop them from thinking that is present his side of the story.
As for a fair trial, you do realize this happened in Poland, and her blog is in English? His denial would also be in English. Even if Poland had Juries (it doesn't) to be biased, it would be trivial to find 12 Poes who don't read English-language tech sites.
This happened in Poland. They have their own Constitution, which is completely different then ours. The legal systems are much different. For example, Poland has no Juries.
I'm not saying it's a third-world hell-hole with a Fascist justice system (our founders were simply incorrect in their belief that Juries were necessary in a free country), but any argument based on a principle on US Law simply has no relevance to a crime committed in Poland.
Dude,
There is no such thing as evidence of attempted rape. An attempted rape looks exactly like an assault.
Why does he have bruising from a punch to the eye, but she states she hit him with a mug? Hitting someone in the eye with a mug like that would put you in the hospital for eye trauma. Why would she lie about how she hit him?
Perhaps she doesn't remember?
Crime victims are notorious for not getting details right. Trauma isn't exactly a memory aid, and things are happening REALLY FAST. Maybe she swung with a mug, missed and broke it on the table, then swung again with her fist and connected, allin a two-second time-frame, but she only remembers swinging once.
The article tells you Oddworld:New and Tasty needs an official publisher to release on XBox, it tells you that Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning doesn't want to get a publisher, and it tells you why he doesn't want to get a publisher (he doesn't want to split the revenue), but it doesn't tell you Oddworld Interactive doesn't count as a publisher.
They clearly don't meet some requirement. Is the requirement stupid and obsolete (ie: the ability to ship boxed games), or is it reasonable (ie: the ability to correctly charge sales tax/VAT)? If it's not reasonable is it trivial?
It turns out it's a more like 20 minutes.
Does it count as passing the FizzBuzz test if you just use printf?
Because I can't program at all, but I can google "HelloWorld" in any programming language you mention. Which means that to pass FizzBuzz in any language, all I have to do is type up a list of numbers (ie: 1, 2, Fizz, 4, Buzz...), find that HelloWorld, and copy my list there. If I got really ambitious I could probably use 100 separate printf functions because TextWrangler is really good at taking a list of words and putting them all into the exact same computer code. I type fast so this is probably a 30-45 minute process.
OTOH it would take me hours to reacquaint myself with the exact formats used by if-else function in C/C++, much less figure out an algorithm on the fly.
Does this mean I'll be able to torture cats with a BLUE laser?
Because that's a lot cooler then any of the petty stuff mentioned in the article.
I didn't realize Federal law considered non-violent threats to be extortion.
But this still isn't going to count. The little shell companies have paperwork granting them the right to threaten to sue based on the patent, therefore they have the right to send you a letter threatening to sue. OTOH you do not have the right to a) file a false police report, or b) receive money in exchange for not reporting crimes. The difference between extortion and being a real hard-ass in negotiations is that an extorter would be breaking the law if he carried out his threats.
It's possible the 40-odd shell companies do not have the correct paper-work to sue based on these patents. It's equally possible they are misinterpreting the patent, or it was granted improperly. But since they don't actually file suit that never comes before the Courts, their right to sue is never challenged, and things like "extortion" simply don't come into play. They may be wrong, but they're idiots, not criminals, until a Judge rules against them.
That's why I love this case. It's pretty much the only way to get these trolls into court and figure out whether they are legally allowed to do this.
That's a stretch.
They have this patent. That means they have the right to sue you for infringing it. That means they have the right to tell you "we will sue your ass if you don't pay us." To be extortion they'd have to threaten actual violence.
The legal options to thwart them are basically a) creative prosecutions such as this one, and b) patent reform. Since the Federal government runs patents, and the Federal government is designed in such a way that reform requires lots of people to really want it, b) is not a practical option.
By the general definition of patent troll, no.
Patent trolls typically patent something that's obviously going to be needed in a few years, without doing any actual engineering work. Then when somebody does the engineering work they demand a cut of the profits. The technical "work" they do is about as difficult as that of Star Trek producers. There are actual diagrams of how a Phaser works, but nobody's ever built one. Patent trolls simply figure out how the parts of several potential future technologies would need to go together, diagram it, and then hope that everything turns out the way they want.
Sometimes trolls do the engineering work, but fail to bring anything to market. Australia's CSIRO actually invented things, but didn't do any of the engineering work required to bring products to a mass-market. They didn't publicize their findings very well, so when some people actually did the hard work of discovering this stuff independently and also the hard work of making the product easy to manufacture they could not patent it. The patent belonged to CSIRO already. So they paid CSIRO to use their own work.
Wouldn't help.
Under eminent domain rules you have to pay at least the fair market value of the thing you seize. Frequently you pay double or triple.
If these patents are valid, and do what the trolls say they do, they are worth a shit-load of cash. We're talking hundreds of millions, minimum.
If trolling is rewarded with a nine-figure check from Barack Obama, an awful lot of people are gonna start trolling.
RICO can only be used if they can prove you also committed another crime. Which means somebody has to convict these guys of something before ANY conspiracy charges stick, much less RICO which only applies to certain crimes.
None of those crimes seem to be relevant to Vermont's lawsuit.
In general I agree. The US social safety net is inadequate. If the European job market didn't suck moving would be on my to-do list.
But your sister may not know about several elements of the US Social Safety net. One is ObamaCare. As of January it will be very difficult to be priced out of health insurance. From a patient's point-of-view the system will be quite close to several European systems -- notably the Dutch, Swiss and German -- in that you will have to be insured by your employer or buy insurance on a private market, with insurance prices varying based on your ability to pay.
Higher Education is more complicated. It is very easy to end up with a degree that cost more then it's worth. This has happened to me.
But if you're talking about Undergraduate education (ie: a Bachelors degree), then there are plenty of options. High-status, extremely-high-cost Universities are actually the best bet. Most American kids could go to Harvard (sticker price: $37k a year for four years, plus room and board in Boston) for free if they can just get in.
Indeed, the major reason the sticker price is so goddamned high is that Harvard subsidizes most kids with the tuition of the richest ones. Emory and the other Ivy league schools offer similar deals, as do many state schools.
The problem is you have to plan this shit out way ahead-of-time. You need to find out the exact deadlines for applying for financial aid BEFORE you send in a college application, and since the programs are administered by the schools you have to know that for each school your kid might end up going to.
I don't think anyone except European workers seriously thinks the principle "a job is a job for life," is good for economic dynamism. Unfortunately for folks who prefer government policy to be as close to an economist's ideal as possible; European workers and European voters are pretty much the same group of people.
Moreover for about half of Europe dynamism would suck ass. Germany and Northern Europe are doing fine with their fossilized labor markets.
As for paid time off, you do realize that salaried Americans don't get that much less paid time off then Europeans? 20 days a year is exactly what the UK mandates. It's less then Germany, Denmark, or Greece (Germany is 24, the other two 25), but it's much more then our actual neighbors (Canada and Mexico are typically two weeks because they don't have a half-dozen holidays nobody remembers).
To an extent you're right. If both those employers had wanted to pay their prospective employee then the immigration rulings would not have mattered.
Thing is in both cases the "employee" was in a situation where they wouldn't have been paid anything as a native. In the UK six-month internships are unpaid. UK Labour law was basically protecting navite Brits right to do a six-month internship for free, not ensuring Brits got fairly paid.
As for the Canadian cousin, you do realize that a) Canada is not a low wage country, and b) at this very minute there are probably several hundred Brits helping family in London for room and board. Some of them are probably doing work that the government would call employment.