Those things aren't permanently given to employees.
Irrelevant. Those are services provided which have a monetary value. There's lots of places where you have to pay $5 or $10 a day to park your car. Elevators cost money to operate, if for no other reason than the electric power needed.
Never worked anywhere where soda was free, I even worked in places where coffee/tea were not gratis.
There's tons of tech companies where sodas and other drinks are available for free; this was particularly true during the dot-com boom, probably less so now.
There's tons of places where there's coffee pots available to use, as well as microwave ovens. These are free even if you bring in your own food items to use in them, but that costs the company money for the electricity.
But these costs (coffee/tea/water) are almost negligible compared to lunch.
Wrong: a coffee drink at Starbucks can cost $4. You might say that Starbucks is overpriced, but that's irrelevant: someone obviously thinks a coffee drink is worth $4, and that's a large fraction of a lunch. It could be argued (by the IRS) that those free coffees are also worth $4, and employees should be paying taxes on them.
But an additional difference: lunch is personal time.
No, it's not. There's no such thing as "personal time" when you're a salaried employee.
So why doesn't the IRS tax you for the free parking spaces your employer provides you? Or the free elevator rides (if your building has elevators)? Or the comfy office chair? You don't strictly need those things to do your job: you can take the bus, walk up the stairs, and sit on a wooden bench. Or how about free coffees and sodas, which many companies have?
The IRS is being picky and choosy about which perks employers are allowed to provide for their employees, and it amounts to micromanaging.
You might, but there's a greater chance that someone leaving campus for lunch could meet with someone else, or just go by themselves, and not talk to coworkers about work-related issues during that lunchtime. Plus, having to leave campus and go elsewhere takes extra time, which they could be spending at work instead (we're talking about salaried employees here). So it's to the employer's benefit to encourage employees to stay on-campus for lunch and only socialize with immediate coworkers, and offering free meals is a good way to do that.
I used to work at Intel, and they had a big campus with several cafeterias too. However, they weren't free, and they weren't very cheap either (provided by an outside vendor, who obviously milked their monopoly position). So it was very common for people to leave campus for lunch, since you could get better food, cheaper, at dining establishments a few miles away. But if that food at the Intel cafeterias were free, that would have changed the equation, and surely more people would have stuck around on-campus for lunch.
How on earth is Google supplying free meals not "for the convenience of the employer"? Having free meals on-site means more employers will stay on-campus, rather than leave the campus for probably lengthier lunch breaks, plus they're more likely to share meals with other employees, discussing work issues. You think Google is giving out free meals out of pure generosity?
If corporations could convince employees to forgo living in their own houses, and instead live on-campus in dormatories, they'd do it in a heartbeat. It's exactly what they do in China. You get more work out of people when they don't have a personal life outside of work.
So, by your crazy logic, should smaller companies that have free sodas and coffee for employees require employees to account for every single cup of coffee they drink there, and pay taxes for it? How about companies that provide elevators for employees? Should non-disabled employees be required to pay taxes for every elevator ride they take, since they could after all just take the stairs instead? How about companies with parking lots? Should employees be required to pay taxes for the luxury of being able to drive to work instead of taking the bus, and not have to pay for parking?
Yep, I think this sums it up prettty well. Marketing to businesses isn't anything like marketing to consumers; all they had to do was show thier wares, wine and dine some people, etc. It's not hard to convince businesses to buy stuff from a large, dominant company, thus making them even larger and more dominant.
You really think MS's marketing campaigns have led it to success?
MS was successful because they were in the right place at the right time by providing the OS to IBM's PC, whose open architecture made it popular for cloning, and because of this popularity tons of application software ran on top of it. Of course a bunch of dirty tricks to ruin competitors didn't hurt, plus they made/bought out some office software which became the business standards. There weren't any advertising campaigns, ever, that helped them in these endeavors.
Yep, this is pretty representative of what you'll get when you ask for directions from locals. While I never got anything that ridiculous, it was always stuff like "turn left at the second stop light..." and it was really the third light that I needed to turn at. All the extra driving around in circles that you'd do from following directions like this is surely more dangerous than just looking at a map.
Have you ever known Microsoft to do anything really intelligent to win good PR and sales? Every one of their marketing campaigns has been a complete debacle (remember the people running around in MSN butterfly outfits? Or the commercial for Microsoft SongSmith?). I don't know where MS gets their marketing people, but they're probably the worst in the Fortune 500.
Ok, so you're going to drive a quarter mile, pull over, drive another quarter mile, pull over, etc.?
Maybe in someplace where the roads are all straight and orthogonal, this isn't necessary, you can just memorize the route to your destination. But try coming here to northern New Jersey sometime and trying to figure out how to get around in this crazy spaghetti-jumble of roads without a turn-by-turn GPS telling you where to go (and even that's not enough because there's so many places where the road has several forks in quick succession, or you have to turn right and take a weird little loop in order to take a left (because left turns aren't allowed on many roads, so they make special turn roads just for that purpose) etc, so you really need a graphical diagram to show you what turns you need to make before you get there.).
That makes perfect sense, but I have little doubt that the authorities will still prosecute people for simply using GPS as it can be construed as being against the letter of this stupid law.
Directions don't work. Random people can't give you accurate turn-by-turn directions orally. I remember trying this when I was young and giving up in frustration after too many sets of bad directions.
I kinda liked the idea I read somewhere else on one of these forums, which was that student loan lenders could only collect for perhaps 10 years, and only if the student was able to get a sufficiently high-paying job (not working as a waiter because they couldn't find a job).
This way, lenders would only loan to students who were good risks, not ones who had terrible job prospects (like Theater majors). This would greatly bring down the amount of money available to universities, and force them to drastically cut their tuitions.
Yes, they thought that. But a funny thing happened on the way to financial bliss. A lot of people didn't get paid all that well. And we've reached the point where a bachelor's degreed person can come out of college 100K in non dischargeble debt, and can often look foirward to a nice 20K per year job for their effort.
Yep, they don't tell people this when they enroll in college. It's the elephant in the room.
Most men live lives of quiet despair. I suspect the people that had no passion for their work probably aren't working in the field any more.
Surely many of them have left (the really bad ones), but many others might remain if they haven't found something better to do.
Your statement betrays your acceptance of the College Good/Trades Bad that we've been force fed by the educational system. I would counter with say, a machinist.
That's great for machinists, but still, plumbers are a pretty important trade, and I have a hard time imagining many people really wanting to do that until they retire. Yet many do; it's dirty work, but it does pay well. Many other trades jobs are hard too: auto mechanics have a fairly tough job, with all the dirt and grease, and worst of all having to work outside (they don't keep those service bays air-conditioned) year-round. Not like a cushy office job. But you still have to have a very good technical knowledge to do the job.
How many BA's in philosophy do we need? How many English Lit majors, Art history majors? Anthropology?
Now here's where we run into a problem. College isn't supposed to be job training, it's supposed to be "higher education". It's not supposed to lead directly into a job, except for professional degrees like engineering. It's supposed to be enlightening, a place for kids (who have enough money) to go learn how to think critically and learn more and better than they did in secondary school before, before they start trying to make a career.
The problem is out-of-control tuition rates. Back in the "old days", college still costed some money, but nothing like it does today. Poor kids obviously couldn't afford it, but many middle-class ones could; it just took them out of the workforce for four years. But it didn't leave them with crushing student loan debt. That's a very modern development, and it's mostly thanks to the existence of easy-to-get student loans which can't be discharged in a bankruptcy; colleges have all inflated their costs to make up for this availability of easy funds. So as a result, the only way college really "pays" is if you get a degree that leads directly to a high-paying career, like engineering. This isn't what college is supposed to be about.
The answer is to drastically reform student loans, perhaps even get rid of them altogether, or at least make them dischargable in a bankruptcy.
Because for years, we have been told that the only possibility of success in this world is to get a college education. If you do not do this, you are quite simply going to be a failure. Heck, they were heading that way in th eearly 70's when I was in High school. Trades was for stupid people who were unfit for even the general education classes
And it isn't simply a matter of everyone shifting over to engineering or chemistry. Those are very specialized careers, and most definitely not for everyone. Choosing to become an engineer because of the pay makes it very likely that a person is going to be miserable - assuming they even graduate.
The people who told us that trades are for stupid people and that everyone needs college to be "successful", don't see it the way you do. According to them, people need to go into careers that pay well, regardless of their interest or aptitude. And many people will: just look at all the people who went into CS and software engineering during the dot-com boom. How many of those people were really that interested in programming, or even very good at it? People frequently go where the money is: law, medicine, etc. Lots of them stick it out even though they don't like it very much, just because it pays well. Just like lots of people stick it out in the trades, retail, waiting tables, etc., even though they hate those jobs. How many people really love plumbing, for instance? Who really wants to unclog shit-filled toilets on a daily basis?
No, not exactly. One thing you're missing is: how do these students all pay for these liberal arts degrees?
If it weren't for easily-available, government-guaranteed student loans which can't ever be discharged in a bankruptcy, we wouldn't have nearly as many people going to college and getting useless liberal arts degrees, and the cost of college tuition would be far less.
This was 20 years ago, but I went to one of the top public high schools in my state, in the richest areas in my city. Plenty of National Merit scholars, yet there were still plenty of violent students and fights, not to mention a pipe bomb that blew up a bunch of lockers (and amazingly didn't hurt anyone, as it happened during lunch). When you stick everyone together in a school with 2500+ students, and don't exclude the kids who don't want to learn and have behavior problems, that's what you're going to get, no matter how nice your neighbornhood is. It doesn't matter if the parents "actually care about the school and the children" if you have some parents and kids who don't; they ruin it for everybody. (With a school that size, we got not only the kids of richer parents, but the kids of poorer parents who lived nearby. Of course, the richest kids probably mostly went to a nearby private school.)
Plus, isn't it wrong for only rich kids to be able to go to school without worrying about being assaulted and hospitalized? Or is this more of Americans hating non-rich people?
I went to high school over 20 years ago, and even then a bunch of my teachers were coaches, including my AP Calculus teacher(!).
Even worse, I have to admit that, except for one really nutty coach who taught Health, the coaches were actually better teachers than many of my other teachers at that school.
Have you ever been to an American high school? They're not much different from a prison. Why on earth would anyone want a job teaching the behaviorally-challenged and often violent students there?
Even in the better high schools, there's a huge difference between being a high school teacher and a college (even community college) professor. As a professor, you can concentrate on the material and teaching it to the students. As a high school teacher, you have to concentrate on being a disciplinarian instead of teaching.
The one thing you might be missing in your math, however, is that it's not a pyramid scheme as you seem to imply: it's not just literature and philosophy majors who take classes in those fields. Anyone getting a Liberal Arts degree of any kind will probably takes some of those courses, as well as students in other fields who have to take LA electives. So there's a reason to have literature and philosophy and other such professors, aside from just teaching graduate students in those fields. Of course, there's still only so many professor positions available, and it's not something people move out of through advancement; once someone becomes a professor, they generally stay there until they retire.
yum and apt aren't restricted to Free software; there's proprietary software that uses these (at least apt, not sure about yum) to maintain themselves too. A couple of examples are Opera and Google Talk.
I am not sure why users give you funny looks with Linux. Is it because things like Flash/Java plug-in/etc. are not installed?
Flash and Java are standard parts of a modern Linux install these days, such as the latest versions of Linux Mint.
Maybe they gave him funny looks because he installed Ubuntu, or worse, Fedora, and they were sudddenly exposed to the horrors of Unity or Gnome3. Just when Linux was really looking like a viable replacement for Windows on the desktop(/laptop) for regular users, Unity and Gnome3 had to rise up and dash that hope forever with their horrible UIs.
They'll probably figure out some legal way so that your little one-person corporations don't have any rights, while giant corporations have all the rights and power.
You misunderstand the word model. The girl next door might be more attractive than your wife, but that doesn't make her a model.
If the somewhat-cute girl next door, your less-than-cute wife, and some old hag down the street are the only three women left in the entire world, then yes, that girl IS a model. Beauty is relative.
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Those things aren't permanently given to employees.
Irrelevant. Those are services provided which have a monetary value. There's lots of places where you have to pay $5 or $10 a day to park your car. Elevators cost money to operate, if for no other reason than the electric power needed.
Never worked anywhere where soda was free, I even worked in places where coffee/tea were not gratis.
There's tons of tech companies where sodas and other drinks are available for free; this was particularly true during the dot-com boom, probably less so now.
There's tons of places where there's coffee pots available to use, as well as microwave ovens. These are free even if you bring in your own food items to use in them, but that costs the company money for the electricity.
But these costs (coffee/tea/water) are almost negligible compared to lunch.
Wrong: a coffee drink at Starbucks can cost $4. You might say that Starbucks is overpriced, but that's irrelevant: someone obviously thinks a coffee drink is worth $4, and that's a large fraction of a lunch. It could be argued (by the IRS) that those free coffees are also worth $4, and employees should be paying taxes on them.
But an additional difference: lunch is personal time.
No, it's not. There's no such thing as "personal time" when you're a salaried employee.
So why doesn't the IRS tax you for the free parking spaces your employer provides you? Or the free elevator rides (if your building has elevators)? Or the comfy office chair? You don't strictly need those things to do your job: you can take the bus, walk up the stairs, and sit on a wooden bench. Or how about free coffees and sodas, which many companies have?
The IRS is being picky and choosy about which perks employers are allowed to provide for their employees, and it amounts to micromanaging.
You might, but there's a greater chance that someone leaving campus for lunch could meet with someone else, or just go by themselves, and not talk to coworkers about work-related issues during that lunchtime. Plus, having to leave campus and go elsewhere takes extra time, which they could be spending at work instead (we're talking about salaried employees here). So it's to the employer's benefit to encourage employees to stay on-campus for lunch and only socialize with immediate coworkers, and offering free meals is a good way to do that.
I used to work at Intel, and they had a big campus with several cafeterias too. However, they weren't free, and they weren't very cheap either (provided by an outside vendor, who obviously milked their monopoly position). So it was very common for people to leave campus for lunch, since you could get better food, cheaper, at dining establishments a few miles away. But if that food at the Intel cafeterias were free, that would have changed the equation, and surely more people would have stuck around on-campus for lunch.
How on earth is Google supplying free meals not "for the convenience of the employer"? Having free meals on-site means more employers will stay on-campus, rather than leave the campus for probably lengthier lunch breaks, plus they're more likely to share meals with other employees, discussing work issues. You think Google is giving out free meals out of pure generosity?
If corporations could convince employees to forgo living in their own houses, and instead live on-campus in dormatories, they'd do it in a heartbeat. It's exactly what they do in China. You get more work out of people when they don't have a personal life outside of work.
So, by your crazy logic, should smaller companies that have free sodas and coffee for employees require employees to account for every single cup of coffee they drink there, and pay taxes for it? How about companies that provide elevators for employees? Should non-disabled employees be required to pay taxes for every elevator ride they take, since they could after all just take the stairs instead? How about companies with parking lots? Should employees be required to pay taxes for the luxury of being able to drive to work instead of taking the bus, and not have to pay for parking?
Yep, I think this sums it up prettty well. Marketing to businesses isn't anything like marketing to consumers; all they had to do was show thier wares, wine and dine some people, etc. It's not hard to convince businesses to buy stuff from a large, dominant company, thus making them even larger and more dominant.
You really think MS's marketing campaigns have led it to success?
MS was successful because they were in the right place at the right time by providing the OS to IBM's PC, whose open architecture made it popular for cloning, and because of this popularity tons of application software ran on top of it. Of course a bunch of dirty tricks to ruin competitors didn't hurt, plus they made/bought out some office software which became the business standards. There weren't any advertising campaigns, ever, that helped them in these endeavors.
Yep, this is pretty representative of what you'll get when you ask for directions from locals. While I never got anything that ridiculous, it was always stuff like "turn left at the second stop light..." and it was really the third light that I needed to turn at. All the extra driving around in circles that you'd do from following directions like this is surely more dangerous than just looking at a map.
Have you ever known Microsoft to do anything really intelligent to win good PR and sales? Every one of their marketing campaigns has been a complete debacle (remember the people running around in MSN butterfly outfits? Or the commercial for Microsoft SongSmith?). I don't know where MS gets their marketing people, but they're probably the worst in the Fortune 500.
Ok, so you're going to drive a quarter mile, pull over, drive another quarter mile, pull over, etc.?
Maybe in someplace where the roads are all straight and orthogonal, this isn't necessary, you can just memorize the route to your destination. But try coming here to northern New Jersey sometime and trying to figure out how to get around in this crazy spaghetti-jumble of roads without a turn-by-turn GPS telling you where to go (and even that's not enough because there's so many places where the road has several forks in quick succession, or you have to turn right and take a weird little loop in order to take a left (because left turns aren't allowed on many roads, so they make special turn roads just for that purpose) etc, so you really need a graphical diagram to show you what turns you need to make before you get there.).
That makes perfect sense, but I have little doubt that the authorities will still prosecute people for simply using GPS as it can be construed as being against the letter of this stupid law.
Directions don't work. Random people can't give you accurate turn-by-turn directions orally. I remember trying this when I was young and giving up in frustration after too many sets of bad directions.
There is also evidence that operating a GPS unit is distracting
It's even more distracting trying to read a map and drive at the same time. If you don't know where you are, it's one or the other.
I kinda liked the idea I read somewhere else on one of these forums, which was that student loan lenders could only collect for perhaps 10 years, and only if the student was able to get a sufficiently high-paying job (not working as a waiter because they couldn't find a job).
This way, lenders would only loan to students who were good risks, not ones who had terrible job prospects (like Theater majors). This would greatly bring down the amount of money available to universities, and force them to drastically cut their tuitions.
Yes, they thought that. But a funny thing happened on the way to financial bliss. A lot of people didn't get paid all that well. And we've reached the point where a bachelor's degreed person can come out of college 100K in non dischargeble debt, and can often look foirward to a nice 20K per year job for their effort.
Yep, they don't tell people this when they enroll in college. It's the elephant in the room.
Most men live lives of quiet despair. I suspect the people that had no passion for their work probably aren't working in the field any more.
Surely many of them have left (the really bad ones), but many others might remain if they haven't found something better to do.
Your statement betrays your acceptance of the College Good/Trades Bad that we've been force fed by the educational system. I would counter with say, a machinist.
That's great for machinists, but still, plumbers are a pretty important trade, and I have a hard time imagining many people really wanting to do that until they retire. Yet many do; it's dirty work, but it does pay well. Many other trades jobs are hard too: auto mechanics have a fairly tough job, with all the dirt and grease, and worst of all having to work outside (they don't keep those service bays air-conditioned) year-round. Not like a cushy office job. But you still have to have a very good technical knowledge to do the job.
How many BA's in philosophy do we need? How many English Lit majors, Art history majors? Anthropology?
Now here's where we run into a problem. College isn't supposed to be job training, it's supposed to be "higher education". It's not supposed to lead directly into a job, except for professional degrees like engineering. It's supposed to be enlightening, a place for kids (who have enough money) to go learn how to think critically and learn more and better than they did in secondary school before, before they start trying to make a career.
The problem is out-of-control tuition rates. Back in the "old days", college still costed some money, but nothing like it does today. Poor kids obviously couldn't afford it, but many middle-class ones could; it just took them out of the workforce for four years. But it didn't leave them with crushing student loan debt. That's a very modern development, and it's mostly thanks to the existence of easy-to-get student loans which can't be discharged in a bankruptcy; colleges have all inflated their costs to make up for this availability of easy funds. So as a result, the only way college really "pays" is if you get a degree that leads directly to a high-paying career, like engineering. This isn't what college is supposed to be about.
The answer is to drastically reform student loans, perhaps even get rid of them altogether, or at least make them dischargable in a bankruptcy.
Because for years, we have been told that the only possibility of success in this world is to get a college education. If you do not do this, you are quite simply going to be a failure. Heck, they were heading that way in th eearly 70's when I was in High school. Trades was for stupid people who were unfit for even the general education classes
And it isn't simply a matter of everyone shifting over to engineering or chemistry. Those are very specialized careers, and most definitely not for everyone. Choosing to become an engineer because of the pay makes it very likely that a person is going to be miserable - assuming they even graduate.
The people who told us that trades are for stupid people and that everyone needs college to be "successful", don't see it the way you do. According to them, people need to go into careers that pay well, regardless of their interest or aptitude. And many people will: just look at all the people who went into CS and software engineering during the dot-com boom. How many of those people were really that interested in programming, or even very good at it? People frequently go where the money is: law, medicine, etc. Lots of them stick it out even though they don't like it very much, just because it pays well. Just like lots of people stick it out in the trades, retail, waiting tables, etc., even though they hate those jobs. How many people really love plumbing, for instance? Who really wants to unclog shit-filled toilets on a daily basis?
Simply supply and demand.
No, not exactly. One thing you're missing is: how do these students all pay for these liberal arts degrees?
If it weren't for easily-available, government-guaranteed student loans which can't ever be discharged in a bankruptcy, we wouldn't have nearly as many people going to college and getting useless liberal arts degrees, and the cost of college tuition would be far less.
This was 20 years ago, but I went to one of the top public high schools in my state, in the richest areas in my city. Plenty of National Merit scholars, yet there were still plenty of violent students and fights, not to mention a pipe bomb that blew up a bunch of lockers (and amazingly didn't hurt anyone, as it happened during lunch). When you stick everyone together in a school with 2500+ students, and don't exclude the kids who don't want to learn and have behavior problems, that's what you're going to get, no matter how nice your neighbornhood is. It doesn't matter if the parents "actually care about the school and the children" if you have some parents and kids who don't; they ruin it for everybody. (With a school that size, we got not only the kids of richer parents, but the kids of poorer parents who lived nearby. Of course, the richest kids probably mostly went to a nearby private school.)
Plus, isn't it wrong for only rich kids to be able to go to school without worrying about being assaulted and hospitalized? Or is this more of Americans hating non-rich people?
I went to high school over 20 years ago, and even then a bunch of my teachers were coaches, including my AP Calculus teacher(!).
Even worse, I have to admit that, except for one really nutty coach who taught Health, the coaches were actually better teachers than many of my other teachers at that school.
Sorta, but the other way to look at it is that they're setting kids up to be prisoners by training them for this expectation.
Have you ever been to an American high school? They're not much different from a prison. Why on earth would anyone want a job teaching the behaviorally-challenged and often violent students there?
Even in the better high schools, there's a huge difference between being a high school teacher and a college (even community college) professor. As a professor, you can concentrate on the material and teaching it to the students. As a high school teacher, you have to concentrate on being a disciplinarian instead of teaching.
The one thing you might be missing in your math, however, is that it's not a pyramid scheme as you seem to imply: it's not just literature and philosophy majors who take classes in those fields. Anyone getting a Liberal Arts degree of any kind will probably takes some of those courses, as well as students in other fields who have to take LA electives. So there's a reason to have literature and philosophy and other such professors, aside from just teaching graduate students in those fields. Of course, there's still only so many professor positions available, and it's not something people move out of through advancement; once someone becomes a professor, they generally stay there until they retire.
yum and apt aren't restricted to Free software; there's proprietary software that uses these (at least apt, not sure about yum) to maintain themselves too. A couple of examples are Opera and Google Talk.
I am not sure why users give you funny looks with Linux. Is it because things like Flash/Java plug-in/etc. are not installed?
Flash and Java are standard parts of a modern Linux install these days, such as the latest versions of Linux Mint.
Maybe they gave him funny looks because he installed Ubuntu, or worse, Fedora, and they were sudddenly exposed to the horrors of Unity or Gnome3. Just when Linux was really looking like a viable replacement for Windows on the desktop(/laptop) for regular users, Unity and Gnome3 had to rise up and dash that hope forever with their horrible UIs.
They'll probably figure out some legal way so that your little one-person corporations don't have any rights, while giant corporations have all the rights and power.
You misunderstand the word model. The girl next door might be more attractive than your wife, but that doesn't make her a model.
If the somewhat-cute girl next door, your less-than-cute wife, and some old hag down the street are the only three women left in the entire world, then yes, that girl IS a model. Beauty is relative.