You don't seem to understand the heart of the issue. It's not you versus Steve Jobs. For most of the middle class it's them versus the corporate executives. The executive salaries increased by about 2000% over the same period that their salaries increased at the rate of inflation. For them, yes, if the money hadn't been spent on executives it would have either been payed back to the shareholders (which include middle class investors) or likely spent on increasing production (thus hiring more middle class workers) or on existing employees (thus increasing the wages of middle class employees).
For about 20 years the middle class as whole has suffered from income stagnation. Why do you suppose that is? The companies the middle class work for have made huge gains, they've become ever more profitable. Well, to answer the question you only need to look at who's prospered. The top 1% alone consumed over 33% of all GDP growth in the past 20 years.
What's been happening is that the rank and file salaries have been held to about inflation to "keep costs down" and make the company more profitable. Simultaneously, corporate executives have seen their salaries balloon by about 2000% over the same time period. Mostly this is a direct effect of Reagan changing the top tax bracket from 70% to 28% 1. When the top rate was 70% there was little incentive to increase the wages of the executives, it cost a company a lot of money to give a small cash incentive (because over two thirds of a large salary would go directly to taxes). Now, however, with only one third going to taxes, corporate executives spend the money that could have been raises for the rank and file employees on bonuses and salaries for each other because they're in a bidding war to try and get and keep the best executives they can hire.
It doesn't matter if you think 70% is too high of a tax rate, I'm just outlining the unforeseen consequences of the changes that Reagan made. The only solution I see to this problem right now is to substancially increase the tax rate on the highest levels of income. The result would be a disincentive to paying huge salaries, and might make it more attractive to spend that money on salaries for the rank and file employees.
Frankly, I think you're jumping to conclusions. They said they developed an algorithmic solution, so it's not a blacklist and they said they didn't use sentiment analysis to penalize web sites. What I would guess they did was use sentiment analysis to negate the value of a link just like it was a "nofollow" link. It'd be hard to game that solution because you can already do it in a much simpler fashion, and it accomplishes the goal: ie. prevent bad reviews from boosting a site's page rank.
I think the point is that if you skip the "right to life", no other rights really matter*.
* Excepting, of course, the right of your descendants to profit from your copyrights for at least 50 years after your death, which will only rarely come into effect in the animal kingdom.
No, she said they had no moral right to condemn human rights abuses because they have caused them to occur in Iraq and Afghanistan. Specifically she was saying warmongers have no credibility on human rights issues.
Specifically, she said British politicians have no moral authority to criticize other countries for human rights violations because of the human rights violations they have allowed their forces and their allies to commit in Iraq.
She specifically said that was the job of human rights organization who have actually have credibility on the issue.
Actually, after listening to her comments, she said if you condone human rights abuses you shouldn't to condemn other people for doing as you do. She was rather specific when she said she was specifically talking about British politicians who have lost the moral authority to lecture on human rights abuses.
She didn't say it was ok to stone people. She said it was hypocritical of British politicians to support the invasion of Iraq and then lecture other people about human rights abuses.
I am bemused that the conservative echo chamber has made her the villain when someone chooses to intentionally or not incite violence against her. Let's consider the fact that she is not a very popular woman in the first place, and that she already has a number of serious death threats against her. I can see how a politician explicitly condoning her murder, even in jest, would be deeply troubling to her.
Frankly, he's most likely going to get off with a small fine and hopefully a learning moment that other people may take your words more seriously than you intended them, so try not to publish your stupidity.
Not exactly, I listened to what she was saying. She was saying that most British politicians have lost their moral authority to condemn human rights abuses, because of their tacit approval of and refusal to condemn the human rights abuses in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Ah, so I was correct. She was saying that due to the human rights abuses perpetrated by the "Coalition of the Willing" in Iraq, British politicians who supported (and still do) the war have have lost the moral authority to lecture other people on human rights abuses.
Essentially, she's just calling them hypocrites, that's not justification for uttering death threats even if you don't like being called a hypocrite. Considering that more serious threats have already been made against her life, I can certainly see how a politician publicly condoning her murder would not be appreciated as a joke.
I don't know anything about this woman other than she's supposedly a supporter of human rights, women's rights and secular government. The claim that she supports stoning in Muslim countries seems a bit out of character, plus I can't find where she made such a claim. Knowing it's a white male conservative politician who's being defended, leaves me unwilling to accept that premise without some evidence. Too often have I seen conservative politicians (and their supporters) make claims that are only loosely based in reality. For instance, it might be considered very different if she said British Politicians had no right to condemn stoning as long as they support renditions and torture...
My guess would be that the downmodder (and there's only one down mod there) thought thethibbs was saying Obama is going to raise tax rates, which would be generally false since Obama's current proposal is to extend tax breaks for the lower 98% of Americans. Of course, the Republicans are blocking the extension of any of the tax cuts unless they're extended for everyone. The issue might be the appearance of cherry-picked facts or it might just be a simple misunderstanding what thethibbs was trying to say.
However, on the other hand, Nethemas has a good point, a marginal tax rate increase of 3% shouldn't be enough to convince someone to sell 1.3 billion in stock unless he thinks the stock won't make more than that in capital gains over the alternative time period that he would holding the stock. So it does look a little like Ballmer selling 20% of his shares in Microsoft is an indication of his lack of confidence in the company.
I've seen people say similar things about Slashdot before, it always strikes me that the people who are complaining give extraordinarily bad examples of how "Slashdot's groupthink" works. I understand the point that you're trying to make, but in reality there is little reason to agree with RIAA and no good reasons to extol "the virtues of IE6". The last time I someone complaining about a specific example, they were upset because they were moderated down for claiming that environmentalists must be planning to kill 90% of the world's population.
To be even more clear, in my experience bad moderation does happen from time to time, but the people who think it's common are usually crackpots who are upset that their crazy theories are ignored. Usually they think the moderation system is responsible, because the Dunning-Kruger effect is hiding the real problem.
1) I'm not sure he increased federal spending. There's the stimulus package, but that's a one-time expense of about 550 billion - 250 million for stimulus and 300 million to cover the strain on employment insurance and welfare (The other 250 million was tax cuts).
2) The government bought stock in private entities because they were unable to secure loans from private banks. The purchases saved over 1 million jobs, which believe it or not is good for practically everyone.
3) Obamacare was implemented in a partisan way because the Republicans refused to participate. The Republicans have been desperate to boycott anything and everything the Democrats have done. It was part of their re-election strategy.
From the perspective of a conservative, any non-Republican president is "the most left-leaning and partisan Presidency to date". The statement doesn't mean much anymore. I heard the exact same things about Clinton, and I heard the claim that both Gore and Kerry would be the same if they were elected. The real problem is too many so-called conservatives no longer live in reality.
I understand the feeling, and I don't like voting for deceptive people either, however, the world isn't a perfect place.
When you choose not to vote, you make the candidates you would have supported less likely, not more likely to appear. Vote or not, I'm just saying when you choose not to vote, you're damaging your own interests.
You may not understand that today, but hopefully some day that will make sense.
This is a symptom of the commercialization of the news media. They've concluded that races are exciting and facts are dull. Since they're in the business of sell out the viewers, it's obvious what they're eventually going to do.
That's not an issue with polling, it's an issue with using a terribly flawed voting system (first past the post). Fix the system and it would fix quite a few political problems. For example, preferential voting eliminates the need for strategic voting as you've described above.
I'm not sure you conclusion is supportable. If you are voting for whomever "lies the least" then you're actually supporting honesty (assuming you actually can telling more lies). If other people vote the same way then you could counteract the effect of people voting for whomever tells them what they want to hear. Looking at it from a macro point of view, voting for the least dishonest person increases the value of honesty in campaigns. Failing to vote at all on that basis does the opposite of what you want, it actually encourages more dishonest behavior because it increases the relative value of the votes of the gullible (by making the votes of skeptical irrelevant).
That's actually really inefficient. It's cheaper in the long run to pay for all medical treatments than to only pay for the ones the patient can't afford. Think of it like developing software, if you catch the problem early it's orders of magnitude cheaper to treat.
There's a reason every other country in the world pays less for health care than the United States.
Maybe I'm being pedantic here, but "Work it out among yourselves and no hitting" is still 2 rules, and usually there's a lot of rules that people don't even understand underlie those principles.
All you need to do is watch an episode of Judge Judy (or equivalent show) to see that "Work it out among yourselves and no hitting" often fails to work out.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't seem to understand the heart of the issue. It's not you versus Steve Jobs. For most of the middle class it's them versus the corporate executives. The executive salaries increased by about 2000% over the same period that their salaries increased at the rate of inflation. For them, yes, if the money hadn't been spent on executives it would have either been payed back to the shareholders (which include middle class investors) or likely spent on increasing production (thus hiring more middle class workers) or on existing employees (thus increasing the wages of middle class employees).
For about 20 years the middle class as whole has suffered from income stagnation. Why do you suppose that is? The companies the middle class work for have made huge gains, they've become ever more profitable. Well, to answer the question you only need to look at who's prospered. The top 1% alone consumed over 33% of all GDP growth in the past 20 years.
What's been happening is that the rank and file salaries have been held to about inflation to "keep costs down" and make the company more profitable. Simultaneously, corporate executives have seen their salaries balloon by about 2000% over the same time period. Mostly this is a direct effect of Reagan changing the top tax bracket from 70% to 28% 1. When the top rate was 70% there was little incentive to increase the wages of the executives, it cost a company a lot of money to give a small cash incentive (because over two thirds of a large salary would go directly to taxes). Now, however, with only one third going to taxes, corporate executives spend the money that could have been raises for the rank and file employees on bonuses and salaries for each other because they're in a bidding war to try and get and keep the best executives they can hire.
It doesn't matter if you think 70% is too high of a tax rate, I'm just outlining the unforeseen consequences of the changes that Reagan made. The only solution I see to this problem right now is to substancially increase the tax rate on the highest levels of income. The result would be a disincentive to paying huge salaries, and might make it more attractive to spend that money on salaries for the rank and file employees.
Well, to be honest that seems pretty fair. There's no reason Google News should actually link to fake news sites.
Frankly, I think you're jumping to conclusions. They said they developed an algorithmic solution, so it's not a blacklist and they said they didn't use sentiment analysis to penalize web sites. What I would guess they did was use sentiment analysis to negate the value of a link just like it was a "nofollow" link. It'd be hard to game that solution because you can already do it in a much simpler fashion, and it accomplishes the goal: ie. prevent bad reviews from boosting a site's page rank.
I think the point is that if you skip the "right to life", no other rights really matter*.
* Excepting, of course, the right of your descendants to profit from your copyrights for at least 50 years after your death, which will only rarely come into effect in the animal kingdom.
No, she said they had no moral right to condemn human rights abuses because they have caused them to occur in Iraq and Afghanistan. Specifically she was saying warmongers have no credibility on human rights issues.
No, she did not.
Specifically, she said British politicians have no moral authority to criticize other countries for human rights violations because of the human rights violations they have allowed their forces and their allies to commit in Iraq.
She specifically said that was the job of human rights organization who have actually have credibility on the issue.
Actually, after listening to her comments, she said if you condone human rights abuses you shouldn't to condemn other people for doing as you do. She was rather specific when she said she was specifically talking about British politicians who have lost the moral authority to lecture on human rights abuses.
...
She didn't say it was ok to stone people. She said it was hypocritical of British politicians to support the invasion of Iraq and then lecture other people about human rights abuses.
I am bemused that the conservative echo chamber has made her the villain when someone chooses to intentionally or not incite violence against her. Let's consider the fact that she is not a very popular woman in the first place, and that she already has a number of serious death threats against her. I can see how a politician explicitly condoning her murder, even in jest, would be deeply troubling to her.
Frankly, he's most likely going to get off with a small fine and hopefully a learning moment that other people may take your words more seriously than you intended them, so try not to publish your stupidity.
Not exactly, I listened to what she was saying. She was saying that most British politicians have lost their moral authority to condemn human rights abuses, because of their tacit approval of and refusal to condemn the human rights abuses in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Ah, so I was correct. She was saying that due to the human rights abuses perpetrated by the "Coalition of the Willing" in Iraq, British politicians who supported (and still do) the war have have lost the moral authority to lecture other people on human rights abuses.
Essentially, she's just calling them hypocrites, that's not justification for uttering death threats even if you don't like being called a hypocrite. Considering that more serious threats have already been made against her life, I can certainly see how a politician publicly condoning her murder would not be appreciated as a joke.
I don't know anything about this woman other than she's supposedly a supporter of human rights, women's rights and secular government. The claim that she supports stoning in Muslim countries seems a bit out of character, plus I can't find where she made such a claim. Knowing it's a white male conservative politician who's being defended, leaves me unwilling to accept that premise without some evidence. Too often have I seen conservative politicians (and their supporters) make claims that are only loosely based in reality. For instance, it might be considered very different if she said British Politicians had no right to condemn stoning as long as they support renditions and torture...
So to sum up: [Citation Needed]
My guess would be that the downmodder (and there's only one down mod there) thought thethibbs was saying Obama is going to raise tax rates, which would be generally false since Obama's current proposal is to extend tax breaks for the lower 98% of Americans. Of course, the Republicans are blocking the extension of any of the tax cuts unless they're extended for everyone. The issue might be the appearance of cherry-picked facts or it might just be a simple misunderstanding what thethibbs was trying to say.
However, on the other hand, Nethemas has a good point, a marginal tax rate increase of 3% shouldn't be enough to convince someone to sell 1.3 billion in stock unless he thinks the stock won't make more than that in capital gains over the alternative time period that he would holding the stock. So it does look a little like Ballmer selling 20% of his shares in Microsoft is an indication of his lack of confidence in the company.
I've seen people say similar things about Slashdot before, it always strikes me that the people who are complaining give extraordinarily bad examples of how "Slashdot's groupthink" works. I understand the point that you're trying to make, but in reality there is little reason to agree with RIAA and no good reasons to extol "the virtues of IE6". The last time I someone complaining about a specific example, they were upset because they were moderated down for claiming that environmentalists must be planning to kill 90% of the world's population.
To be even more clear, in my experience bad moderation does happen from time to time, but the people who think it's common are usually crackpots who are upset that their crazy theories are ignored. Usually they think the moderation system is responsible, because the Dunning-Kruger effect is hiding the real problem.
Let's do a little fact check:
1) I'm not sure he increased federal spending. There's the stimulus package, but that's a one-time expense of about 550 billion - 250 million for stimulus and 300 million to cover the strain on employment insurance and welfare (The other 250 million was tax cuts).
2) The government bought stock in private entities because they were unable to secure loans from private banks. The purchases saved over 1 million jobs, which believe it or not is good for practically everyone.
3) Obamacare was implemented in a partisan way because the Republicans refused to participate. The Republicans have been desperate to boycott anything and everything the Democrats have done. It was part of their re-election strategy.
From the perspective of a conservative, any non-Republican president is "the most left-leaning and partisan Presidency to date". The statement doesn't mean much anymore. I heard the exact same things about Clinton, and I heard the claim that both Gore and Kerry would be the same if they were elected. The real problem is too many so-called conservatives no longer live in reality.
I understand the feeling, and I don't like voting for deceptive people either, however, the world isn't a perfect place.
When you choose not to vote, you make the candidates you would have supported less likely, not more likely to appear. Vote or not, I'm just saying when you choose not to vote, you're damaging your own interests.
You may not understand that today, but hopefully some day that will make sense.
This is a symptom of the commercialization of the news media. They've concluded that races are exciting and facts are dull. Since they're in the business of sell out the viewers, it's obvious what they're eventually going to do.
That's not an issue with polling, it's an issue with using a terribly flawed voting system (first past the post). Fix the system and it would fix quite a few political problems. For example, preferential voting eliminates the need for strategic voting as you've described above.
Hmm. Taking your complaint seriously:
I'm not sure you conclusion is supportable. If you are voting for whomever "lies the least" then you're actually supporting honesty (assuming you actually can telling more lies). If other people vote the same way then you could counteract the effect of people voting for whomever tells them what they want to hear. Looking at it from a macro point of view, voting for the least dishonest person increases the value of honesty in campaigns. Failing to vote at all on that basis does the opposite of what you want, it actually encourages more dishonest behavior because it increases the relative value of the votes of the gullible (by making the votes of skeptical irrelevant).
Hmm... Is that "Anything Goes" or "Everything Goes"?
Apparently you didn't look hard enough.
From the article:
"IE is now a 39.53% in Europe and Firefox at 38.65%."
Unless you're using some new fangled kind of math, that's not double.
That's actually really inefficient. It's cheaper in the long run to pay for all medical treatments than to only pay for the ones the patient can't afford. Think of it like developing software, if you catch the problem early it's orders of magnitude cheaper to treat.
There's a reason every other country in the world pays less for health care than the United States.
If I see one of these, I think I'll just go somewhere else. It'd have to be something really compelling to make me endure that kind of abuse.
Maybe I'm being pedantic here, but "Work it out among yourselves and no hitting" is still 2 rules, and usually there's a lot of rules that people don't even understand underlie those principles.
All you need to do is watch an episode of Judge Judy (or equivalent show) to see that "Work it out among yourselves and no hitting" often fails to work out.
Sooner or later somebody always makes the rules.
Anarchy only lasts until somebody gathers enough power to stop it.