Not necessarily a bad idea. So why arent unions in favor of this? Why are they so eager to resort to eliminating secret ballots?
Who says they aren't?
The unions aren't against secret ballots. What they're trying to do is eliminate a step in the process which is there for the sole purpose of preventing them from forming a union.
Why do you assume that the reason they want to eliminate the step is so they can use union bosses to strong arm people?
Wasnt it you who was decrying namecalling in another thread?
When did I call you a name?
I think many would argue that this is exactly what most non-union companies do. Examples: Publix workers and Toyota factory workers. Both have substantially higher morale than their unionized competitors. Both have successfully resisted countless union drives. And both have higher entry level pay.
So unlike Wal-Mart they didn't have to cook the books to resist unionization?
2 years is very much the exception and not the rule. Employees being fired for signing a union petition is illegal and also fairly rare.
And rarely prosecuted.
If it is, it takes six years to get to a decision in the courts and by then it's too late. The court costs and settlement fees are a small price to pay.
And if they are really so concerned about hte length of time before the election why dont they just pass a law that says "the election shall be held within 60 days of receiving X number of signatures"? Why do they have to eliminate the secret ballot to do that?
Great, some compromising. How about making it illegal for the corporation to see the names of the people who signed the petition too while we're at it?
Enough with the bullshit dishonesty. You don't care about secret ballots. You just hate unions. At least the unions are honest about their intentions.
I got an idea. This may be radical, but why don't you try treating employees well? Pay them a decent wage, give them good benefits and don't shit all over them. Maybe then they wouldn't want to form a union, and the vote would fail on it's own initiative.
The reason people are so against it is that its primary purpose is to take away the secret ballot from workers considering joining a union.
I don't think that's it. I think that's an excuse to justify some other reason to be against it.
What the unions want to do is just collect 50% of the signatures and skip the secret ballot step. This is called the "Card Check" provision, because the workers just sign cards and hand them to the union boss. Why? Because there are an awful lot of people who are willing to sign when the union boss is at their door leaning on them but when the secret ballot comes around the union routinely doesnt get anywhere near the number of votes the thought they had.
Hmm, so the process now is... workers sign petition. Petition is open to the corporate bosses. Corporate bosses strong arm signers of the petititon and tell them if the union passes they'll lose their jobs. Vote comes up for union... people amazingly vote against it. Yeah, I can understand why the corporations want this "secret" ballot. (deep sarcasm)
Gee, I wonder why the union people want to bypass the second step and just ratify the union if they get enough people to sign the petition? Hmm, I wonder why?
In the 100 or so years of union history in this country, isn't it more common for corporations to strong arm employees out of a union than these magical union bosses?
I'm not a union supporter, but you just convinced me to support this bill because your argument is fucking bullshit dishonest.
On Scott Hanselman's podcast(I believe that was the right one), they mentioned that the rumor mill around at PDC was that the release of Chrome caught the IE team off guard, and they realized they needed to rethink their strategy going forward. Hence the delay.
This may result in a much better browser. We'll see.
I'd have to say it's you who are playing tricks to try to justify an obscure point of view nobody cares about.
It depends on how you look at the year. If you look at calendar year say january thru december in 2000 the debt did decrease by about 100 billion. However if you look at fiscal year, from 10/1/99 until 9/30/00, the debt only increased by a mere 10 billion or so, which was substantially less than the fiscal year prior so you can clearly see a trend.
The US Treasury has a pretty good database of this information to play with, and it also breaks down how much is owed to private individuals and how much to social security, which is the accounting tricks you are referring to that is clearly not there.
My fiance loves Sahara and is willing to watch it over and over again. Which is actually a pretty rare thing. Normally she does not care for movies which involve car chases, guns, and things blowing up... much less sci-fi aspects.
I attribute McConaughey for this. Hollywood should take note and cast him more often in movies. Think about it guys. Would you rather watch a movie like Sahara, or Sisterhood of the traveling pants?
How long it takes to encode video, or process some data... whatever. That isn't the issue I'm having. For the past several years, things are pretty damned fast in that regard.
What I still have problems with is applications which think they are the only apps you are running, so they pop up modal boxes that take over your screen while you think you are typing in another app. (which is lovely when it's an OK dialog box and it accepts a space as an answer, and you're going... oops, what did I just agree to?) This has been a long standing problem with Windows. In XP they tried to address this, and then clever programmers found a way around it. Vista they tightened it down even more, and I believe solved it entirely, but I'm not going to say that uniequivocally... I just know it's a lot better.
So the responsiveness of the UI is key. When I have an app lock up, I don't want the explorer task bar locking up, etc. Vista is just a lot better at this than XP. If Windows 7 makes this seamless so much the better.
One mortgage company we worked with here in Houston consistently turned away mortgages that were iffy. My builders (the ones out of business now) would then go shopping for someone to take the mortgages (Countrywide, for instance). The mortgage company is still in business, my builders can't get construction financing, and you know what happened to Countrywide and their type... I'm pretty sure that if Countrywide had to live with their loans instead of selling them off, they would have evaluated them differently.
The company I worked for was a competitor of Countrywide. Not some podunk little mortgage brokerage, but one of the larger secondary lenders.
And Countrywide is a prime example. Nobody from the government was forcing us to buy or sell this crap, it was purely the greed of the marketplace.
And this started in and around 2005. So this problem doesn't go back 10 years, or 20, it's recent.
Howso? Simple. Yes, we'd always been involved in this risky product, but starting in around 2005 we increased our volumes such that it was no longer 5% of our mortgage origination but more like 50%. So when things started going south in that space, our risk exposure made it all the worse for us.
This was industry wide. This was WaMu, GMAC, Countrywide, IndyMac, New Century, National City, you just go right down the line and they all fell for it.
As for Economists... They've been telling us for years that some of what we are doing is unsustainable, and many in Congress have been listening and pointing it out and saying we need to change. And every election year a group of people we refer to as a political party would come out and say "Don't listen to them. They're just doom sayers and America haters! Deficits don't matter! WOO HOO! Party on Wayne!"
The chickens have come home to roost. You can can believe as true what is really false, but that doesn't make it so.
If I had to pick from both sides of the aisle I'd go with Sen. Collins for the Republicans. Harder to pick a Democrat because I can't stand Hillary and most of the other big-name female Democrats in the Senate are too far to the left for my tastes (Feinstein comes to mind).
I'm curious why you think Feinstein is liberal. Nobody else thinks that amongst Democrats.
This idea of left and right is entirely predicated upon how one speaks about issues, not how one actually votes on issues.
I would like to point out that the Democrats were overwhelmingly in favor of the bailout that has led to the government taking over several large financial institutions, while the Republicans generally opposed it.
You keep telling yourself that.
And then wonder why it was the Republicans who got all upset when it failed the first time and not the Democrats.
Christ, he made one little quip about reducing Nasa's budget and/. went into a full on flame out over it several months ago.
And you think he's going to tell you what he's gonna cut?
Now to be fair, I think McCain was being honest. He's got no clue what he'd cut because he doesn't understand where the government spends it's money in the first place. So he'll give you some platitude about how we'll save billions of dollars by not funding Sesame Street.
And Obama is a gay, crack loving homosexual terrorist cross dressing prostitute, and if we elect him we'll get lot's of socialism, crack and be forced into gay marriage slavery. Oh yeah, and he's Hitler too!
Even Alan Greenspan doesn't believe this bullshit. He acknowledged he screwed up big time, in believing companies would self-regulate.
I worked for a mortgage company for 10 years up until just this past spring, and Congress had nothing to do with it. It was entirely market greed. We were being pushed to maintain 15% annual growth. In 2004 when things started slowing down, we started moving more aggressively into questionable product. Why? Because we wanted the growth, and our competitors were doing so. We were facing a situation where people were saying "Well if you don't buy this mortgage from us, we'll take it to your competitor."
and the response from our management was "take it or we'll lose even more market share"
Don't give me this bullshit. You weren't there, and you don't know. All you want to believe is that some how this was all the fault of the Democrats, and you're flailing desperately to figure out a way to blame them.
If they were being just a little bit more intellectually honest they'd end the argument with "Look how badly we fucked it up when we had that much power!"
I seem to recall an article a few years ago about how Microsoft or perhaps the Gates Foundation did the work to create this system for law enforcement. I believe it is using image matching analysis, much like facial recognition technology to identify the pictures. It's kind of like what Picasa does at google.
Now certainly if you cropped images, things like that, I'm sure this would change somewhat. Although if their hash is identifying object shapes in the picture it may not help much. The point is to maintain this database of confirmed photography, and just do a quick scan across what a suspect has on their computer to see if there are matches. The reason being is that these pictures are shared broadly. So chances are if a suspect has a collection, they aren't modifying every picture and even if they did, they probably shared the modified picture with someone else who might have gotten caught and had it put into the database.
The purpose behind the system was several fold. The main purpose was to save some poor guy from having a job doing nothing but looking at child porn all day. A second purpose was to speed searches. A third purpose was to then track where these images were appearing across the globe, and link that into another database of who these people were in contact with, and from that build a path of how this flowed with the hopes of tracking it back to the source who took the picture.
Slashdot Mirror
Who says they aren't?
The unions aren't against secret ballots. What they're trying to do is eliminate a step in the process which is there for the sole purpose of preventing them from forming a union.
Why do you assume that the reason they want to eliminate the step is so they can use union bosses to strong arm people?
When did I call you a name?
So unlike Wal-Mart they didn't have to cook the books to resist unionization?
As was mentioned, because the petition isn't secret.
Why all the hatred and name calling?
And rarely prosecuted.
If it is, it takes six years to get to a decision in the courts and by then it's too late. The court costs and settlement fees are a small price to pay.
Great, some compromising. How about making it illegal for the corporation to see the names of the people who signed the petition too while we're at it?
Enough with the bullshit dishonesty. You don't care about secret ballots. You just hate unions. At least the unions are honest about their intentions.
I got an idea. This may be radical, but why don't you try treating employees well? Pay them a decent wage, give them good benefits and don't shit all over them. Maybe then they wouldn't want to form a union, and the vote would fail on it's own initiative.
I don't think that's it. I think that's an excuse to justify some other reason to be against it.
Hmm, so the process now is... workers sign petition. Petition is open to the corporate bosses. Corporate bosses strong arm signers of the petititon and tell them if the union passes they'll lose their jobs. Vote comes up for union... people amazingly vote against it. Yeah, I can understand why the corporations want this "secret" ballot. (deep sarcasm)
Gee, I wonder why the union people want to bypass the second step and just ratify the union if they get enough people to sign the petition? Hmm, I wonder why?
In the 100 or so years of union history in this country, isn't it more common for corporations to strong arm employees out of a union than these magical union bosses?
I'm not a union supporter, but you just convinced me to support this bill because your argument is fucking bullshit dishonest.
I don't mean the USPS, I mean the people using their service.
They never thought this might fail?
Did anybody ask the all important question this year?
Briefs or Boxers?
I've never met someone who is pro-abortion. What do they look like?
Wow, so college is still about arguing stupid unimportant points.
Man you'd think after 20 years they would have changed by now.
Grow up kid, you aren't a victim in this life and you can choose to ignore stuff you don't like.
Developers could always get a job working at a restaurant waiting tables. :-)
On Scott Hanselman's podcast(I believe that was the right one), they mentioned that the rumor mill around at PDC was that the release of Chrome caught the IE team off guard, and they realized they needed to rethink their strategy going forward. Hence the delay.
This may result in a much better browser. We'll see.
I'd have to say it's you who are playing tricks to try to justify an obscure point of view nobody cares about.
It depends on how you look at the year. If you look at calendar year say january thru december in 2000 the debt did decrease by about 100 billion. However if you look at fiscal year, from 10/1/99 until 9/30/00, the debt only increased by a mere 10 billion or so, which was substantially less than the fiscal year prior so you can clearly see a trend.
The US Treasury has a pretty good database of this information to play with, and it also breaks down how much is owed to private individuals and how much to social security, which is the accounting tricks you are referring to that is clearly not there.
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np
I've not read the book, but did enjoy the movie.
My fiance loves Sahara and is willing to watch it over and over again. Which is actually a pretty rare thing. Normally she does not care for movies which involve car chases, guns, and things blowing up... much less sci-fi aspects.
I attribute McConaughey for this. Hollywood should take note and cast him more often in movies. Think about it guys. Would you rather watch a movie like Sahara, or Sisterhood of the traveling pants?
Agreed.
Best Buy's dominance is already showing. When i was looking for a HDTV last year, I found Best Buy consistently the most expensive place to buy.
As much as I hate that, Circuit City really screwed up.
How long it takes to encode video, or process some data... whatever. That isn't the issue I'm having. For the past several years, things are pretty damned fast in that regard.
What I still have problems with is applications which think they are the only apps you are running, so they pop up modal boxes that take over your screen while you think you are typing in another app. (which is lovely when it's an OK dialog box and it accepts a space as an answer, and you're going... oops, what did I just agree to?) This has been a long standing problem with Windows. In XP they tried to address this, and then clever programmers found a way around it. Vista they tightened it down even more, and I believe solved it entirely, but I'm not going to say that uniequivocally... I just know it's a lot better.
So the responsiveness of the UI is key. When I have an app lock up, I don't want the explorer task bar locking up, etc. Vista is just a lot better at this than XP. If Windows 7 makes this seamless so much the better.
I don't understand. Isn't Bush the greatest president on earth?
How is it negative to compare him to Bush?
The company I worked for was a competitor of Countrywide. Not some podunk little mortgage brokerage, but one of the larger secondary lenders.
And Countrywide is a prime example. Nobody from the government was forcing us to buy or sell this crap, it was purely the greed of the marketplace.
And this started in and around 2005. So this problem doesn't go back 10 years, or 20, it's recent.
Howso? Simple. Yes, we'd always been involved in this risky product, but starting in around 2005 we increased our volumes such that it was no longer 5% of our mortgage origination but more like 50%. So when things started going south in that space, our risk exposure made it all the worse for us.
This was industry wide. This was WaMu, GMAC, Countrywide, IndyMac, New Century, National City, you just go right down the line and they all fell for it.
As for Economists... They've been telling us for years that some of what we are doing is unsustainable, and many in Congress have been listening and pointing it out and saying we need to change. And every election year a group of people we refer to as a political party would come out and say "Don't listen to them. They're just doom sayers and America haters! Deficits don't matter! WOO HOO! Party on Wayne!"
The chickens have come home to roost. You can can believe as true what is really false, but that doesn't make it so.
I'm curious why you think Feinstein is liberal. Nobody else thinks that amongst Democrats.
This idea of left and right is entirely predicated upon how one speaks about issues, not how one actually votes on issues.
Just fascinating...
You keep telling yourself that.
And then wonder why it was the Republicans who got all upset when it failed the first time and not the Democrats.
Christ, he made one little quip about reducing Nasa's budget and /. went into a full on flame out over it several months ago.
And you think he's going to tell you what he's gonna cut?
Now to be fair, I think McCain was being honest. He's got no clue what he'd cut because he doesn't understand where the government spends it's money in the first place. So he'll give you some platitude about how we'll save billions of dollars by not funding Sesame Street.
Yeah yeah, we're all racists. We know.
And Obama is a gay, crack loving homosexual terrorist cross dressing prostitute, and if we elect him we'll get lot's of socialism, crack and be forced into gay marriage slavery. Oh yeah, and he's Hitler too!
Don't you guys have any new material?
Even Alan Greenspan doesn't believe this bullshit. He acknowledged he screwed up big time, in believing companies would self-regulate.
I worked for a mortgage company for 10 years up until just this past spring, and Congress had nothing to do with it. It was entirely market greed. We were being pushed to maintain 15% annual growth. In 2004 when things started slowing down, we started moving more aggressively into questionable product. Why? Because we wanted the growth, and our competitors were doing so. We were facing a situation where people were saying "Well if you don't buy this mortgage from us, we'll take it to your competitor."
and the response from our management was "take it or we'll lose even more market share"
Don't give me this bullshit. You weren't there, and you don't know. All you want to believe is that some how this was all the fault of the Democrats, and you're flailing desperately to figure out a way to blame them.
I'm pretty certain that is their argument.
I seem to recall an article a few years ago about how Microsoft or perhaps the Gates Foundation did the work to create this system for law enforcement. I believe it is using image matching analysis, much like facial recognition technology to identify the pictures. It's kind of like what Picasa does at google.
Now certainly if you cropped images, things like that, I'm sure this would change somewhat. Although if their hash is identifying object shapes in the picture it may not help much. The point is to maintain this database of confirmed photography, and just do a quick scan across what a suspect has on their computer to see if there are matches. The reason being is that these pictures are shared broadly. So chances are if a suspect has a collection, they aren't modifying every picture and even if they did, they probably shared the modified picture with someone else who might have gotten caught and had it put into the database.
The purpose behind the system was several fold. The main purpose was to save some poor guy from having a job doing nothing but looking at child porn all day. A second purpose was to speed searches. A third purpose was to then track where these images were appearing across the globe, and link that into another database of who these people were in contact with, and from that build a path of how this flowed with the hopes of tracking it back to the source who took the picture.