How exactly? How does a momentary burst of dust and radiaton on a radiation-soaked ball of dust and rock, with scientific and military applications, compare to a long-lived contamination of the beauty of the night sky?
Yeah "nuclear bad" and all that, but the moon makes the worst badlands we test them on here look like verdant paradises in comparison - and here the fallout reaches everywhere in the world.
That's power-fantasy objectification though, not sexual objectification.
Ask yourself (better yet, ask your women friends) - are Conan the Barbarian, Superman, etc. characters created for men to fantasize about being, or for women to fantasize about fucking? Then ask yourself the same (gender-flipped) question about the women portrayed in the same medium.
The two fantasies tend to be very different, and you only need to look at the target audience (and gender of the character designers) to get a pretty good idea which it is.
Nobody (well, aside for some really Puritan fuckwits) is trying to make us a sexless society. Such a scheme is doomed to failure anyway - in the fight between intellect and biology, biology always wins eventually. Same reason "abstinence only" sex education has always ended in spectacular failure.
What most people are complaining about is the extreme sexism and objectification of women endemic in much of popular media, with video games and comics often being the worst offenders. Now personally, I have no objection to the existence of gratuitously sexualized characters, but *both* genders should get the treatment. If you've got a bunch of women in running around with chainmail bikinis and DDD busts, the men should get the same treatment and be sexualized for women's consumption - dump the power fantasy presentation and lets see the sweet, sensitive eyes, pouty lips, and a F'ing extra-large fruit-basket clearly outlined in their tight fitting speedos.
Would I want to play such a game? Not really, I don't need to see that shit. But what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Either objectify both genders equally, represent them both as power fantasies catering to their respective genders, or give them all more realistic figures and wardrobes.
>that belonged to someone a.k.a. the owners, who did basically none of the work.
At a conservative estimate 10% of the US population owns 80% of the stock. Those owners didn't do any substantial part of the work involved, they couldn't have, there's just too few of them. All they contributed was money. Money which they accumulated primarily from skimming the profits from work done by other people.
As they say - if someone says they got rich through hard work, ask them whose. You can get comfortably wealthy through hard work - but getting rich mostly requires investing so that you can profit from many other people's hard work. Which isn't inherently a bad thing, except that it inevitably seems to lead to a spiraling inequality in wealth distribution.
Thanks. I figured I should at least allude to the fact that I often argue to elicit a well-considered alternative point of view.
I'm not specifically interested in those with low IQ, - I just decided to pick on them as an obvious example of a group that has very little option of doing smart things, because they simply aren't smart enough to figure out what that is in whatever particular circumstance they're in. There's also those in poverty who have a very hard time *affording* to do the smart thing. And as you point out, those who through cultural indoctrination, have a very difficult time with either or both of those.
Though I think it might be worth mentioning that recent study that suggests that resisting temptation is actually something that *everybody* sucks at - and the choices we commonly attribute to "willpower" seem to actually correlate not with resisting temptation, but avoiding it. Which at the very least suggests a different aspect of our culture to try to fix. For example, a cultural fixation on consumerism keeps the temptation to buy a little instant gratification always close at hand.
Actually 2.5% of the population is below 70. Mental disability is currently recognized at around 70-75. Fully 1/6 of the population is below 85. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Maybe 80 is reasonably a bit much to be expected to navigate the finer points of our society without assistance, I don't know well enough to say. But I don't think it's unreasonable to say that if you're in the middle 2/3rds of the population, you should be able to get ahead in life through hard work, and be materially and influentially invested in the product of your labor a.k.a. the company you're an integral part of building and maintaining.
True, but that's really a separate issue - I believe it's fairly rare that a non-founding executive owns sufficient stock in a company to exert any sort of ownership control through that route. It gives them more skin the the game, and (I think) lets them defer paying taxes on that compensation until they decide to sell - win-win for both the company and executive, but has very little to do with increasing their ownership-based power over the company.
I'd argue in favor of a somewhat vague "general principles" law that also includes specific cases of behavior that would *definitely* be a violation of those principles to make it easy to prosecute those who violate any of the examples thought of while writing the law, without letting criminals escape justice by adhering to the letter of the law.
I'd ague that - except that was the guiding principle of the U.S. Bill of Rights, and good luck bringing someone to justice for violating a non-enumerated right.
Actually, the shareholders usually aren't paid at all - dividends are increasingly rare, and shareholders just gamble on the value of the company to sell their shares later. By the same token, only the very first owner of a share gives any money to the company - everyone else is just gambling amongst each other.
But yes, employees are paid immediately, and owners are paid when there's a profit. When the employees are also the owners they get paid both a wage, and dividends. Or do you think the executives of owner-operated companies don't normally get a paycheck?
Yes, there are reasons for employers to want to have employees own stock in their company.
Those reasons have nothing to do with the benefits employees get from having ownership control of the company, which seems to be what's being discussed.
Sounds like somebody hasn't actually studied history. The company stores - the only place you could spend your company scrip, often charged several times as much as the public stores down the street. Nobody in their right mind would rather get paid pennies on the dollar, even if it means avoiding taxes.
Ownership implies control - if every non-executive employee of the company owns stock in the company, and they all agree that a certain policy must be changed - how likely is it that the policy will change?
If they actually owned the company, that would approach 100%. In reality, it's probably closer to 0%, because the company is owned primarily by a small group of wealthy investors, and all the employee stock combined amount to a rounding error.
If you want a hybrid system for (partial) employee ownership you almost need to give employees a different class of stock, exclusive to them, that combined has majority voting control. Zuckerberg has something sort of like that going on for himself, owning privileged "class B" shares with 10x the voting power of normal "class A" shares, which gives him an untouchable 75% voting control despite owning less than 10% of the company.
So what? You think that would change in an employee-owned company? Employees still get paid normally - they just *also* are the shareholders with ultimate control over company policy, they collect the dividends, etc., rather than that being the domain of a separate capitalist class.
They did't claim it wasn't anti-competitive - they claimed they were allowed to do it.
Anti-competitive behavior is only disallowed if the government recognizes you as a monopoly or trade organization. Grease the right palms to prevent that, an no problem.
Heck, here in the US even a convicted abusive monopoly like Microsoft can get away with it. Grease the right palms and nobody will make an issue of it - or at worst "punish" you with a fine far smaller than the excess profits your anti-competitive behavior is generating so that it's just a cost of doing business.
Agreed - it's not the user interface that needs to be standardized, it's the developer interface.
If I write a piece of software for Windows, I know it will almost certainly install and run on any contemporary or newer version of Windows, especially if I rigorously honor reasonable access restraints. I have plenty of old software from the Windows 95 days that still runs fine, though some requires a little permission tweaking.
If I write software for Linux though... I can't. I have to write it for a specific distribution and the system libraries it uses. It won't run on most other distributions, and it probably won't run on the same distro a few years later.
Well now, that depends entirely on what point you're trying to make. They're obviously employees - they do collect a paycheck, which depending on who you ask makes them part of the working class.
Where do you see me mentioning the AR15? Yes, there are a lot of "lookalike" consumer weapons that wouldn't be particularly suitable for a combat setting - but even they would generally be preferable to a hunting rifle.
Then you go on about snipers, I'm talking assholes shooting people in a fit of carelessness or passion, criminals shooting rivals and victims, and psychopaths shooting up churches, theaters, etc.
I'm fairly certain that eliminating rifles of all kinds would have a very small effect on total gun deaths. Yes, they are far more dangerous in skilled hands (given the right environment and visibility). But by the same token, skilled gunmen are far more likely to treat their weapon with the respect it deserves.
Slashdot Mirror
How exactly? How does a momentary burst of dust and radiaton on a radiation-soaked ball of dust and rock, with scientific and military applications, compare to a long-lived contamination of the beauty of the night sky?
Yeah "nuclear bad" and all that, but the moon makes the worst badlands we test them on here look like verdant paradises in comparison - and here the fallout reaches everywhere in the world.
That's power-fantasy objectification though, not sexual objectification.
Ask yourself (better yet, ask your women friends) - are Conan the Barbarian, Superman, etc. characters created for men to fantasize about being, or for women to fantasize about fucking? Then ask yourself the same (gender-flipped) question about the women portrayed in the same medium.
The two fantasies tend to be very different, and you only need to look at the target audience (and gender of the character designers) to get a pretty good idea which it is.
Nobody (well, aside for some really Puritan fuckwits) is trying to make us a sexless society. Such a scheme is doomed to failure anyway - in the fight between intellect and biology, biology always wins eventually. Same reason "abstinence only" sex education has always ended in spectacular failure.
What most people are complaining about is the extreme sexism and objectification of women endemic in much of popular media, with video games and comics often being the worst offenders. Now personally, I have no objection to the existence of gratuitously sexualized characters, but *both* genders should get the treatment. If you've got a bunch of women in running around with chainmail bikinis and DDD busts, the men should get the same treatment and be sexualized for women's consumption - dump the power fantasy presentation and lets see the sweet, sensitive eyes, pouty lips, and a F'ing extra-large fruit-basket clearly outlined in their tight fitting speedos.
Would I want to play such a game? Not really, I don't need to see that shit. But what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Either objectify both genders equally, represent them both as power fantasies catering to their respective genders, or give them all more realistic figures and wardrobes.
>that belonged to someone
a.k.a. the owners, who did basically none of the work.
At a conservative estimate 10% of the US population owns 80% of the stock. Those owners didn't do any substantial part of the work involved, they couldn't have, there's just too few of them. All they contributed was money. Money which they accumulated primarily from skimming the profits from work done by other people.
As they say - if someone says they got rich through hard work, ask them whose. You can get comfortably wealthy through hard work - but getting rich mostly requires investing so that you can profit from many other people's hard work. Which isn't inherently a bad thing, except that it inevitably seems to lead to a spiraling inequality in wealth distribution.
I was trying to figure out what you might mean by that...
As for the rest - I don't disagree, I've long been annoyed by similar behavior across the economic spectrum.
It is worth noting though that even though the recipe works for everyone, it doesn't necessarily work equally well for everyone.
Thanks. I figured I should at least allude to the fact that I often argue to elicit a well-considered alternative point of view.
I'm not specifically interested in those with low IQ, - I just decided to pick on them as an obvious example of a group that has very little option of doing smart things, because they simply aren't smart enough to figure out what that is in whatever particular circumstance they're in. There's also those in poverty who have a very hard time *affording* to do the smart thing. And as you point out, those who through cultural indoctrination, have a very difficult time with either or both of those.
Though I think it might be worth mentioning that recent study that suggests that resisting temptation is actually something that *everybody* sucks at - and the choices we commonly attribute to "willpower" seem to actually correlate not with resisting temptation, but avoiding it. Which at the very least suggests a different aspect of our culture to try to fix. For example, a cultural fixation on consumerism keeps the temptation to buy a little instant gratification always close at hand.
Actually 2.5% of the population is below 70. Mental disability is currently recognized at around 70-75. Fully 1/6 of the population is below 85. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Maybe 80 is reasonably a bit much to be expected to navigate the finer points of our society without assistance, I don't know well enough to say. But I don't think it's unreasonable to say that if you're in the middle 2/3rds of the population, you should be able to get ahead in life through hard work, and be materially and influentially invested in the product of your labor a.k.a. the company you're an integral part of building and maintaining.
And, do you think that is a realistic option for your average burger flipper or janitor with an IQ of 80?
If not, then we need to consider policies that offer them more dignity than spending their entire life as an wage-slave living below the poverty line.
True, but that's really a separate issue - I believe it's fairly rare that a non-founding executive owns sufficient stock in a company to exert any sort of ownership control through that route. It gives them more skin the the game, and (I think) lets them defer paying taxes on that compensation until they decide to sell - win-win for both the company and executive, but has very little to do with increasing their ownership-based power over the company.
>>Why would any internet user want to accept tracking
>...once privacy-respecting ads became no longer viable...
If the ads are tracking you, they are NOT respecting your privacy.
If they collect dividends and control the board of directors, they have ownership. That doesn't change just because they can't sell it.
I'd argue in favor of a somewhat vague "general principles" law that also includes specific cases of behavior that would *definitely* be a violation of those principles to make it easy to prosecute those who violate any of the examples thought of while writing the law, without letting criminals escape justice by adhering to the letter of the law.
I'd ague that - except that was the guiding principle of the U.S. Bill of Rights, and good luck bringing someone to justice for violating a non-enumerated right.
Actually, the shareholders usually aren't paid at all - dividends are increasingly rare, and shareholders just gamble on the value of the company to sell their shares later. By the same token, only the very first owner of a share gives any money to the company - everyone else is just gambling amongst each other.
But yes, employees are paid immediately, and owners are paid when there's a profit. When the employees are also the owners they get paid both a wage, and dividends. Or do you think the executives of owner-operated companies don't normally get a paycheck?
Yes, there are reasons for employers to want to have employees own stock in their company.
Those reasons have nothing to do with the benefits employees get from having ownership control of the company, which seems to be what's being discussed.
Capitalism = the owners keep what you kill.
Sounds like somebody hasn't actually studied history. The company stores - the only place you could spend your company scrip, often charged several times as much as the public stores down the street. Nobody in their right mind would rather get paid pennies on the dollar, even if it means avoiding taxes.
Ownership implies control - if every non-executive employee of the company owns stock in the company, and they all agree that a certain policy must be changed - how likely is it that the policy will change?
If they actually owned the company, that would approach 100%. In reality, it's probably closer to 0%, because the company is owned primarily by a small group of wealthy investors, and all the employee stock combined amount to a rounding error.
If you want a hybrid system for (partial) employee ownership you almost need to give employees a different class of stock, exclusive to them, that combined has majority voting control. Zuckerberg has something sort of like that going on for himself, owning privileged "class B" shares with 10x the voting power of normal "class A" shares, which gives him an untouchable 75% voting control despite owning less than 10% of the company.
So what? You think that would change in an employee-owned company? Employees still get paid normally - they just *also* are the shareholders with ultimate control over company policy, they collect the dividends, etc., rather than that being the domain of a separate capitalist class.
Heck, *long* before they dropped it as the company motto, the common joke was they left out the punctuation: "Don't. Be evil."
They did't claim it wasn't anti-competitive - they claimed they were allowed to do it.
Anti-competitive behavior is only disallowed if the government recognizes you as a monopoly or trade organization. Grease the right palms to prevent that, an no problem.
Heck, here in the US even a convicted abusive monopoly like Microsoft can get away with it. Grease the right palms and nobody will make an issue of it - or at worst "punish" you with a fine far smaller than the excess profits your anti-competitive behavior is generating so that it's just a cost of doing business.
Sure, but they're PR projects for the advertiser, not for the company delivering the ads.
Agreed - it's not the user interface that needs to be standardized, it's the developer interface.
If I write a piece of software for Windows, I know it will almost certainly install and run on any contemporary or newer version of Windows, especially if I rigorously honor reasonable access restraints. I have plenty of old software from the Windows 95 days that still runs fine, though some requires a little permission tweaking.
If I write software for Linux though... I can't. I have to write it for a specific distribution and the system libraries it uses. It won't run on most other distributions, and it probably won't run on the same distro a few years later.
I could have sworn most of the funding for his last launch at least came from donations to do Flat Earth "research" .
Well now, that depends entirely on what point you're trying to make. They're obviously employees - they do collect a paycheck, which depending on who you ask makes them part of the working class.
Where do you see me mentioning the AR15? Yes, there are a lot of "lookalike" consumer weapons that wouldn't be particularly suitable for a combat setting - but even they would generally be preferable to a hunting rifle.
Then you go on about snipers, I'm talking assholes shooting people in a fit of carelessness or passion, criminals shooting rivals and victims, and psychopaths shooting up churches, theaters, etc.
I'm fairly certain that eliminating rifles of all kinds would have a very small effect on total gun deaths. Yes, they are far more dangerous in skilled hands (given the right environment and visibility). But by the same token, skilled gunmen are far more likely to treat their weapon with the respect it deserves.