In general, I agree, what is good for one person is good for the whole. Except in this case, we're rewarding irresponsible behavior on both the part of the lender and the part of the borrower. You could argue that letting people pay the price for their lack of common sense falls under 'tough love' for the entire economy. Seeing friends and neighbors lose their homes will have the effect of making people more cautious about decisions regarding the biggest purchase they will most likely ever make.
The only thing wrong with identity theft costing middle-men agencies billions is that they're allowed to pass those costs on to the consumers who did nothing wrong. (Actually, the people who end up paying the price for fraudulent credit card transactions, for example, are the merchants. The big CC companies don't reimburse them for fraudulent transactions; they make the merchant prove the fraud, and make them pay if they can't prove it to their satisfaction.)
I'm suggesting a little near-term bitter medicine for the long-term health of the whole. Yes, it sucks to lose your house; yes, it sucks that we all suffer for it. But in the long run you can only hope that the whole incident will be painful enough for people to realize they were being fucking stupid.
It's not just those who are behind that are in trouble, the lenders are too.
My heart fucking bleeds. Their own greed got in the way of good business sense, so they only have themselves to blame. Boo hoo, their bonuses might be six figures instead of seven this year.
For a long tyme it's been a pretty basic standard operating policy for lenders to work with borrowers to allow them to state in the home as the lender loses when they have to foreclose.
If they hadn't lent so much money to people who they KNEW wouldn't be able to pay when their ARM reset, then they wouldn't be in this mess. Again, no sympathy for multi-billion dollar multinationals who should know better (or who have the money to be able to pay someone to figure it out.)
Besides the costs of foreclosure when a house is sold it may not sell for as much as is still owed on it, foreclosure reduces the value as well.
Good. Overpriced houses are overpriced. In this state (one of the most expensive markets in the nation) the average single family house sold for 400k+ a couple years ago. How the fuck is an honest guy making an honest living supposed to be able to afford that shit? Anyone who works hard 40+ hours a week should be able to afford at least a marginally livable house without entering into a mortgage that they KNOW will be too much for them to pay back.
At the first sign a borrower will have trouble paying they should contact the lender to work out a plan to repay the loan, maybe they can pay the interest only until their income rises.
And more than likely, the lender will laugh them off the phone. Why would they voluntarily take a smaller payment? They'll roll the dice that the borrower will figure it out, because it's cheaper to let them sink than to help them swim. If they DO default and end up getting repossessed, then the lender can write off the bad debt and recover whatever they can at auction.
I'd expand on that. For way too long we've been tolerant of the willfully ignorant in our society. (I like to call these people 'stupid'.) What you know is almost worthless, while who you know (or have dirt on) is paramount, and the more people you can fool, the better a quality of life you enjoy.
Fuck that.
It's not OK, it's never been OK, and it shouldn't be OK any more.
How do we get non-IT workers to care about privacy? We don't. We watch them pay the price for not caring. We watch them get their credit wrecked, lose their homes, get driven into homelessness. Then we buy their houses from the bank at fifty cents on the dollar.
When enough of those retards figure out that it's a problem, and they should do something about it to avoid losing their homes like the guy next door, they might come to us and ask for help. At which point we charge them an arm and a leg for our services, or tell them to go out and figure the stuff out like we did. (Look at that schmuck with his SS number all over tv advertising his service. All they do is call the credit agencies every three months to renew a lock on new credit applications. Everyone is capable of doing it, but they're lazy. So he's cashing in on their laziness. Capitalism at its finest.) The information is all available, you just have to look for it.
Stupidity should be painful; ignorance should be expensive. If they want to learn, good for them; if they don't, fuck em.
Think I'm exaggerating? Five years ago I bought a house. I could have gotten one of those oh-so-tempting ARM loans and had a lower payment for the last five years. I got a 30-year fixed rate loan. My payment will never go up. It will always be the same unless I choose to change it (with a refinance or some such.) My house was more expensive than it would have been otherwise, because all these retards said "HURR LOW PAYMENT RIGHT NOW HURR" and demand went up, driving prices up. Now, all these morons are losing their houses, because they didn't read their contracts. All they saw was a $900 payment on a $250,000 house and their eyes glazed over. So, people are losing their homes, prices are falling because supply is up and money is harder to borrow, which makes MY house worth less!
I don't care if your stupidity only affects YOU. I start caring when it affects ME. People who suffer identity theft because they were idiots regarding IT security only hurt themselves. Why should people who understand voluntarily help these people if it's clear they won't help themselves? EVERYONE is capable of understanding the concept of a secure connection, of not putting your personal information on the equivalent of the front page of a newspaper. If they don't want to understand it, fuck them.
You've hit on why I can't support Ron Paul, despite his views on several issues being in line with my own (state's rights, personal privacy, decriminalization of marijuana, etc). The Libertarian philosophy (and I don't care what he calls himself, Republican or anything else, he's a libertarian) counts on people acting the way they're supposed to in a free market economy. It would be great if there were enough true competition in the consumer space to create the level playing field required for price competition based on quality of service, but that's just not the case. Companies will not choose to compete when they can undermine the competition's ability to function. SOMEONE owns that copper, SOMEONE owns the fiber. That someone will not share willingly, so you have a monopoly, and a for-profit company is able, in fact required, to exploit that advantage. The end result is a situation that's as bad or worse as it was before the regulation was removed. Either they will raise rates to obscene levels (which may result in people eventually not buying their product) or they will reduce the quality of service to the point where, if it were any worse, it would not exist as a service at all.
It would be a great thing if a Libertarian society existed. Unfortunately, it requires people (and corporations) to not be selfish bastards, and since the libertarian/objectivist philosophy places self-interest above all else, it just won't happen.
So of course they'll lower their pricing for the 95% of their users that use the other 50%, right?
Of course not. Yet Another Money Grab. Oh well, if they do change the terms of the service I'm getting, it means I can get out of that 1 year promotional package I have from Comcast.
Anyone know if Verizon is going to do this with FiOS? I'm fortunate enough to have a choice of high-speed internet service, so at the very least there's SOME market pressure here.
Or, they're looking to tie him down and make him stop working on PHP... since as we all know ASP.NET is a far far superior technology... and a LOT of Yahoo! code is PHP.
No incentive? How about that paycheck you receive every 2 weeks?
Which is the same amount no matter how hard I work. I can skate by doing the absolute minimum required to keep my job, or I can bust my ass for 100 hours each week; it doesn't affect my compensation in any way. Sure, it's *supposed* to make a difference come review time, but assuming you can even get a review (which seems to be becoming nearly impossible) your hard work will most likely not amount in a raise above 3%.
Isnt that why they pay you - to work hard?
No, they pay me to help the company make money.
So when your boss leaves for a better company, he discreetly dodges the no-recruitment clause and "invites" you to apply for a job under him at the new place - and that's when you negotiate for that promotion or raise.
No, he abides by the no-recruitment clause because 1) he doesn't want to get sued and 2) his new company won't take the risk that they could be sued as well. (This is also assuming you don't have a non-compete, which is unlikely; the non-compete also puts YOU at risk of a lawsuit. Just yesterday I heard from someone I know that a former co-worker of theirs lost a non-compete lawsuit and basically lost everything they owned.) Also, it's generally accepted that using the offer of a job elsewhere as a negotiating tactic for a raise or promotion at your current company is a bad strategy. If they give you the raise, you're resented as being mercenary and disloyal; if you're denied the raise or promotion, you're angry about it, and it's assumed that you therefore will be a less productive/cooperative employee. It's no-win; either take the other job or don't. Even if they do offer you a raise to keep you there, you've already demonstrated that the money is more important than your current job, which is never acceptable.
I know it's popular to blame corporate culture for lack of career advancement, but in my experience the single biggest problem is the unspoken one - lazy Americans. Too much entitlement mentality, none of the old Protestant Work Ethic anymore.
You're missing my point: it doesn't MATTER how hard you work, you will be treated the same way. This is why people blame the situation on corporate culture; it's become clear that hard work is for chumps, and the only way to get ahead is to either kiss the right asses or go elsewhere.
People willingly do things which make their job easier, and for most organisation a company procedures manual is exactly that sort of thing.
Bullshit. I see from your spelling that you're most likely in the UK, where it's non-trivial to actually fire someone. Over on this side of the pond, anyone can be shitcanned at any time with no reason, no notice, and no severance. You can't even effectively pursue a wrongful termination suit unless you've got video of your boss grabbing your ass, since the burden of proof is on the employee, and over here the barrier to entry for a lawsuit of this kind is huge. (Most of the time you can't even get a lawyer to take your case, unless you have the aformentioned video.)
In this environment, is it any wonder that employees (especially those who might not have a highly-in-demand skill set) will do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING possible, including deliberately "forgetting" to document their processes, in order to make them more difficult to replace? For example:
OverpaidExecutive: "Our profits are 5% lower! My bonus check is in jeopardy! Do some layoffs to cut costs!" Manager: "OK, let me see who we can let go.. Hmm, $employee[0] isn't finished documenting his processes yet, so it'd take too long to train someone new... Oh, $employee[1] did a great job documenting their processes, I bet I can hire some new graduate to do that at about a third of their salary! Hey, $employee[1]! Clean out your desk, you've got 20 minutes until security arrives to escort you out! I don't care if you've been here 10 years!"
Lots of companies also attempt to contest unemployment claims as a matter of policy, regardless of the circumstances under which the employee was terminated. This way, their premiums don't go up, and it REALLY costs them nothing to fire you.
Well, the old adage goes "If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted."
And the new adage that replaces that is "If you want a promotion or a raise of any consequence, start working for someone else."
People don't get promoted anymore. They piddle along in a job that they're either too valuable in to be moved, or they're too incompetent/lazy to be given more responsibility. There's no incentive to work hard in this environment; you can't get a promotion no matter what you do.
You don't have to give them any weight whatsoever as far as your own decisions go. But just because they believe something else doesn't make them 'wrong', it just makes them different. I'm not asking you to respect their beliefs, but to respect what those beliefs mean to them, no matter how bizarre they might seem to you. Most of the time this involves simply keeping your mouth shut, so it's actually LESS effort for you.
If someone believes something that is patently stupid, why is it deserving of respect?
Just because it's a religion?
Because by accepting that people believe different things than you do, you reduce their ability to tell YOU that what you believe is wrong. Not to mention the fact that arguing over religion is a waste of time.
And what is "moral relativism"? Morals are ALWAYS relative, as far as I can tell. What works for you doesn't necessarily work for me, and vice versa. Personally, what I believe is that while religion can be easily twisted into a destructive force, there are some good things that come out of a common belief, such as a stronger community.
You wouldn't happen to be an objectivist, would you?
I misspoke. I meant 'respect a person's right to believe what they want'.
This includes NOT ridiculing those beliefs for its own sake. I find it's best to smile, nod, and say nothing when it's obvious from my perspective that what someone believes is patently ridiculous. If you want to pick a fight, go for it, I respect your right to believe that that's the correct course of action. Personally, I find that arguing with a zealot accomplishes two things: pisses you off, and convinces the zealot that you're working against whatever they believe in, so they have to believe twice as hard. Nobody wins, and there's ten minutes of your life you're never going to get back.
I knew someone who contributed to the Bush campaign, she wants the second coming (of Jesus) to happen and she's looking forward to the events in Revelations, such as the battle of Armegeddon.
Lots of people feel that way. I don't see how it's relevant.
For the record, I'm not an evangelical, but I think that people's beliefs should be respected insofar as they don't infringe on other people's rights to have different ones. RAmen.
I wonder how those numbers break down when you compare health care available to the rich versus the middle class versus the working poor or unemployed. I'd bet that the US system fares better, so long as you're rich.
Which brings me to another point that I think I forgot to make: The problem with the US healthcare system is the for-profit HMOs. Call me crazy, but I don't think you should treat health care as a commodity, the same as lumber or oil. Give a company a profit motive to provide as little care as possible, and the results are predictable. This system should NOT be driven by profit.
I think where we're differing is that you're operating under the assumption that anyone gives a flying fuck about productivity or quality when it comes to labor negotiations over here. The union wants no part of helping someone get fired, whether they're competent or not. The reason for this is that management could conceivably make it look like a particular worker were incompetent, if they found that said worker were becoming 'inconvenient' for management (for example, kept complaining about broken equipment or OSHA violations, or the like). As far as the union is concerned, management has NO credibility in terms of competency. Gross incompetence or behavioral problems are another issue; while the union won't help management identify these workers, they also won't defend their behavior if it's clearly inappropriate.
Union negotiations in this country boil down to two things: Management wants to pay nothing, give no benefits, and make people work 100 hours a week, and would do so if allowed to. The union wants to keep them from doing that. The two sides push and shove away from the extremes and meet somewhere in the middle.
You also assume that there's any incentive for a worker to work harder than they absolutely have to to keep from getting fired (see Office Space). Compensation is not tied to performance or productivity; compensation is simply kept as low as possible under all circumstances. The union makes it difficult to lower wages as much as management would like. Nowhere in this situation does quality become significant at all. In order to turn a profit, the product is made as cheaply as possible, quality be damned. (Which works in the domestic market, because the American consumer has proven again and again that given the choice between a good product and a cheap product, they'll buy the cheap one.) Management only concerns themselves with quality when their bonuses start getting smaller. They're only motivated by greed.
Agreed, the US situation is different than in a lot of others because we stubbornly insist on coupling access to health care with employment. For some reason, the prevailing attitude seems to be that the unemployed deserve whatever they get, even if that 'whatever' is a slow agonizing death from a treatable cancer.
I'm sure someone will soon reply to this insisting that I'm a socialist and I'd like to see everyone's taxes go up as high as possible. Neither is true. IMHO we can provide every American with access to health care universally without increasing taxes. This might sound impossible, but work with me here: The unemployed/underemployed don't stop needing health care just because of their work situation. Hospitals can't refuse to treat people based on their insurance coverage (or lack thereof). The taxpayer is already paying for their health care through programs like Medicaid. Making health care universal only requires repurposing of tax revenue, not increasing it.
I'm sure someone will respond to that by pointing to the Canadian system, and how the quality of coverage is perceived as low as compared to the US system, where you get as much health care as you can afford. The rich don't need more health care than the poor; as much as they'd like to insist that it isn't the case, we're all the same on the inside, despite someone's bank acount being larger than someone else's. If we all receive the same level of care, and it's perceived as poor, then we can work to improve it for EVERYONE, not just the rich.
Detroit isn't a good example of this. The foreign car brands that produce their vehicles domestically have proven that the American auto worker, despite being unionized, can produce a good product at a price point that is both affordable to the consumer and profitable to the company.
The problem with Detroit is that they design and sell a shitty product. The line worker doesn't control the quality of the parts he/she bolts onto the car as it passes by. All he/she can do is his/her job to the best of his/her ability, but a poorly designed engine mated to a shit transmission inside an ugly-ass package can't be improved by paying the worker less. Detroit is a victim of their own mis-management.
Now I'm not saying that the UAW doesn't share some of the blame for Detroit's financial woes; I'm sure they protect incompetent workers all the time. The problem is, if they're going to protect the competent ones, they have to protect everyone.
Despite being a bleeding-heart tree-hugging Massachusetts liberal, I'm glad to see there's a few of you left. I long for the days when the GOP stood for small government, and also could at least be reasoned/negotiated with. The current crop of retards refuses to discuss even the most minor compromise in anything they try to push, because their invisible friend Jesus told them that they were right and the Libs are a bunch of terrorist sympathizers protecting gay minority welfare queens driving luxury cars. The fact that the federal government was designed to work via compromise is just an inconvenience for them.
Those guys would sooner cut off an arm than suggest that a union would EVER be appropriate and/or helpful. Their contempt for people who do actual work (whether that's digging a ditch or writing code) seems to have no boundaries.
Please take your party back from the neocons, or form your own party. I don't agree with your positions on a lot of things (there are some that I do agree with, such as state's rights) but would welcome opponents who would meet me halfway.
Yeah, it's a huge relief to not have to put up with things like "benefits" or "dignity". I've been a contractor at a number of companies, including some in the Fortune 500. I found that I was doing all the shit work the permanent employees didn't feel like doing, without any of the resources (system access, etc) that they enjoyed. I was doing the same work as them, for SLIGHTLY higher pay, without benefits. Yes, I was working through another company as a W-2 employee, so they were getting their cut (about 40% of what they billed me out at).
Plus there's the psychological weight of having to eat shit and smile. Permanent employee says 'jump'? You say 'how high' or your employer replaces you like *that* because they don't want to lose the contract.
The day I finally got my current job as a full-timer was a red letter day, because I didn't have to put up with that crap. I also became eligible for trivial things like 'health insurance', 'salary reviews', 'sick pay', 'vacation pay', 'paid holidays', and 'dignity'.
Being a contractor is only marginally better than being a crack whore in a lot of situations, and there's not as much sex.
Perhaps if big ISPs like Comcast would stop spending resources (read: my monthly subscription fees) on impersonating me in order to degrade the usefulness of their service, then Internet access would be a less scarce resource. This sort of filtering requires processing power, which has a price tag associated with it (both in hardware/electricity/rent and in human resources required to program and maintain it). That money then cannot pay for more bandwidth to make the resource less scarce.
Comcast would do well IMHO to be very careful of how it filters traffic. Once you decide to punish people for using a legitimate service (for things like freely available OS disk images, or for-pay services that use the bittorrent protocol to distribute bandwidth load) in the name of "oh well you're probably using it to trade copyrighted material", thus using a legal argument (copyright infringement) to justify the behavior, it's not a big step to then having to examine traffic for things like brute force SSH password attacks (since computer trespass is illegal), viruses designed to install spambots, and illegal content like child pornography.
It's a very slippery slope, and the consumers would of course pick up the tab for all of it. I realize that it's their network and they get to say what traffic flows over it, but it's the tip of a very large iceberg that they may not be prepared or equipped to handle.
This is, of course, all old news, but it bears repeating IMHO. Perhaps someone with more legal expertise could discuss how this might affect their common carrier status, if at all; once you start filtering for one thing, is it possible you could be compelled to filter for others?
I also offer the company the added benefit that I am less upset when they don't had out pay raises for various reasons.
You realize, of course, that if you allow your employer to get away with this, soon it will become standard practice to deny telecommuters raises as a matter of policy. NEVER accept a lower raise for anything other than performance. Where you work should not impact your compensation; what you DO should impact your compensation.
Think about it. You say that you are able to put in more hours from home than you would in an office. One can infer from that that you are putting in more hours than your office-bound co-workers, as you don't have the burden of a commute. Why would you not deserve as big a raise (if not bigger) than those who are arguably doing less work?
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In general, I agree, what is good for one person is good for the whole. Except in this case, we're rewarding irresponsible behavior on both the part of the lender and the part of the borrower. You could argue that letting people pay the price for their lack of common sense falls under 'tough love' for the entire economy. Seeing friends and neighbors lose their homes will have the effect of making people more cautious about decisions regarding the biggest purchase they will most likely ever make.
The only thing wrong with identity theft costing middle-men agencies billions is that they're allowed to pass those costs on to the consumers who did nothing wrong. (Actually, the people who end up paying the price for fraudulent credit card transactions, for example, are the merchants. The big CC companies don't reimburse them for fraudulent transactions; they make the merchant prove the fraud, and make them pay if they can't prove it to their satisfaction.)
I'm suggesting a little near-term bitter medicine for the long-term health of the whole. Yes, it sucks to lose your house; yes, it sucks that we all suffer for it. But in the long run you can only hope that the whole incident will be painful enough for people to realize they were being fucking stupid.
I'd expand on that. For way too long we've been tolerant of the willfully ignorant in our society. (I like to call these people 'stupid'.) What you know is almost worthless, while who you know (or have dirt on) is paramount, and the more people you can fool, the better a quality of life you enjoy.
Fuck that.
It's not OK, it's never been OK, and it shouldn't be OK any more.
How do we get non-IT workers to care about privacy? We don't. We watch them pay the price for not caring. We watch them get their credit wrecked, lose their homes, get driven into homelessness. Then we buy their houses from the bank at fifty cents on the dollar.
When enough of those retards figure out that it's a problem, and they should do something about it to avoid losing their homes like the guy next door, they might come to us and ask for help. At which point we charge them an arm and a leg for our services, or tell them to go out and figure the stuff out like we did. (Look at that schmuck with his SS number all over tv advertising his service. All they do is call the credit agencies every three months to renew a lock on new credit applications. Everyone is capable of doing it, but they're lazy. So he's cashing in on their laziness. Capitalism at its finest.) The information is all available, you just have to look for it.
Stupidity should be painful; ignorance should be expensive. If they want to learn, good for them; if they don't, fuck em.
Think I'm exaggerating? Five years ago I bought a house. I could have gotten one of those oh-so-tempting ARM loans and had a lower payment for the last five years. I got a 30-year fixed rate loan. My payment will never go up. It will always be the same unless I choose to change it (with a refinance or some such.) My house was more expensive than it would have been otherwise, because all these retards said "HURR LOW PAYMENT RIGHT NOW HURR" and demand went up, driving prices up. Now, all these morons are losing their houses, because they didn't read their contracts. All they saw was a $900 payment on a $250,000 house and their eyes glazed over. So, people are losing their homes, prices are falling because supply is up and money is harder to borrow, which makes MY house worth less!
I don't care if your stupidity only affects YOU. I start caring when it affects ME. People who suffer identity theft because they were idiots regarding IT security only hurt themselves. Why should people who understand voluntarily help these people if it's clear they won't help themselves? EVERYONE is capable of understanding the concept of a secure connection, of not putting your personal information on the equivalent of the front page of a newspaper. If they don't want to understand it, fuck them.
You've hit on why I can't support Ron Paul, despite his views on several issues being in line with my own (state's rights, personal privacy, decriminalization of marijuana, etc). The Libertarian philosophy (and I don't care what he calls himself, Republican or anything else, he's a libertarian) counts on people acting the way they're supposed to in a free market economy. It would be great if there were enough true competition in the consumer space to create the level playing field required for price competition based on quality of service, but that's just not the case. Companies will not choose to compete when they can undermine the competition's ability to function. SOMEONE owns that copper, SOMEONE owns the fiber. That someone will not share willingly, so you have a monopoly, and a for-profit company is able, in fact required, to exploit that advantage. The end result is a situation that's as bad or worse as it was before the regulation was removed. Either they will raise rates to obscene levels (which may result in people eventually not buying their product) or they will reduce the quality of service to the point where, if it were any worse, it would not exist as a service at all.
It would be a great thing if a Libertarian society existed. Unfortunately, it requires people (and corporations) to not be selfish bastards, and since the libertarian/objectivist philosophy places self-interest above all else, it just won't happen.
So of course they'll lower their pricing for the 95% of their users that use the other 50%, right?
Of course not. Yet Another Money Grab. Oh well, if they do change the terms of the service I'm getting, it means I can get out of that 1 year promotional package I have from Comcast.
Anyone know if Verizon is going to do this with FiOS? I'm fortunate enough to have a choice of high-speed internet service, so at the very least there's SOME market pressure here.
Fundie alert! *plonk*
And me without mod points... I also couldn't help but notice you're also posting as an AC.. Lacking the balls to stand behind your position?
No, just saying that's a possibility is all. As part of a larger movement to kill what they don't own or control.
Or, they're looking to tie him down and make him stop working on PHP... since as we all know ASP.NET is a far far superior technology... and a LOT of Yahoo! code is PHP.
In this environment, is it any wonder that employees (especially those who might not have a highly-in-demand skill set) will do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING possible, including deliberately "forgetting" to document their processes, in order to make them more difficult to replace? For example:
OverpaidExecutive: "Our profits are 5% lower! My bonus check is in jeopardy! Do some layoffs to cut costs!"
Manager: "OK, let me see who we can let go.. Hmm, $employee[0] isn't finished documenting his processes yet, so it'd take too long to train someone new... Oh, $employee[1] did a great job documenting their processes, I bet I can hire some new graduate to do that at about a third of their salary! Hey, $employee[1]! Clean out your desk, you've got 20 minutes until security arrives to escort you out! I don't care if you've been here 10 years!"
Lots of companies also attempt to contest unemployment claims as a matter of policy, regardless of the circumstances under which the employee was terminated. This way, their premiums don't go up, and it REALLY costs them nothing to fire you.
People don't get promoted anymore. They piddle along in a job that they're either too valuable in to be moved, or they're too incompetent/lazy to be given more responsibility. There's no incentive to work hard in this environment; you can't get a promotion no matter what you do.
You don't have to give them any weight whatsoever as far as your own decisions go. But just because they believe something else doesn't make them 'wrong', it just makes them different. I'm not asking you to respect their beliefs, but to respect what those beliefs mean to them, no matter how bizarre they might seem to you. Most of the time this involves simply keeping your mouth shut, so it's actually LESS effort for you.
And what is "moral relativism"? Morals are ALWAYS relative, as far as I can tell. What works for you doesn't necessarily work for me, and vice versa. Personally, what I believe is that while religion can be easily twisted into a destructive force, there are some good things that come out of a common belief, such as a stronger community.
You wouldn't happen to be an objectivist, would you?
I misspoke. I meant 'respect a person's right to believe what they want'.
This includes NOT ridiculing those beliefs for its own sake. I find it's best to smile, nod, and say nothing when it's obvious from my perspective that what someone believes is patently ridiculous. If you want to pick a fight, go for it, I respect your right to believe that that's the correct course of action. Personally, I find that arguing with a zealot accomplishes two things: pisses you off, and convinces the zealot that you're working against whatever they believe in, so they have to believe twice as hard. Nobody wins, and there's ten minutes of your life you're never going to get back.
For the record, I'm not an evangelical, but I think that people's beliefs should be respected insofar as they don't infringe on other people's rights to have different ones. RAmen.
Really. I was not aware of that study, thanks.
I wonder how those numbers break down when you compare health care available to the rich versus the middle class versus the working poor or unemployed. I'd bet that the US system fares better, so long as you're rich.
Which brings me to another point that I think I forgot to make: The problem with the US healthcare system is the for-profit HMOs. Call me crazy, but I don't think you should treat health care as a commodity, the same as lumber or oil. Give a company a profit motive to provide as little care as possible, and the results are predictable. This system should NOT be driven by profit.
I think where we're differing is that you're operating under the assumption that anyone gives a flying fuck about productivity or quality when it comes to labor negotiations over here. The union wants no part of helping someone get fired, whether they're competent or not. The reason for this is that management could conceivably make it look like a particular worker were incompetent, if they found that said worker were becoming 'inconvenient' for management (for example, kept complaining about broken equipment or OSHA violations, or the like). As far as the union is concerned, management has NO credibility in terms of competency. Gross incompetence or behavioral problems are another issue; while the union won't help management identify these workers, they also won't defend their behavior if it's clearly inappropriate.
Union negotiations in this country boil down to two things: Management wants to pay nothing, give no benefits, and make people work 100 hours a week, and would do so if allowed to. The union wants to keep them from doing that. The two sides push and shove away from the extremes and meet somewhere in the middle.
You also assume that there's any incentive for a worker to work harder than they absolutely have to to keep from getting fired (see Office Space). Compensation is not tied to performance or productivity; compensation is simply kept as low as possible under all circumstances. The union makes it difficult to lower wages as much as management would like. Nowhere in this situation does quality become significant at all. In order to turn a profit, the product is made as cheaply as possible, quality be damned. (Which works in the domestic market, because the American consumer has proven again and again that given the choice between a good product and a cheap product, they'll buy the cheap one.) Management only concerns themselves with quality when their bonuses start getting smaller. They're only motivated by greed.
Agreed, the US situation is different than in a lot of others because we stubbornly insist on coupling access to health care with employment. For some reason, the prevailing attitude seems to be that the unemployed deserve whatever they get, even if that 'whatever' is a slow agonizing death from a treatable cancer.
I'm sure someone will soon reply to this insisting that I'm a socialist and I'd like to see everyone's taxes go up as high as possible. Neither is true. IMHO we can provide every American with access to health care universally without increasing taxes. This might sound impossible, but work with me here: The unemployed/underemployed don't stop needing health care just because of their work situation. Hospitals can't refuse to treat people based on their insurance coverage (or lack thereof). The taxpayer is already paying for their health care through programs like Medicaid. Making health care universal only requires repurposing of tax revenue, not increasing it.
I'm sure someone will respond to that by pointing to the Canadian system, and how the quality of coverage is perceived as low as compared to the US system, where you get as much health care as you can afford. The rich don't need more health care than the poor; as much as they'd like to insist that it isn't the case, we're all the same on the inside, despite someone's bank acount being larger than someone else's. If we all receive the same level of care, and it's perceived as poor, then we can work to improve it for EVERYONE, not just the rich.
Detroit isn't a good example of this. The foreign car brands that produce their vehicles domestically have proven that the American auto worker, despite being unionized, can produce a good product at a price point that is both affordable to the consumer and profitable to the company.
The problem with Detroit is that they design and sell a shitty product. The line worker doesn't control the quality of the parts he/she bolts onto the car as it passes by. All he/she can do is his/her job to the best of his/her ability, but a poorly designed engine mated to a shit transmission inside an ugly-ass package can't be improved by paying the worker less. Detroit is a victim of their own mis-management.
Now I'm not saying that the UAW doesn't share some of the blame for Detroit's financial woes; I'm sure they protect incompetent workers all the time. The problem is, if they're going to protect the competent ones, they have to protect everyone.
Despite being a bleeding-heart tree-hugging Massachusetts liberal, I'm glad to see there's a few of you left. I long for the days when the GOP stood for small government, and also could at least be reasoned/negotiated with. The current crop of retards refuses to discuss even the most minor compromise in anything they try to push, because their invisible friend Jesus told them that they were right and the Libs are a bunch of terrorist sympathizers protecting gay minority welfare queens driving luxury cars. The fact that the federal government was designed to work via compromise is just an inconvenience for them.
Those guys would sooner cut off an arm than suggest that a union would EVER be appropriate and/or helpful. Their contempt for people who do actual work (whether that's digging a ditch or writing code) seems to have no boundaries.
Please take your party back from the neocons, or form your own party. I don't agree with your positions on a lot of things (there are some that I do agree with, such as state's rights) but would welcome opponents who would meet me halfway.
Yeah, it's a huge relief to not have to put up with things like "benefits" or "dignity". I've been a contractor at a number of companies, including some in the Fortune 500. I found that I was doing all the shit work the permanent employees didn't feel like doing, without any of the resources (system access, etc) that they enjoyed. I was doing the same work as them, for SLIGHTLY higher pay, without benefits. Yes, I was working through another company as a W-2 employee, so they were getting their cut (about 40% of what they billed me out at).
Plus there's the psychological weight of having to eat shit and smile. Permanent employee says 'jump'? You say 'how high' or your employer replaces you like *that* because they don't want to lose the contract.
The day I finally got my current job as a full-timer was a red letter day, because I didn't have to put up with that crap. I also became eligible for trivial things like 'health insurance', 'salary reviews', 'sick pay', 'vacation pay', 'paid holidays', and 'dignity'.
Being a contractor is only marginally better than being a crack whore in a lot of situations, and there's not as much sex.
That's not really fair. With so much material to work with, people can't help but be inspired.
Perhaps if big ISPs like Comcast would stop spending resources (read: my monthly subscription fees) on impersonating me in order to degrade the usefulness of their service, then Internet access would be a less scarce resource. This sort of filtering requires processing power, which has a price tag associated with it (both in hardware/electricity/rent and in human resources required to program and maintain it). That money then cannot pay for more bandwidth to make the resource less scarce.
Comcast would do well IMHO to be very careful of how it filters traffic. Once you decide to punish people for using a legitimate service (for things like freely available OS disk images, or for-pay services that use the bittorrent protocol to distribute bandwidth load) in the name of "oh well you're probably using it to trade copyrighted material", thus using a legal argument (copyright infringement) to justify the behavior, it's not a big step to then having to examine traffic for things like brute force SSH password attacks (since computer trespass is illegal), viruses designed to install spambots, and illegal content like child pornography.
It's a very slippery slope, and the consumers would of course pick up the tab for all of it. I realize that it's their network and they get to say what traffic flows over it, but it's the tip of a very large iceberg that they may not be prepared or equipped to handle.
This is, of course, all old news, but it bears repeating IMHO. Perhaps someone with more legal expertise could discuss how this might affect their common carrier status, if at all; once you start filtering for one thing, is it possible you could be compelled to filter for others?
Think about it. You say that you are able to put in more hours from home than you would in an office. One can infer from that that you are putting in more hours than your office-bound co-workers, as you don't have the burden of a commute. Why would you not deserve as big a raise (if not bigger) than those who are arguably doing less work?