Read the text in the rainbow video. The idiot blames energy companies for what they're pumping into the ground. That's precisely the same scare-mongering OBAMA does, though with his speechwriters and teleprompter he sounds about 2% more intelligent when he says it.
> It's not easy to match MS-Word's layout engine bug-for-bug in another product.
I saw proof of that a few weeks ago. My mother's new computer, with a.new version of Word, couldn't open her existing Word files. I had to open them in LibreOffice and save them using the newest version of the newest Word format using LibreOffice. Then Word could open them.
So yes, in my experience LibreOffice is more compatible with Word than Word is.
I actually had a smiley in there that I accidentally removed, but yeah - gas wouldn't be the cleanest option. The fact that gas, methanol, and ethanol all work in fuel cells does show that there's no reason we can't find a variety of liquids that work in fuel cells. Not that any of those is ideal*, but they are POC - they prove that liquid fuel cells are entirely plausible. Now we just identify the best liquid for any particular set of priorities.
Given a catalyst that isn't uber-expensive, putting gasoline in fuel cells COULD work really well for two reasons. First, it would fix one of the two major drawbacks of electric vehicles like the Tesla - range. Specifically, the WORRY about running out of battery. The Tesla already has an electric motor. If you added a small fuel cell that could power that same motor, Tesla owners would know that they'll never be stranded. They could always gas up like any other car. No worries about distance between charging stations, or being unable to visit a dying relative 350 miles away because the car has to charge overnight. They can just run the last 60 miles on gas WHEN NECESSARY. This without adding a gasoline engine and all of it's supporting systems.
The other thing is, in THEORY gasoline exhaust is nothing but water and CO2. A conventional engine, where the chemical reaction consists of exploding thousands of times per minute, doesn't resemble theory. There are many more pollutants generated. A gas or gasohol fuel cell could be much cleaner than a gasoline engine. Also, fuel processors promise to make gasoline fuel cells much more efficient than gas engines, too - potentially cutting fuel use in half. That would be incredible if we could cut fuel usage in half. Of course, so far those are just claims by the companies making the processors. Solyndra claimed some wonderful things too.
> Have they managed to come up with a liquid hydrogen storage medium then?
Yes, and its volumetric energy density is significantly better than a lead-acid battery. It has more hydrogen per volume than H2 liquid hydrogen, too. My car uses such a liquid. For every two or three hydrogen atoms, just add one atom of carbon, ending up with C7H16, C5H10 or similar.
I also have some other mostly-hydrogen liquid fuel on my desk here, C12H22O11. It works very well when boosted with just a tiny amount of C8H10N4O2.
Seriously, though, there are many liquids that can work in fuel cells, including C7H16, kerosene, and gasoline. Selecting one that makes the greenies and everyone else happy is a chore, but I don't see any to think that won't happen.
Hydrogen fuel cells ARE electric. It's a way to store a lot of electricity in a small space, and be able to recharge in two minutes. The electricity from the fuel cell powers the electric motor.
Perhaps you meant "toxic and expensive batteries with a short lifespan, that takehours to recharge s are simpler"? That's debatable. The design of each is actually very similar. The main difference is that a fuel cell has a filler cap, while a battery has a charging circuit to charge the fluid while it's in the battery. Fuel cells allow the fluid to be charged (separated) outside the car, so you don't have to sit there waiting for the charge. You just pump pre-charged fluid in.
All RFCs are supposed to have a section covering security considerations, and there are a couple of of RFCs about that. RFC 3552 (2003), has section 3.2.1. "Confidentiality Violations", indicating that protocol authors should consider the possibility of eavesdropping. The new RFC (7258) just expands upon 3552.
It is technical rather than political in the sense that 7258 essentially says we wouldn't develop SMTP the same way again, sending everything in the clear. If we were developing a new mail protocol, we should design it to support encryption from the get-go. (Ie include RFC 3207 capabilities in the original RFC 2476). That's a technical decision, with a technical implementation.
> exacerbated by the money=speech provisions that have been placed into our current system.
Unfortunately, the alternative is far, far worse. In Citizens United, it was decided that you are allowed to make a documentary, or otherwise let your voice be heard beyond the room you are in - and that doing so means spending some money to make the documentary.
The other option would be to decide that you may NOT spend any money while exercising your free speech rights. You may not buy yellow ribbon, you may not make Xerox copies of your essay, and you may not rent a microphone and speakers to make a speech. If you decide that free speech rights disappear the moment you spend any money, you've decided that Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech is illegal without prior government approval. (As political speech that required money to put on, virtually all of MLK's speeches would have been illegal under the principles the FEC put forth in CU). I don't think we want to go there.
Allowing MLK to give a speech also allows Michael Moore and the head of UAW to give speeches or make videos. It's not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than criminalizing the act of making a political video.
A moment ago you said you don't want to force workers into unions against their will. That was shortly after you said it is necessary to "force employees to become paying union members even when they don't want to". If you didn't change your mind, are you just confused? Maybe you're not sure what you think? That would be cool, that's called being open-minded.
>> You jump from that to wanting to force people to work your union contracts against their will. On that we disagree.
> Please quote where I have said anything of the kind.
Coldsam wrote: If every worker had the freedom to do whatever they want, a union would never have any leverage
Also:
They are against laws that force employers to recognize unions and bargain with them as well as the laws that FORCE EMPLOYEES TO BECOME PAYING UNION MEMBERS EVEN WHEN THEY DON'T WANT TO.
You replied: So they are just against effective unions then
I guess you've realized that's ridiculous (and fascist) to "force employees to become paying union members when they don't want to", so you've changed your mind. Awesome. That's the great benefit of discussion, we get to examine our ideas, consider alternative viewpoints, and refine our own thinking. Yay for effective discussion. A moment ago you said forcing people to be under the control of a union is the only way for unions to do anything.
Indeed. Much like the "penalty" for Microsoft's numerous antitrust violations - they had to allow schools to teach kids to use Microsoft products. Of course, they called it "donate software licenses to schools".
There are bad settlements, and bad settlements shouldn't be allowed. Most settlements (and criminal plea bargains) are better for everyone than going to trial - the outcome is something that both parties agree is somewhat reasonable, unlike a trial where it's all-or-nothing, so it's guaranteed to be totally unfair, from one viewpoint.
I missed a few words while doing cut-and-paste to organize my reply:
If Ford is offering $40 ($35) under the union contract, no sane person would turn that down to work at GM for significantly less instead, modulo if GM treats their workers better, etc. Therefore, GM must offer at least as much as the union deal offers. Of course, "as much" might mean something employees value more than an extra fifty cents, like on-site child care provided, where parents can walk over and have lunch with their children. My (non-union) job has different scheduling options and several workers have started tele-commuting, working from home, even from a different state. The union contract can't treat people as individuals, recognizing that Sally needs to leave early every Friday to pick up her kid and Ray needs time to move around assisting other employees rather than being stuck at his station all day. Instead, the union contract has to treat employees as interchangeable things, rather than as individual people . For this reason, the non-union shop can very well attract the best workers with a truly better offer - better for the employee and better for the employer. The employer benefits from Ray lending a hand wherever needed, and expediting work through the relationships he builds, but the union contract has to pigeonhole him into a specific task all day, every day. Can't have him lend a hand in any role he's not assigned to - he's not on that payscale. These are the facts of my daily working life.
Unions have done some good for some people at some time in history. On that we agree. You jump from that to wanting to force people to work your union contracts against their will. On that we disagree.
> Ford is paying $40 and the union dues are $5. How much is GM going to pay their non unionized workers? You seem to believe that it will be more than $40 because GM doesn't have to pay for union extracted protection
If Ford is offering $40 ($35) under the union contract, no sane person would turn that down to work at GM instead, modulo if GM treats their workers better, etc.
> workers typically do not understand (and thus do not appreciate) the union
Your arrogance is insulting. That's the elitist liberal snobbery that turns people off so much. You tell people that they are too stupid to make their own decisions, so you should make their choices for them. You know so much more about their lives than they do about their own, right? It's stomach-turning. Just like when you say black people are too stupid to score high enough on the SAT to get into college, so you should give them extra points for being a stupid negro. It's just disgusting.
Speaking of cherry-picking, government schools are over twice as likely to require grade school teachers to have a masters degree or PhD compared to private schools, who are allowed to hire based on actual competency. Yeah, people with master's and PhDs required by union contract make more than people with a bachelor's degree.(Minus their student loan payments).
I was guessing as to what your point may be. Thanks for clarifying.
One gentleman who had been president of a labor union pointed out that for government employees, unions have the conflict of interest I outlined. Not that he was anti-union - he had recently been the president of a union when he made the point that they don't work with unions negotiating with elected officials (whom they will elect).
After being union president, he was president of the United States and was defining the modern republican party when Reagan expressed the conflict of interest inherent in government unions. It seems that many conservatives today still follow Reagan's logic in seeing that conflict of interest as a reason that government employees, especially should not be unionized. The other reason articulated by president Reagan and conservatives since then as that police and other essential public services can't be going on strike, leaving the public with no police protection. If Apple employees walk off the job, that creates a problem for Apple and their employees to work out. It doesn't affect the general public much. If police (or air traffic controllers) walk off the job, that puts lives at risk, so it shouldn't be allowed.
For those two reasons, many conservatives, including myself, think that police are one of the few professions who shouldn't have unions (and therefore strikes). Workers in private industry should be _allowed_ to unionize but not _forced_ to do so.
> It's also a category error. People should be very clear and consistent in their mind and design what is a security feature and what is not, e.g. what is an identifier such as a userid and what is part of the authtenticatio machinery. It's muddleheadedness of this type that gives the US its whole SSN fiasco.
I've actually written exactly the same thing. That's certainly true in many contexts, such as Moodle, which is a context in which I wrote just what you wrote.
In other contexts, like bank web site, you can expect that a) dictionary attacks will be a daily occurrence and b) most users will not publish their username/identifier. In such cases, it's a HUGE advantage to make attacks orders of magnitude harder by deciding that the username IS part of the authentication (and treating it as such).
Absolutely there are some bad settlements, just as there are bad verdicts when cases go to trial. Sometimes the court shouldn't approve a settlement, and sometimes that don't approve them.
> a million plaintiffs owed $100 each
We should keep in mind that it's actually one lawyer who CLAIMS that a million people are owed $100 each. There's another side of the story most of the time. I've been part of the plaintiff class in three or four cases. In one case, I didn't feel that I was owed anything. In most cases, I didn't feel that I received much. So good and bad there.
In 1983, H.R. 1900 VERY gradually increased the the age from 65 years old in 1983 to 67 years old in 2005. That's an increase of just one month per year, and it made a big difference.
How much of a difference does it make? A proposal that gradually increases the full retirement age to 69 and then indexes it for life expectancy increases would reduce the deficit by about 44 percent. (Social Security Administration 2012b).
I'm sure almost everyone agrees that we'd rather not have to make any changes, but unfortunately that's not mathematically possible. Doing nothing now would mean being utterly screwed in 20 years.
You seem to be overlooking the difference between being forced to work a union contract that is far worse than what you can get on the free market vs being able to choose to join a union. The libertarian platform isn't that unions are bad. It's that choice is good - people should be able to join unions if they want to.
> If there ever were any meager benefits extracted by the unions then the free-riders would reduce the unions power (leverage and lobbying ability) to near zero. Why pay dues and follow union rules if you get the benefits without having to?
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Consider the union makes a deal with Ford for $X (minus $Y paid to the union). GM doesn't strike a deal with the union, so they offer $Z. Workers then have a choice of either the union deal Ford or the non-union offer at GM. You can get all the union benefits and drawbacks at Ford, if that's what you want. The alternative you propose is that all workers must take the union deal. You work for $X-Z or you don't work at all.
> Can you provide any example anywhere in the world where this has worked?
In the US, programmers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, nurses, web designers, fashion designers, clothing designers, and architects are not unionized. Assembly line workers, chicken pluckers, and school teachers are unionized. Guess which group gets the best salaries?
School teachers are a great example. Their union gets someone with a masters degree $50,000, then takes a chunk of that back in tribute. I don't know about you, but if I had a masters degree and someone guaranteed that I wasn't allowed to make more than $50K, I wouldn't be paying them for the great deal they got me
I'll go you one better. You find me a police union who doesn't endorse and/or finance the council candidate who offers to give them the most taxpayer money and widest latitude on infringing citizen's rights. So it goes like this:
The police union takes a cut of the (taxpayer financed) police wages. The union uses that money to get help get a mayor and city council member elected. The mayor and council now owe the union a favor. The mayor and council supposedly represent you, the citizen, in negotiations vs the union who got them elected. (Rotfl). The mayor and council give their union financiers what they ask for.
Three years later
The head of the police union stops by the mayor's office to discuss two things: a) The police want less strict rules about "use of force" b) The union wants to talk about whether or not they'll support the mayor in the upcoming election.
And you think police unions are examples of a really great idea?
Your comment makes sense only if you think that what Apple, Google, etc. did was right, and that freedom is bad.
The libertarian platform says that if workers want to have a union, they can. If they don't like particular union, they can form another, or choose no union at all. That's called freedom. The opposing view is that workers should be forced to a work for a union, with union bosses controlling what workers can do. Aka socialist totalitarianism.
The other part is how employers interact with unions. The libertarian viewpoint is tthat workers should be able to get multiple offers from different companies and choose the best offer based on salary, benefits, location, etc. The alternative view is that some group or third party should dictate (and seize part of) workers' pay. If you think that's right, you side with Apple in this case - they had an organized group helping to control wages.
Libertarians believe (party platform) that if some guy who runs a union suggests that you work for $40K and have four weeks of vacation, you have the right to say "no thanks, I'll take this offer for $53K and two weeks". Companies can hire all of their workers in one shot with the union. IF a lot of workers don't like the union deal, the company can instead negotiate with each employee based on their priorities - offering one higher pay, and telling another it's okay for them to take off an hour early twice a week to pick up their kid. Under the libertarian idea, employers can negotiate based on each employees needs ONLY if lots of workers don't like the union - enough to staff the entire company with non-union workers. (The union workers won't show up to a split workplace). What that guarantees is that needed workers always have at least two competing offers to choose from - the union contract and the non-union employer. The employer and the union both have to offer the workers the best deal they can, because the worker can choose either.
To be against that is to be against allowing workers to choose between competing offers. Apple and the other companies did that, they eliminated competing offers. I guess you think that's a great thing, because that's precisely what mandatory unions do.
> I got some $2.34. Imagine a lawyer only able to gain 10K times that amount MAX. It would change how they proceed in representing the Class.
Yes, it would change things. The change would be that no law firm would ever represent a class. The firm's expenses are about $100,000. Would YOU spend $200,000 in hopes of making $10? Me neither.
If plaintiffs are probably right, they are probably owed about $100 million, and the defendant offers to pay the $100 million, accepting that offer is obviously good. It's good for the plaintiffs, who get paid sooner and know that the approved settlement won't be appealed. It's good for the tax payer, who doesn't have to spend tax money on a long court battle. It's good for the defendant, who can get it over with and move on. The only people who prefer a trial are lawyers who get paid more to try a case .
Given the cost of trial, in time, money, and uncertainty, it's still a good deal if the defendant offers $90 million.
Most of the time, there are two sides to the story. Patent trolls remind us that plaintiffs are often wrong. Often, they should get nothing. So consider a class action in which the plaintiffs feel they are owed $100 million, and they have a 50/50 chance of winning. In that case, a $50 million settlement is a good thing. The plaintiffs get almost as much as they might hope for after trial expenses, the defendant, also gets it over with without trial expenses, and doesn't risk a $100 million loss.
In the instant case, this particular settlement is too low if and only if the plaintiffs had at least a 20% chance of not only winning, but winning as much as they asked for. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but in general settlements save everyone money, time, risk, and stress.
Your local auto shop or machine shop can put a piece of brick or concrete in their 20,000 pound press and you can see it turn to dust. Or just hit a piece with a big hammer. Now imagine MILLIONS of pounds crashing down, rather than a two pound hammer.
Slashdot Mirror
Read the text in the rainbow video. The idiot blames energy companies for what they're pumping into the ground. That's precisely the same scare-mongering OBAMA does, though with his speechwriters and teleprompter he sounds about 2% more intelligent when he says it.
> It's not easy to match MS-Word's layout engine bug-for-bug in another product.
I saw proof of that a few weeks ago. My mother's new computer, with a.new version of Word, couldn't open her existing Word files. I had to open them in LibreOffice and save them using the newest version of the newest Word format using LibreOffice. Then Word could open them.
So yes, in my experience LibreOffice is more compatible with Word than Word is.
I actually had a smiley in there that I accidentally removed, but yeah - gas wouldn't be the cleanest option.
The fact that gas, methanol, and ethanol all work in fuel cells does show that there's no reason we can't find a variety of liquids that work in fuel cells. Not that any of those is ideal*, but they are POC - they prove that liquid fuel cells are entirely plausible. Now we just identify the best liquid for any particular set of priorities.
Given a catalyst that isn't uber-expensive, putting gasoline in fuel cells COULD work really well for two reasons.
First, it would fix one of the two major drawbacks of electric vehicles like the Tesla - range. Specifically, the WORRY about running out of battery. The Tesla already has an electric motor. If you added a small fuel cell that could power that same motor, Tesla owners would know that they'll never be stranded. They could always gas up like any other car. No worries about distance between charging stations, or being unable to visit a dying relative 350 miles away because the car has to charge overnight. They can just run the last 60 miles on gas WHEN NECESSARY. This without adding a gasoline engine and all of it's supporting systems.
The other thing is, in THEORY gasoline exhaust is nothing but water and CO2. A conventional engine, where the chemical reaction consists of exploding thousands of times per minute, doesn't resemble theory. There are many more pollutants generated. A gas or gasohol fuel cell could be much cleaner than a gasoline engine. Also, fuel processors promise to make gasoline fuel cells much more efficient than gas engines, too - potentially cutting fuel use in half. That would be incredible if we could cut fuel usage in half. Of course, so far those are just claims by the companies making the processors. Solyndra claimed some wonderful things too.
> Have they managed to come up with a liquid hydrogen storage medium then?
Yes, and its volumetric energy density is significantly better than a lead-acid battery. It has more hydrogen per volume than H2 liquid hydrogen, too. My car uses such a liquid. For every two or three hydrogen atoms, just add one atom of carbon, ending up with C7H16, C5H10 or similar.
I also have some other mostly-hydrogen liquid fuel on my desk here, C12H22O11. It works very well when boosted with just a tiny amount of C8H10N4O2.
Seriously, though, there are many liquids that can work in fuel cells, including C7H16, kerosene, and gasoline. Selecting one that makes the greenies and everyone else happy is a chore, but I don't see any to think that won't happen.
Hydrogen fuel cells ARE electric. It's a way to store a lot of electricity in a small space, and be able to recharge in two minutes. The electricity from the fuel cell powers the electric motor.
Perhaps you meant "toxic and expensive batteries with a short lifespan, that takehours to recharge s are simpler"? That's debatable. The design of each is actually very similar. The main difference is that a fuel cell has a filler cap, while a battery has a charging circuit to charge the fluid while it's in the battery. Fuel cells allow the fluid to be charged (separated) outside the car, so you don't have to sit there waiting for the charge. You just pump pre-charged fluid in.
All RFCs are supposed to have a section covering security considerations, and there are a couple of of RFCs about that. RFC 3552 (2003), has section 3.2.1. "Confidentiality Violations", indicating that protocol authors should consider the possibility of eavesdropping. The new RFC (7258) just expands upon 3552.
It is technical rather than political in the sense that 7258 essentially says we wouldn't develop SMTP the same way again, sending everything in the clear. If we were developing a new mail protocol, we should design it to support encryption from the get-go. (Ie include RFC 3207 capabilities in the original RFC 2476). That's a technical decision, with a technical implementation.
That's a very interesting point. I hadn't thought of it that way.
I have a gun. I bake my own cake. Brownies too. Today I baked cinnamon rolls. You're welcome to come have one.
Or you can sit there and complain that you're hungry.
> exacerbated by the money=speech provisions that have been placed into our current system.
Unfortunately, the alternative is far, far worse. In Citizens United, it was decided that you are allowed to make a documentary, or otherwise let your voice be heard beyond the room you are in - and that doing so means spending some money to make the documentary.
The other option would be to decide that you may NOT spend any money while exercising your free speech rights. You may not buy yellow ribbon, you may not make Xerox copies of your essay, and you may not rent a microphone and speakers to make a speech. If you decide that free speech rights disappear the moment you spend any money, you've decided that Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech is illegal without prior government approval. (As political speech that required money to put on, virtually all of MLK's speeches would have been illegal under the principles the FEC put forth in CU). I don't think we want to go there.
Allowing MLK to give a speech also allows Michael Moore and the head of UAW to give speeches or make videos. It's not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than criminalizing the act of making a political video.
A moment ago you said you don't want to force workers into unions against their will. That was shortly after you said it is necessary to "force employees to become paying union members even when they don't want to". If you didn't change your mind, are you just confused? Maybe you're not sure what you think? That would be cool, that's called being open-minded.
>> You jump from that to wanting to force people to work your union contracts against their will. On that we disagree.
> Please quote where I have said anything of the kind.
Coldsam wrote:
If every worker had the freedom to do whatever they want, a union would never have any leverage
Also:
They are against laws that force employers to recognize unions and bargain with them as well as the laws that FORCE EMPLOYEES TO BECOME PAYING UNION MEMBERS EVEN WHEN THEY DON'T WANT TO.
You replied:
So they are just against effective unions then
I guess you've realized that's ridiculous (and fascist) to "force employees to become paying union members when they don't want to", so you've changed your mind. Awesome. That's the great benefit of discussion, we get to examine our ideas, consider alternative viewpoints, and refine our own thinking. Yay for effective discussion. A moment ago you said forcing people to be under the control of a union is the only way for unions to do anything.
I've enjoyed discussing this with you.
Indeed. Much like the "penalty" for Microsoft's numerous antitrust violations - they had to allow schools to teach kids to use Microsoft products. Of course, they called it "donate software licenses to schools".
There are bad settlements, and bad settlements shouldn't be allowed. Most settlements (and criminal plea bargains) are better for everyone than going to trial - the outcome is something that both parties agree is somewhat reasonable, unlike a trial where it's all-or-nothing, so it's guaranteed to be totally unfair, from one viewpoint.
I missed a few words while doing cut-and-paste to organize my reply:
If Ford is offering $40 ($35) under the union contract, no sane person would turn that down to work at GM for significantly less instead, modulo if GM treats their workers better, etc. Therefore, GM must offer at least as much as the union deal offers. Of course, "as much" might mean something employees value more than an extra fifty cents, like on-site child care provided, where parents can walk over and have lunch with their children. My (non-union) job has different scheduling options and several workers have started tele-commuting, working from home, even from a different state. The union contract can't treat people as individuals, recognizing that Sally needs to leave early every Friday to pick up her kid and Ray needs time to move around assisting other employees rather than being stuck at his station all day. Instead, the union contract has to treat employees as interchangeable things, rather than as individual people . For this reason, the non-union shop can very well attract the best workers with a truly better offer - better for the employee and better for the employer. The employer benefits from Ray lending a hand wherever needed, and expediting work through the relationships he builds, but the union contract has to pigeonhole him into a specific task all day, every day. Can't have him lend a hand in any role he's not assigned to - he's not on that payscale. These are the facts of my daily working life.
Unions have done some good for some people at some time in history. On that we agree. You jump from that to wanting to force people to work your union contracts against their will. On that we disagree.
> Ford is paying $40 and the union dues are $5. How much is GM going to pay their non unionized workers? You seem to believe that it will be more than $40 because GM doesn't have to pay for union extracted protection
If Ford is offering $40 ($35) under the union contract, no sane person would turn that down to work at GM instead, modulo if GM treats their workers better, etc.
> workers typically do not understand (and thus do not appreciate) the union
Your arrogance is insulting. That's the elitist liberal snobbery that turns people off so much. You tell people that they are too stupid to make their own decisions, so you should make their choices for them. You know so much more about their lives than they do about their own, right? It's stomach-turning. Just like when you say black people are too stupid to score high enough on the SAT to get into college, so you should give them extra points for being a stupid negro. It's just disgusting.
Speaking of cherry-picking, government schools are over twice as likely to require grade school teachers to have a masters degree or PhD compared to private schools, who are allowed to hire based on actual competency. Yeah, people with master's and PhDs required by union contract make more than people with a bachelor's degree.(Minus their student loan payments).
I was guessing as to what your point may be. Thanks for clarifying.
One gentleman who had been president of a labor union pointed out that for government employees, unions have the conflict of interest I outlined. Not that he was anti-union - he had recently been the president of a union when he made the point that they don't work with unions negotiating with elected officials (whom they will elect).
After being union president, he was president of the United States and was defining the modern republican party when Reagan expressed the conflict of interest inherent in government unions. It seems that many conservatives today still follow Reagan's logic in seeing that conflict of interest as a reason that government employees, especially should not be unionized. The other reason articulated by president Reagan and conservatives since then as that police and other essential public services can't be going on strike, leaving the public with no police protection. If Apple employees walk off the job, that creates a problem for Apple and their employees to work out. It doesn't affect the general public much. If police (or air traffic controllers) walk off the job, that puts lives at risk, so it shouldn't be allowed.
For those two reasons, many conservatives, including myself, think that police are one of the few professions who shouldn't have unions (and therefore strikes). Workers in private industry should be _allowed_ to unionize but not _forced_ to do so.
> It's also a category error. People should be very clear and consistent in their mind and design what is a security feature and what is not, e.g. what is an identifier such as a userid and what is part of the authtenticatio machinery. It's muddleheadedness of this type that gives the US its whole SSN fiasco.
I've actually written exactly the same thing. That's certainly true in many contexts, such as Moodle, which is a context in which I wrote just what you wrote.
In other contexts, like bank web site, you can expect that a) dictionary attacks will be a daily occurrence and b) most users will not publish their username/identifier. In such cases, it's a HUGE advantage to make attacks orders of magnitude harder by deciding that the username IS part of the authentication (and treating it as such).
Absolutely there are some bad settlements, just as there are bad verdicts when cases go to trial. Sometimes the court shouldn't approve a settlement, and sometimes that don't approve them.
> a million plaintiffs owed $100 each
We should keep in mind that it's actually one lawyer who CLAIMS that a million people are owed $100 each.
There's another side of the story most of the time.
I've been part of the plaintiff class in three or four cases. In one case, I didn't feel that I was owed anything.
In most cases, I didn't feel that I received much. So good and bad there.
In 1983, H.R. 1900 VERY gradually increased the the age from 65 years old in 1983 to 67 years old in 2005.
That's an increase of just one month per year, and it made a big difference.
How much of a difference does it make? A proposal that gradually increases the full retirement age to 69 and then indexes it for life expectancy increases would reduce the deficit by about 44 percent. (Social Security Administration 2012b).
I'm sure almost everyone agrees that we'd rather not have to make any changes, but unfortunately that's not mathematically possible.
Doing nothing now would mean being utterly screwed in 20 years.
You seem to be overlooking the difference between being forced to work a union contract that is far worse than what you can get on the free market vs being able to choose to join a union. The libertarian platform isn't that unions are bad. It's that choice is good - people should be able to join unions if they want to.
> If there ever were any meager benefits extracted by the unions then the free-riders would reduce the unions power (leverage and lobbying ability) to near zero. Why pay dues and follow union rules if you get the benefits without having to?
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Consider the union makes a deal with Ford for $X (minus $Y paid to the union). GM doesn't strike a deal with the union, so they offer $Z. Workers then have a choice of either the union deal Ford or the non-union offer at GM. You can get all the union benefits and drawbacks at Ford, if that's what you want. The alternative you propose is that all workers must take the union deal. You work for $X-Z or you don't work at all.
> Can you provide any example anywhere in the world where this has worked?
In the US, programmers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, nurses, web designers, fashion designers, clothing designers, and architects are not unionized. Assembly line workers, chicken pluckers, and school teachers are unionized. Guess which group gets the best salaries?
School teachers are a great example. Their union gets someone with a masters degree $50,000, then takes a chunk of that back in tribute. I don't know about you, but if I had a masters degree and someone guaranteed that I wasn't allowed to make more than $50K, I wouldn't be paying them for the great deal they got me
Points to you for looking. That's not what I was referring to, though. See my post just above yours (seven hours earlier) for more information.
I'll go you one better. You find me a police union who doesn't endorse and/or finance the council candidate who offers to give them the most taxpayer money and widest latitude on infringing citizen's rights. So it goes like this:
The police union takes a cut of the (taxpayer financed) police wages.
The union uses that money to get help get a mayor and city council member elected.
The mayor and council now owe the union a favor.
The mayor and council supposedly represent you, the citizen, in negotiations vs the union who got them elected. (Rotfl).
The mayor and council give their union financiers what they ask for.
Three years later
The head of the police union stops by the mayor's office to discuss two things:
a) The police want less strict rules about "use of force"
b) The union wants to talk about whether or not they'll support the mayor in the upcoming election.
And you think police unions are examples of a really great idea?
Your comment makes sense only if you think that what Apple, Google, etc. did was right, and that freedom is bad.
The libertarian platform says that if workers want to have a union, they can. If they don't like particular union, they can form another, or choose no union at all. That's called freedom. The opposing view is that workers should be forced to a work for a union, with union bosses controlling what workers can do. Aka socialist totalitarianism.
The other part is how employers interact with unions. The libertarian viewpoint is tthat workers should be able to get multiple offers from different companies and choose the best offer based on salary, benefits, location, etc. The alternative view is that some group or third party should dictate (and seize part of) workers' pay. If you think that's right, you side with Apple in this case - they had an organized group helping to control wages.
Libertarians believe (party platform) that if some guy who runs a union suggests that you work for $40K and have four weeks of vacation, you have the right to say "no thanks, I'll take this offer for $53K and two weeks". Companies can hire all of
their workers in one shot with the union. IF a lot of workers don't like the union deal, the company can instead negotiate with each employee based on their priorities - offering one higher pay, and telling another it's okay for them to take off an hour early twice a week to pick up their kid. Under the libertarian idea, employers can negotiate based on each employees needs ONLY if lots of workers don't like the union - enough to staff the entire company with non-union workers. (The union workers won't show up to a split workplace). What that guarantees is that needed workers always have at least two competing offers to choose from - the union contract and the non-union employer. The employer and the union both have to offer the workers the best deal they can, because the worker can choose either.
To be against that is to be against allowing workers to choose between competing offers. Apple and the other companies did that, they eliminated competing offers. I guess you think that's a great thing, because that's precisely what mandatory unions do.
> I got some $2.34. Imagine a lawyer only able to gain 10K times that amount MAX. It would change how they proceed in representing the Class.
Yes, it would change things. The change would be that no law firm would ever represent a class. The firm's expenses are about $100,000. Would YOU spend $200,000 in hopes of making $10? Me neither.
If plaintiffs are probably right, they are probably owed about $100 million, and the defendant offers to pay the $100 million, accepting that offer is obviously good. It's good for the plaintiffs, who get paid sooner and know that the approved settlement won't be appealed. It's good for the tax payer, who doesn't have to spend tax money on a long court battle. It's good for the defendant, who can get it over with and move on. The only people who prefer a trial are lawyers who get paid more to try a case .
Given the cost of trial, in time, money, and uncertainty, it's still a good deal if the defendant offers $90 million.
Most of the time, there are two sides to the story. Patent trolls remind us that plaintiffs are often wrong. Often, they should get nothing. So consider a class action in which the plaintiffs feel they are owed $100 million, and they have a 50/50 chance of winning. In that case, a $50 million settlement is a good thing. The plaintiffs get almost as much as they might hope for after trial expenses, the defendant, also gets it over with without trial expenses, and doesn't risk a $100 million loss.
In the instant case, this particular settlement is too low if and only if the plaintiffs had at least a 20% chance of not only winning, but winning as much as they asked for. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not, but in general settlements save everyone money, time, risk, and stress.
Your local auto shop or machine shop can put a piece of brick or concrete in their 20,000 pound press and you can see it turn to dust. Or just hit a piece with a big hammer. Now imagine MILLIONS of pounds crashing down, rather than a two pound hammer.