Amending the constitution so that corporations are not people would make this a much easier situation. If that were not possible, then my second scenario of limiting all "people" to some small amount per election cycle would work.
People are already limited in what they can spend per election cycle directly to official campaigns, however it seems that corporations prefer to donate to PACs which simply spend money on their own commercials, bypassing the official campaigns.
I think the bigger issue is that if we want to prevent PACs from airing their own commercials, you need to have an objective way of deciding what a political ad is in order to make it illegal, and it must both catch actual political ads while not catching any legitimate non-political ads. I can see a lot of ways in which political ads can be made "less political" to avoid regulations, and also ways in which people could prevent certain legitimate ads from airing by abusing a law of this sort.
It would be way harder to coordinate, and you could be very sure that each individual would be very aware about where the money was going. If Walmart attempted to get all its employees to donate to one particular political candidate, it would be not only a much more transparent donation, but all those donating would need to agree.
Would it be acceptable to you, if corporations could donate unlimited money that was transparent?
Right now, many corporations that employee vast swaths of the American public are actively donating to issues and candidates that are not in the best interests of their employees.
Imagine Walmart asking its employees to donate to a PAC whose political purpose was to lobby against a minimum wage hike...:)
Also, I think it's probably pretty easy to get Walmart employees to agree to donate to a political campaign. You just give them money. They are desperate. I guarantee that if you gave each walmart employee $3000 to donate $2500 to a candidate they hated, most would do it. They have families to feed.
Poor people can not even be bothered to vote in their own interest. I don't think they will be able to refuse money even if it means helping a republican campaign (that they did not even care enought o vote against).
I'll bet a pretty big percentage of Walmart employees are poor white people who vote for republicans. So they are already voting against their interest. They will be even happier to take money to vote the same way they were already going to.
I read your whole post, and gave the reason why it seemed to indicate that you did not read the original article. I read the entire original article and your entire post. Maybe you should admit that you were mistaken in saying "the whole advantage of the long term contract is it allows you to get very expensive models for a much smaller comparative monthly payment." if that's not what you meant.
Continuing to nitpick grammar mistakes is still childis. I am not willing to spend the time to ensure my slashdot comments are error free. I will continue to focus on content.
I am not sure exactly how this number scale maps to reality. I'm sure everyone has their own idea of what a 7/10 programmer actually is.
That said, competent programmers are capable of orders of magnitude more productivity. They are able to design software correctly from the beginning. This leads to less time spent on reworking parts of the software when design flaws are found, less time spent hunting down bugs that are due to poor design, less time spent learning on the job, and less time spent maintaining software that is hard to maintain due to poor design.
Mediocre programmers, in my opinion of what counts as mediocre, actually end up being more expensive than good programmers who command much higher salaries. It is cheaper to spend $3000/day on a good software engineer who finishes the job in one day than it is to pay a mediocre software engineer $50/day to finish the job in 3 months. Not too mention the fact that a mediocre software engineer will probably never be able to produce something of quality until he/she becomes a good software engineer.
It's not a question of "which jobs are easy enough to finish for a 5/10 programmer". There are very few jobs that a competent programmer can not do more cheaply for the same (and usually better) quality of work, due to expending less effort and time to do it.
My advice to any 5/10 - 7/10 programmers out there is to become better at your craft. You will be more productive, make more money, your customers will be happier, and you will have less stress and be happier. It's easier to love your job when you are really good at it.
I would also like to note that I don't think it is necessarily the case that mediocre software engineers are incompetent. I can envision a day when mediocre software engineers are perfectly competent, but that's not the case today.
I work at a company where we actually hire 5/10 - 9/10 programmers, and I would estimate that the 5's and 6's actually do not produce any code that's actually usable. It always needs to eventually be replaced by an 8 or 9. The only thing 5's and 6's are useful for is unit testing, because it frees up good programmers to be productive rather than doing things that don't require much skill.
The good news is that even if you are a mediocre programmer, and can somehow manage to get hired, you will probably eventually be promoted to being a manager provided you are reasonably responsible and not anti-social.
Mortgages are long term thinking in relation to renting. Sure it would be nice to save all your money and buy a house with cash, but unless your alternative to a mortgage is squatting, I don't see how mortgages count as short term thinking.
You can live in a way nicer house by renting than by paying a mortgage, the downside is that after 30 years of renting, you don't have anything to show for it.
OK so you've found a place where I made a grammar mistake. Congratulations. Despite you're apparently perfect grammar, the actual content of your post is what I was criticizing.
The fact that you can find a grammar mistake in one of my posts doesn't change anything. I'm 100% sure I could find a place where you have made a grammar mistake and throw it in your face, but this would be a pretty childish response.
Do you think most of Western Europe just has smarter more engaged people? Americans are just less intelligent or less interested in politics?
I think Western Europeans are on average smarter and more engaged in politics than Americans. I don't think Europeans like politics more than Americans, but I think they take seriously the idea that who and what they vote for matters, and because of this attitude it actually does matter.
Americans are pretty apathetic when it comes to voting, and rightly so. Our votes do not really matter. But the reason our votes don't matter is because we have allowed our political process to go unchecked for so long.
It's like studying for a big test. You can start studying 20 minutes before the test, and then lament the fact that studying didn't seem to help. I am one of the only people I know who actually reads propositions and candidate positions and watches debates (at the federal, state, and city level). I have voted in every single election since I turned 18. I am not excited by politics, I am disgusted by it, but I feel a sense of civic responsibility.
This is something of a chicken/egg situation. Until you get the money more regulated in politics, and get TV/Radio ads held to higher standards of honesty, the population will never become more informed. As long as MSNBC and Fox can twist the truth so extremely as to make their message so misleading that is literally is causing harm in society... the electorate will not become more informed.
I agree except that I feel it is probably easier to educate people in a basically free society (even with Fox News, etc), than it would be to get money out of politics given an apathetic and ignorant electorate. I don't think either is easy. I think one is hard and one is impossible.
How would we prevent an organization from receiving money from a millionaire and donating that on his/her behalf? Simple. Organizations/Corporations cannot spend money on anything that a court of law would rule is related to politics. The only organization that is allowed to spend money talking about the campaign or politics in general, would be the campaign itself. And that money would be capped each election cycle. Harsh? Yeah. But it could be done.
So does this mean you would outlaw individual people from spending their own money on political messages?
Or... since corporations are apparently people, each corporation is treated like a person. They get to spend that same 100 dollars (total) that a real person can spend. That goes for any PAC as well.
The problem I see with this is that all corporations and groups of people are comprised of individuals. Doing things in the name of a corporation makes it easy to do certain things, and it shields individuals from consequences (e.g. corporations can't be imprisoned). But if you make it illegal for a corporation to do something, they can just have the individuals do it instead. My company gets it's employees to make donations to a PAC, but they could have us donate directly to political campaigns instead, it would just be a little harder to coordinate.
You state Craigslist is "unregulated" but there is no regulations for services that act like Craigslist, such as the local newspaper's classified section..
Yes it's true that unregulated things are not regulated, and regulated things are regulated.
If one posts or answers an ad in the newspaper or on Craigslist, and on is cheated, raped, robbed, or killed, that is not the fault of Craigslist or the newspaper.
And if it were regulated, then responsibility might fall on the newspaper or some regulating body, as it would be their job to ensure it was safe.
But, taxis and taxi services are regulated. Uber and Lyft are not complying with those regulations.
I am not saying they are complying with the regulations. I am saying that these services are working perfectly fine even without the regulations.
The drivers are not just advertising with Uber, but are acting as either independent contractors or employees of Uber, just like taxi drivers are either employees or independent contractors of the taxi services.
I would agree they are independent contractors of Uber.
This makes Uber at least partially responsible for the acts and actions of the drivers.
We as a society get to decide these sorts of things. You are mixing up "is" and "ought" (i.e. descriptive vs. normative). I am not suggesting that Uber would never be held responsible for the actions of their contractors in a court. I am questioning whether this is the way it should be.
The fact that Uber has that $1,000,000 insurance policy listed as a benefit of Uber is tacit admission of the fact.
It would be crazy not to have insurance given the amount of litigation that we have. I don't think having insurance is a tacit admission of anything except your acknowledgement that you are probably going to get sued in the future.
By failing to state exactly what regulations Craigslist should be following and why, you have admitted you don't know what you are talking about.
I find your argument style to be a tacit admission that you can't engage in a discussion where you aren't able to tell people what their own positions are.
I *don't* think craigslist should be following regulations. I think craigslist is able to operate just fine without them. I think taxis can operate just fine without them as well, under a good framework (such as uber). I am not saying that no taxi service ever benefitted from regulations. I am saying that technology can make some regulations no longer necessary.
The industry that Craigslist participates in has very few, if any, regulations while for-hire transportation is regulated at the local and state level, and occasionally at the federal level.
The arguments that "Things should be regulated if they are heavily regulated" or "If things shouldn't be regulated, if they aren't regulated" are not convincing to me.
You don't what you are talking about because you are ignorant of the regulations that are involved and used a false comparison.
By making all these assumptions your are tacitly admitting that you can't have an adult conversation.
Please state exactly what the fuck are you talking about? Failure to do so will be a tacit admission that you are unqualified to decide what tacit admissions are made by others.
Craigslist is unregulated. Why isn't everyone on craigslist cheating, raping, killing and robbing people? I know some people on craigslist are bad apples, but the vast majority are just honest people trying to have a mutually beneficial deal.
I know some cities/countries have cabs that try to cheat you. They also have people on the street trying to cheat you too. I don't think it's the lack of regulation that's the problem. I think it's the fact that some 3rd world countries are so poor that dishonest livings become very tempting, especially when their customers are foreigners with lots of money.
I think uber will do just fine without the regulation. It has the ability to review drivers and riders. I have had nothing but good experiences with uber.
That allows memories to be retrieved but it also loses information in the process. But they point out that this cannot be how real memory works; otherwise, retrieving memories repeatedly would cause them to gradually decay.
I remember hearing a radiolab episode on NPR talking about how memories actually get modified every time you recall them.
Imagine if there's this shirt that you want to buy, but its only sold in a package for $200 with 4 other shirts sized XXXL which you will never wear. Does it even make sense to buy the bundle?
Yeah and imagine if the shirt by itself were $190, then paying $200 for a 5 pack (where you can;t use 4 of them doesn't sound so bad). We live in a world where the shirt companies just need $200 from every customer and they have unlimited shirts. charging $200 for a shirt seems outrageous so they try to help you rationalize by giving 5 shirts for the price of 1.
You could let people play 10 fold for only the channels they want and the cable companies still wouldn't make as much money. That's a pretty good reason for the cable companies to either keep the model they've got, or to charge more than ten fold per channel.
I Think it would probably cost the same price to get just what you want. They already know you aren't watching most of the channels, but it doesn't cost them any more money to give you all of them.
The only time they are losing money is when they are giving you something for free that you would have been willing to pay for.
I am convinced that the price per channel would go up if everyone was able to purchase channels a la carte.
It costs $X to produce all the content, and they need to charge each customer more than $Y (where y = x / number of customers) on average in order to make a profit. Everybody knows no one could possibly be watching 200 channels. But if all of a sudden people decide they want to only pay for 20 channels, then everybody is going to be paying the same price for just those 20 channels.
People want a la carte because they think it will be cheaper, but it probably won't be on average. For example It'll be cheaper for people who watch 5 channels and more expensive for people who watch 30.
The real way to save money on a la carte, is to cut out the middle man (e.g. the cable companies). If you can purchase content directly from the supplier (e.g. from HBO, or comedy central, etc), that's however many less salaraies that need to be paid by your subscription costs.
Critics say they believe expanding the H-1B visa program will allow lower-paid foreign workers to take American jobs. The plan immediately drew fire from Republicans. Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, accused the administration of acting unilaterally to change immigration law and bring in tens of thousands of potential competitors with Americans for jobs.
I thought Republicans were supposed to support free markets. What could be less free market than limiting the number of immigrants to artificially keep the price of American labor high? Furthermore, I would have assumed some big companies that need H1B visas would have bribed all the politicians by now... What gives?
Refusing to invest in coal industries does not help reduce carbon emissions and pollution one jot.
Do you not believe that investment drives use?
If there's ever a polluting industry it would be the so-called renewables which use rare earths and cause massive pollution.
I didn't mention anything about renewables, but I will agree that solar does in fact generate a lot of pollution, wind not so much. The pollution from coal is on a level orders of magnitude higher than any renewables. It even causes more radioactive waste than nuclear does. Coal is by far the dirtiest form of energy we have.
I am not sure why helping to reduce carbon emissions and pollution counts as a political statement. Maybe investing in science is a political statement too because so many Republicans believe in the bible as the ultimate source of truth.
The whole advantage of the long term contract is X
Oh and also Y
Oh and also Z
Where X is already completely addressed. And now you are complaining that I focused on X rather than Y and Z? I focused on your lead sentence because that is what your lead sentence directs the reader to do.
We do limit free speech in cases of that speech harming society. The old saying "Can't yell fire in a crowded theater", etc.. other country's have heavier regulations around the spending of cash on political advertisements
In fact you can yell fire in a crowded movie theater. Penn and Teller actually yell fire in a crowded movie theater as part of their nightly act in Las Vegas. Their point is that yelling fire in a crowded movie theater under the right context (if it is meant as political speech, rather than as a way to harm people), should be protected as speech.
Political ads are most certainly political speech rather than a malicious attempt to harm people (e.g. get people to trample eachother fleeing the building)
Right now you can basically say anything, even flat out lies, in political ads and speeches and face no consequences.
Right now they don't face legal consequences. In a healthy democracy, a politician caught lying should have lots of consequences if voters value honesty. Unfortunately our democracy is not healthy, and voters do no value honesty in the sense that they are not willing to spend the effort out find out who is honest, nor are they willing to "waste" a vote on an honest candidate if they feel they can't win or belong to an opposing party. They are in effect tolerating dishonesty by valuing other things like partisanship (i.e. voting with their party) more, if they vote at all.
Something needs to change. Either level the playing field (between the super wealthy and the average citizen) by restricting the amounts that can be spent, or strengthen libel and slander laws to govern political speech. Most other modern countries do both those things to a greater extent than the US.
How would you restrict the amounts that can be spent? Simply passing a law that each person can only spend $2500 per campaign isn't going to do it. How do you prevent rich people from giving other people money to donate for them? The company I work for offers to give a charity of your choice $1.50 for each $1 you contribute to their PAC. So lets say I donate $2000 to a political campaign that benefits my boss because my boss promised to donate $3000 to doctors without borders if I did. How do you make that illegal?
This is just one example. But the number of loopholes in how to get money where it wants to go is nearly infinite.
If you strengthen libel and slander laws, you will give the rich even more power to crush their detractors. Every claim you make about someone rich will be grounds for litigation from a team of expensive lawyers. Yes you might be able to prove your case in court, but it will take a lot of time, effort, money, and lawyers of your own to do so.
What needs to change is that we need an informed and engaged electorate. All the other problems get solved when we have this. All the other potential solutions (like campaign finance restrictions) only seek to mask this symptoms of this greater problem. We don't want a lot of money in politics because money is able to convince stupid people to vote for a bad choice. The solution is to stop people from being stupid, not to remove the money (because there isn't a good way to remove the money without also removing freedom of speech).
If I am a billionaire and I want to spend $1 million of my own money on political lawn signs and give them away to like-minded people for free. I am not donating to a campaign directly. How do you word a law to prevent me from doing this?
With technology, there is no need to take verbatim notes. The teacher/professor can just upload his powerpoint slides and a video of the whole lecture to the web.
The problem it seems is that notes serve 2 different purposes. #1 Make an accurate record of the lecture contents, #2 Distill the lecture information in a way that will help you remember/understand key points. #2 Can lose a lot of information, and I know I myself am guilty of distilling lectures to the point of missing some key points. I think the reason people take verbatim notes, is because they are worried that their distilling process is not perfect.
People are making a tradeoff between learning the material quickly (i.e. concentrating on the lecture) but risk losing some information, and capturing all the material (i.e. taking exhaustive notes) for later review at the expense of loss of concentration during the lecture. This provides the benefit of potentially learning everything but with the cost of learning it more slowly.
If we completely remove the need to make an accurate recordings of the lecture (#1), by simply providing these, then we are free to concentrate on #2 or not even taking any notes and just listening intently. It's ok if you miss things because you can always just rewatch the video or look at the slides.
I'd dare say that the only reason it will be cheaper with a CC to buy a phone is because you can actually pay it off faster than the two years that you'd be stuck in a contract with a single provider.
I did the math assuming you pay off the card at 20% interest rate for 2 years. As far as I know, you can make credit card payments last for indefinitely by paying the minimum or you can pay them off immediately, and everything in between.
Bear in mind also that there's really no difference in principle to being locked into paying off credit card debt and locked into a single cell phone service contract for two years.
The difference is that by tying your phone debt to your mobile provider, you lose freedom to change your provider and your provider independently. When your phone is subsidized, you don't have the option of paying your phone off early to save money, or transfer the debt to a lower interest creditor. Also, every time you need a new subsidized phone, you need o sign another 2 year agreement, and most of the phones you buy from providers are locked to that provider ensuring that if you ever change providers, you will be forced to buy a new phone.
Buying your phone separately frees your from this cycle. It is not more expensive if you do it correctly.
You can't just decide with the former that you won't pay them anymore until what you owe has been settled, neither can you do so with the latter.
I am not suggesting that in either case you can avoid paying your debts. I am saying that if you separate your mobile contract from your phone loan, you have more freedom to pay them off individually. For the same reason that there is no reason to buy your car and your house together in one loan, there is no reason to buy your phone and 2 years of service and lump them into one loan. Being able to sell your car and keep paying your mortgage like normal (e.g. without setting up a new loan) is a good thing. Being able to sell your phone and get a new one without getting a new 2 year service agreement is a good thing.
Except that the payments to your credit card for the phone, plus the cost of the service, will result in higher monthly expenses overall until the phone is finished being paid for.
I showed an example where it comes out basically the same monthly price on a credit card that charges 20% interest. In reality you should be using a card with like 10%, but I made it 20% because I know a lot of people don't have good credit.
The fact that it's cheaper in the long run is moot if you can't afford it in the short term.
I am saying it's cheaper in the long term (if you buy the phone outright) and the same price in the short term if you have bad credit (20% interest rate) and cheaper in the short term if you have good credit (10% interest rate).
Slashdot Mirror
Amending the constitution so that corporations are not people would make this a much easier situation. If that were not possible, then my second scenario of limiting all "people" to some small amount per election cycle would work.
People are already limited in what they can spend per election cycle directly to official campaigns, however it seems that corporations prefer to donate to PACs which simply spend money on their own commercials, bypassing the official campaigns.
I think the bigger issue is that if we want to prevent PACs from airing their own commercials, you need to have an objective way of deciding what a political ad is in order to make it illegal, and it must both catch actual political ads while not catching any legitimate non-political ads. I can see a lot of ways in which political ads can be made "less political" to avoid regulations, and also ways in which people could prevent certain legitimate ads from airing by abusing a law of this sort.
It would be way harder to coordinate, and you could be very sure that each individual would be very aware about where the money was going. If Walmart attempted to get all its employees to donate to one particular political candidate, it would be not only a much more transparent donation, but all those donating would need to agree.
Would it be acceptable to you, if corporations could donate unlimited money that was transparent?
Right now, many corporations that employee vast swaths of the American public are actively donating to issues and candidates that are not in the best interests of their employees.
Imagine Walmart asking its employees to donate to a PAC whose political purpose was to lobby against a minimum wage hike... :)
Also, I think it's probably pretty easy to get Walmart employees to agree to donate to a political campaign. You just give them money. They are desperate. I guarantee that if you gave each walmart employee $3000 to donate $2500 to a candidate they hated, most would do it. They have families to feed.
Poor people can not even be bothered to vote in their own interest. I don't think they will be able to refuse money even if it means helping a republican campaign (that they did not even care enought o vote against).
I'll bet a pretty big percentage of Walmart employees are poor white people who vote for republicans. So they are already voting against their interest. They will be even happier to take money to vote the same way they were already going to.
I read your whole post, and gave the reason why it seemed to indicate that you did not read the original article. I read the entire original article and your entire post. Maybe you should admit that you were mistaken in saying "the whole advantage of the long term contract is it allows you to get very expensive models for a much smaller comparative monthly payment." if that's not what you meant.
Continuing to nitpick grammar mistakes is still childis. I am not willing to spend the time to ensure my slashdot comments are error free. I will continue to focus on content.
I am not sure exactly how this number scale maps to reality. I'm sure everyone has their own idea of what a 7/10 programmer actually is.
That said, competent programmers are capable of orders of magnitude more productivity. They are able to design software correctly from the beginning. This leads to less time spent on reworking parts of the software when design flaws are found, less time spent hunting down bugs that are due to poor design, less time spent learning on the job, and less time spent maintaining software that is hard to maintain due to poor design.
Mediocre programmers, in my opinion of what counts as mediocre, actually end up being more expensive than good programmers who command much higher salaries. It is cheaper to spend $3000/day on a good software engineer who finishes the job in one day than it is to pay a mediocre software engineer $50/day to finish the job in 3 months. Not too mention the fact that a mediocre software engineer will probably never be able to produce something of quality until he/she becomes a good software engineer.
It's not a question of "which jobs are easy enough to finish for a 5/10 programmer". There are very few jobs that a competent programmer can not do more cheaply for the same (and usually better) quality of work, due to expending less effort and time to do it.
My advice to any 5/10 - 7/10 programmers out there is to become better at your craft. You will be more productive, make more money, your customers will be happier, and you will have less stress and be happier. It's easier to love your job when you are really good at it.
I would also like to note that I don't think it is necessarily the case that mediocre software engineers are incompetent. I can envision a day when mediocre software engineers are perfectly competent, but that's not the case today.
I work at a company where we actually hire 5/10 - 9/10 programmers, and I would estimate that the 5's and 6's actually do not produce any code that's actually usable. It always needs to eventually be replaced by an 8 or 9. The only thing 5's and 6's are useful for is unit testing, because it frees up good programmers to be productive rather than doing things that don't require much skill.
The good news is that even if you are a mediocre programmer, and can somehow manage to get hired, you will probably eventually be promoted to being a manager provided you are reasonably responsible and not anti-social.
Energy is energy. Maybe it's not efficient to use solar power to synthesize hydrocarbons like octane, but you can put liquid hydrogen in a container.
Mortgages are long term thinking in relation to renting. Sure it would be nice to save all your money and buy a house with cash, but unless your alternative to a mortgage is squatting, I don't see how mortgages count as short term thinking.
You can live in a way nicer house by renting than by paying a mortgage, the downside is that after 30 years of renting, you don't have anything to show for it.
OK so you've found a place where I made a grammar mistake. Congratulations. Despite you're apparently perfect grammar, the actual content of your post is what I was criticizing.
The fact that you can find a grammar mistake in one of my posts doesn't change anything. I'm 100% sure I could find a place where you have made a grammar mistake and throw it in your face, but this would be a pretty childish response.
Do you think most of Western Europe just has smarter more engaged people? Americans are just less intelligent or less interested in politics?
I think Western Europeans are on average smarter and more engaged in politics than Americans. I don't think Europeans like politics more than Americans, but I think they take seriously the idea that who and what they vote for matters, and because of this attitude it actually does matter.
Americans are pretty apathetic when it comes to voting, and rightly so. Our votes do not really matter. But the reason our votes don't matter is because we have allowed our political process to go unchecked for so long.
It's like studying for a big test. You can start studying 20 minutes before the test, and then lament the fact that studying didn't seem to help. I am one of the only people I know who actually reads propositions and candidate positions and watches debates (at the federal, state, and city level). I have voted in every single election since I turned 18. I am not excited by politics, I am disgusted by it, but I feel a sense of civic responsibility.
This is something of a chicken/egg situation. Until you get the money more regulated in politics, and get TV/Radio ads held to higher standards of honesty, the population will never become more informed. As long as MSNBC and Fox can twist the truth so extremely as to make their message so misleading that is literally is causing harm in society... the electorate will not become more informed.
I agree except that I feel it is probably easier to educate people in a basically free society (even with Fox News, etc), than it would be to get money out of politics given an apathetic and ignorant electorate. I don't think either is easy. I think one is hard and one is impossible.
How would we prevent an organization from receiving money from a millionaire and donating that on his/her behalf? Simple. Organizations/Corporations cannot spend money on anything that a court of law would rule is related to politics. The only organization that is allowed to spend money talking about the campaign or politics in general, would be the campaign itself. And that money would be capped each election cycle. Harsh? Yeah. But it could be done.
So does this mean you would outlaw individual people from spending their own money on political messages?
Or... since corporations are apparently people, each corporation is treated like a person. They get to spend that same 100 dollars (total) that a real person can spend. That goes for any PAC as well.
The problem I see with this is that all corporations and groups of people are comprised of individuals. Doing things in the name of a corporation makes it easy to do certain things, and it shields individuals from consequences (e.g. corporations can't be imprisoned). But if you make it illegal for a corporation to do something, they can just have the individuals do it instead. My company gets it's employees to make donations to a PAC, but they could have us donate directly to political campaigns instead, it would just be a little harder to coordinate.
You state Craigslist is "unregulated" but there is no regulations for services that act like Craigslist, such as the local newspaper's classified section..
Yes it's true that unregulated things are not regulated, and regulated things are regulated.
If one posts or answers an ad in the newspaper or on Craigslist, and on is cheated, raped, robbed, or killed, that is not the fault of Craigslist or the newspaper.
And if it were regulated, then responsibility might fall on the newspaper or some regulating body, as it would be their job to ensure it was safe.
But, taxis and taxi services are regulated. Uber and Lyft are not complying with those regulations.
I am not saying they are complying with the regulations. I am saying that these services are working perfectly fine even without the regulations.
The drivers are not just advertising with Uber, but are acting as either independent contractors or employees of Uber, just like taxi drivers are either employees or independent contractors of the taxi services.
I would agree they are independent contractors of Uber.
This makes Uber at least partially responsible for the acts and actions of the drivers.
We as a society get to decide these sorts of things. You are mixing up "is" and "ought" (i.e. descriptive vs. normative). I am not suggesting that Uber would never be held responsible for the actions of their contractors in a court. I am questioning whether this is the way it should be.
The fact that Uber has that $1,000,000 insurance policy listed as a benefit of Uber is tacit admission of the fact.
It would be crazy not to have insurance given the amount of litigation that we have. I don't think having insurance is a tacit admission of anything except your acknowledgement that you are probably going to get sued in the future.
By failing to state exactly what regulations Craigslist should be following and why, you have admitted you don't know what you are talking about.
I find your argument style to be a tacit admission that you can't engage in a discussion where you aren't able to tell people what their own positions are.
I *don't* think craigslist should be following regulations. I think craigslist is able to operate just fine without them. I think taxis can operate just fine without them as well, under a good framework (such as uber). I am not saying that no taxi service ever benefitted from regulations. I am saying that technology can make some regulations no longer necessary.
The industry that Craigslist participates in has very few, if any, regulations while for-hire transportation is regulated at the local and state level, and occasionally at the federal level.
The arguments that "Things should be regulated if they are heavily regulated" or "If things shouldn't be regulated, if they aren't regulated" are not convincing to me.
You don't what you are talking about because you are ignorant of the regulations that are involved and used a false comparison.
By making all these assumptions your are tacitly admitting that you can't have an adult conversation.
I think you are the one that needs to go back to school. I used "your" correctly, unless you can explain what "you are lead sentence" means.
Please state exactly what the fuck are you talking about? Failure to do so will be a tacit admission that you are unqualified to decide what tacit admissions are made by others.
Craigslist is unregulated. Why isn't everyone on craigslist cheating, raping, killing and robbing people? I know some people on craigslist are bad apples, but the vast majority are just honest people trying to have a mutually beneficial deal.
I know some cities/countries have cabs that try to cheat you. They also have people on the street trying to cheat you too. I don't think it's the lack of regulation that's the problem. I think it's the fact that some 3rd world countries are so poor that dishonest livings become very tempting, especially when their customers are foreigners with lots of money.
I think uber will do just fine without the regulation. It has the ability to review drivers and riders. I have had nothing but good experiences with uber.
That allows memories to be retrieved but it also loses information in the process. But they point out that this cannot be how real memory works; otherwise, retrieving memories repeatedly would cause them to gradually decay.
I remember hearing a radiolab episode on NPR talking about how memories actually get modified every time you recall them.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/91569-memory-and-forgetting/
Maybe the radiolab episode is completely wrong, but I don't think it's fair to assume memories are lossless without providing some evidence of this.
I wasn't really making an argument, but I also don't think forcibly unionizing anyone could be considered a free market approach either.
Imagine if there's this shirt that you want to buy, but its only sold in a package for $200 with 4 other shirts sized XXXL which you will never wear. Does it even make sense to buy the bundle?
Yeah and imagine if the shirt by itself were $190, then paying $200 for a 5 pack (where you can;t use 4 of them doesn't sound so bad). We live in a world where the shirt companies just need $200 from every customer and they have unlimited shirts. charging $200 for a shirt seems outrageous so they try to help you rationalize by giving 5 shirts for the price of 1.
You could let people play 10 fold for only the channels they want and the cable companies still wouldn't make as much money. That's a pretty good reason for the cable companies to either keep the model they've got, or to charge more than ten fold per channel.
I Think it would probably cost the same price to get just what you want. They already know you aren't watching most of the channels, but it doesn't cost them any more money to give you all of them.
The only time they are losing money is when they are giving you something for free that you would have been willing to pay for.
I am convinced that the price per channel would go up if everyone was able to purchase channels a la carte.
It costs $X to produce all the content, and they need to charge each customer more than $Y (where y = x / number of customers) on average in order to make a profit. Everybody knows no one could possibly be watching 200 channels. But if all of a sudden people decide they want to only pay for 20 channels, then everybody is going to be paying the same price for just those 20 channels.
People want a la carte because they think it will be cheaper, but it probably won't be on average. For example It'll be cheaper for people who watch 5 channels and more expensive for people who watch 30.
The real way to save money on a la carte, is to cut out the middle man (e.g. the cable companies). If you can purchase content directly from the supplier (e.g. from HBO, or comedy central, etc), that's however many less salaraies that need to be paid by your subscription costs.
Critics say they believe expanding the H-1B visa program will allow lower-paid foreign workers to take American jobs. The plan immediately drew fire from Republicans. Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, accused the administration of acting unilaterally to change immigration law and bring in tens of thousands of potential competitors with Americans for jobs.
I thought Republicans were supposed to support free markets. What could be less free market than limiting the number of immigrants to artificially keep the price of American labor high? Furthermore, I would have assumed some big companies that need H1B visas would have bribed all the politicians by now... What gives?
Refusing to invest in coal industries does not help reduce carbon emissions and pollution one jot.
Do you not believe that investment drives use?
If there's ever a polluting industry it would be the so-called renewables which use rare earths and cause massive pollution.
I didn't mention anything about renewables, but I will agree that solar does in fact generate a lot of pollution, wind not so much. The pollution from coal is on a level orders of magnitude higher than any renewables. It even causes more radioactive waste than nuclear does. Coal is by far the dirtiest form of energy we have.
I am not sure why helping to reduce carbon emissions and pollution counts as a political statement. Maybe investing in science is a political statement too because so many Republicans believe in the bible as the ultimate source of truth.
You're post goes like this:
The whole advantage of the long term contract is X
Oh and also Y
Oh and also Z
Where X is already completely addressed. And now you are complaining that I focused on X rather than Y and Z? I focused on your lead sentence because that is what your lead sentence directs the reader to do.
We do limit free speech in cases of that speech harming society. The old saying "Can't yell fire in a crowded theater", etc.. other country's have heavier regulations around the spending of cash on political advertisements
In fact you can yell fire in a crowded movie theater. Penn and Teller actually yell fire in a crowded movie theater as part of their nightly act in Las Vegas. Their point is that yelling fire in a crowded movie theater under the right context (if it is meant as political speech, rather than as a way to harm people), should be protected as speech.
Political ads are most certainly political speech rather than a malicious attempt to harm people (e.g. get people to trample eachother fleeing the building)
Right now you can basically say anything, even flat out lies, in political ads and speeches and face no consequences.
Right now they don't face legal consequences. In a healthy democracy, a politician caught lying should have lots of consequences if voters value honesty. Unfortunately our democracy is not healthy, and voters do no value honesty in the sense that they are not willing to spend the effort out find out who is honest, nor are they willing to "waste" a vote on an honest candidate if they feel they can't win or belong to an opposing party. They are in effect tolerating dishonesty by valuing other things like partisanship (i.e. voting with their party) more, if they vote at all.
Something needs to change. Either level the playing field (between the super wealthy and the average citizen) by restricting the amounts that can be spent, or strengthen libel and slander laws to govern political speech. Most other modern countries do both those things to a greater extent than the US.
How would you restrict the amounts that can be spent? Simply passing a law that each person can only spend $2500 per campaign isn't going to do it. How do you prevent rich people from giving other people money to donate for them? The company I work for offers to give a charity of your choice $1.50 for each $1 you contribute to their PAC. So lets say I donate $2000 to a political campaign that benefits my boss because my boss promised to donate $3000 to doctors without borders if I did. How do you make that illegal?
This is just one example. But the number of loopholes in how to get money where it wants to go is nearly infinite.
If you strengthen libel and slander laws, you will give the rich even more power to crush their detractors. Every claim you make about someone rich will be grounds for litigation from a team of expensive lawyers. Yes you might be able to prove your case in court, but it will take a lot of time, effort, money, and lawyers of your own to do so.
What needs to change is that we need an informed and engaged electorate. All the other problems get solved when we have this. All the other potential solutions (like campaign finance restrictions) only seek to mask this symptoms of this greater problem. We don't want a lot of money in politics because money is able to convince stupid people to vote for a bad choice. The solution is to stop people from being stupid, not to remove the money (because there isn't a good way to remove the money without also removing freedom of speech).
If I am a billionaire and I want to spend $1 million of my own money on political lawn signs and give them away to like-minded people for free. I am not donating to a campaign directly. How do you word a law to prevent me from doing this?
With technology, there is no need to take verbatim notes. The teacher/professor can just upload his powerpoint slides and a video of the whole lecture to the web.
The problem it seems is that notes serve 2 different purposes. #1 Make an accurate record of the lecture contents, #2 Distill the lecture information in a way that will help you remember/understand key points. #2 Can lose a lot of information, and I know I myself am guilty of distilling lectures to the point of missing some key points. I think the reason people take verbatim notes, is because they are worried that their distilling process is not perfect.
People are making a tradeoff between learning the material quickly (i.e. concentrating on the lecture) but risk losing some information, and capturing all the material (i.e. taking exhaustive notes) for later review at the expense of loss of concentration during the lecture. This provides the benefit of potentially learning everything but with the cost of learning it more slowly.
If we completely remove the need to make an accurate recordings of the lecture (#1), by simply providing these, then we are free to concentrate on #2 or not even taking any notes and just listening intently. It's ok if you miss things because you can always just rewatch the video or look at the slides.
I'd dare say that the only reason it will be cheaper with a CC to buy a phone is because you can actually pay it off faster than the two years that you'd be stuck in a contract with a single provider.
I did the math assuming you pay off the card at 20% interest rate for 2 years. As far as I know, you can make credit card payments last for indefinitely by paying the minimum or you can pay them off immediately, and everything in between.
Bear in mind also that there's really no difference in principle to being locked into paying off credit card debt and locked into a single cell phone service contract for two years.
The difference is that by tying your phone debt to your mobile provider, you lose freedom to change your provider and your provider independently. When your phone is subsidized, you don't have the option of paying your phone off early to save money, or transfer the debt to a lower interest creditor. Also, every time you need a new subsidized phone, you need o sign another 2 year agreement, and most of the phones you buy from providers are locked to that provider ensuring that if you ever change providers, you will be forced to buy a new phone.
Buying your phone separately frees your from this cycle. It is not more expensive if you do it correctly.
You can't just decide with the former that you won't pay them anymore until what you owe has been settled, neither can you do so with the latter.
I am not suggesting that in either case you can avoid paying your debts. I am saying that if you separate your mobile contract from your phone loan, you have more freedom to pay them off individually. For the same reason that there is no reason to buy your car and your house together in one loan, there is no reason to buy your phone and 2 years of service and lump them into one loan. Being able to sell your car and keep paying your mortgage like normal (e.g. without setting up a new loan) is a good thing. Being able to sell your phone and get a new one without getting a new 2 year service agreement is a good thing.
Except that the payments to your credit card for the phone, plus the cost of the service, will result in higher monthly expenses overall until the phone is finished being paid for.
I showed an example where it comes out basically the same monthly price on a credit card that charges 20% interest. In reality you should be using a card with like 10%, but I made it 20% because I know a lot of people don't have good credit.
The fact that it's cheaper in the long run is moot if you can't afford it in the short term.
I am saying it's cheaper in the long term (if you buy the phone outright) and the same price in the short term if you have bad credit (20% interest rate) and cheaper in the short term if you have good credit (10% interest rate).