If employee populations should be representative of customers, would Facebook be better off if they made the education and salary of their employees representative of their users? If paid their engineers $50k a year and hired mostly non-STEM majors? Would your hospital deliver better health care if its medical staff was representative of its patients in terms of education and salary? Would teachers teach better if they were representative of the student population? The whole point of an economy and division of labor is that businesses and their customers are not representative of each other.
Of course, as far as race is concerned, it is just irrelevant. I mean, who but a racist would seriously believe that you have to be (fill in some race) in order to write web software for (same race)?
Assuming "lifetime earnings" has the obvious meaning (the actual article is paywalled), the small advantage STEM degrees have in this study is probably more than made up for the loss of a decade of investment and compound interest; it's even worse if you have taken on debt while getting your degree.
Other studies also concluded that both college and advanced degrees are probably largely break-even financially overall.
If the employees of Walmart want to donate to a political issue, or group together to buy an advertisement, go for it. If the owners of Walmart want to donate to a political issue, go for it.
Citizens United has nothing to do with Walmart. The "corporations" that Citizens United was about was not-for-profit corporations, specifically created for the purpose of citizen participation. You know, everything from the Sierra Club and the ACLU to Citizens United.
But just like we limit direct campaign contributions, there is no reason we couldn't limit individual political spending.
There's no reason why we couldn't transform ourselves into a fascist dictatorship either; that doesn't make it a good idea.
It's because there is a massive power imbalance between the employer and employee. Generally speaking, the employee needs a job more than the employer needs the employee.
If the employer doesn't get the employees he needs with the skill he needs to get the job done, he goes out of business and gets no money, often very quickly.
As an employee, you have lots of choices and options: you can work for many different employers, you can choose to live off your savings, you can change fields, and you can even go on welfare. All of that gives you a lot of power to negotiate.
Of course, if you don't have any savings, aren't flexible, and don't have a good resume, your options are very limited and you may have to take the first job that's offered to you. But that's like saying that when you max out your credit cards, there is a power imbalance between you and the bank. True, there is, but why should anybody care?
Electricity in Germany is about 3x as expensive as it is in the US. Electricity is not just what you pay at home, but it's a big component of the price of goods and services, so German consumers are paying a premium for this.
It depends -- what do you mean by "get the job done"? If the cheaper shop will do the minimum possible and do it so fast...
Well, and that's what the people who hire at a business go through as well: "Is 3 years experience sufficient, or do we need the guy with 10 years? Can we save some money here or is it better to hire the more expensive guy?" AC is complaining about the fact that business make those kinds of tradeoffs.
Most people learn at some point in their lives that cheapness often comes with significant costs
Most people buy overpriced "luxury" crap that's made in the same Chinese factories as the cheap stuff. Most people buy stuff that is way too expensive for their income(*). Most people have little retirement savings and lots of credit card debt. Many people overpaid for their houses and mortgages. Most Americans are careless with money and don't understand business.
So, you're right -- an employer pays as much as he thinks he needs to "get the job done" to his standards. If he wants to raise the standards, it might be worth raising the wage and the qualifications necessary for the job.
That's his decision to make. You'd be surprised how good businesses are at making those kinds of decisions. And if the cheap employee doesn't work out, they'll fire him and hire someone more qualified.
Businesses are also very good at figuring out how to get rid of your job entirely if it gets too expensive: they'll eliminate it by buying more expensive equipment or just outsource it to a service provider, possibly overseas. That's what usually happens when government tries to keep the wrong people in jobs.
The real solution is specific plain-English rules sent to every employer by the labor board
No, the real solution is for people to get out of fields where there is an oversupply of labor that lets employers get away with this b.s., because employers in fields where supply and demand are in balance don't behave this way. In fields where labor is scarce, employers will go out of their way to make your life good and retain you, and those are the fields you want to be in. Of course, those kinds of fields also require more skill and dedication that a network engineering certificate.
Forcing businesses to overpay for labor just means that your entire job category becomes a candidate for automation, or even outsourcing, either to contracting firms, or straight overseas.
I think it depends on the job. I've heard that IT tends to be bad, but that's mostly because there are so many workers with the same set of certificates all scrambling for the same low tier jobs that they feel they must be the wage slave just to survive.
Yes, we have an oversupply of some kinds of IT personnel, and people have inflated expectations. The solution is for people to suck it up, deal with the fact that they spent money and time on a worthless certificate, and then go do something different.
Yep. It's not like you have to eat, make rent, pay medical bills or any of that.
Yes, and it is your responsibility to learn something that people actually want to pay you good money for. If you go to college, then become a network engineer, and then there is no demand for network engineers anymore, that's your responsibility, just as if you go to college, learn art history, and then don't get a job as an art historian.
You seem to think that "business" (really, the rest of the world) owes you a good living just because you learned something you thought would be a marketable skill. That's not just stupid, it's greedy and offensive.
Note that, no matter how dumb and greedy your personal choices are, you don't have to starve in the US.
The irony, of course, is that a lot of those restrictions are really just rooted in middle class greed and selfishness; all that progressive talk about social responsibility and equality is just window dressing, and many of the "social programs" just funnel money and benefits in the hands of the educated middle class. The same people who pretend they want to help the poor look down their noses at Walmart, rednecks, and NASCAR.
10 years experience in networking? Minimum wage and no breaks, or this guy over here - who was 3 years experience - will take the job. See how that works?
Yes, that is the way it's supposed to work. If one car repair shop charges you $200/h and another $100/h, and you know they both get the job done, which one are you going to take your car to? Are you willing to pay extra if the $200/h shop's mechanic has a Ph.D. in English literature?
I don't see what you think is wrong with businesses choosing cheap labor and paying only for qualifications they actually need: you do the same thing in your daily life.
Calling it "Workaholism" implies we have a choice.
That's because we do have a choice.
The job market sucks, and it's never going to get any better.
In different words, there are other people willing to do your job for less, and you don't like it. Your beef isn't with business, it's with the people you compete against and who are either better or cheaper than you.
Heck, is it just me or can nobody in the American Media do anything except blame the workers?
I don't see anybody "blaming" anybody. It's a pretty simple transaction: you set the terms under which you offer your labor and businesses either buy from you or they buy from someone else. No blame involved, and nothing personal.
We don't have a "leader". Obama is head of the executive branch; he's supposed to keep the government running, implement the laws that Congress passes, and otherwise, like all the other presidents, Obama should STFU. It's little proto-fascists like you that want to be led by a "Fuhrer".
Managing individual agencies are the responsibilities of the individual directors.
Yes, appointed by Obama. And it is his job to appoint people who obey the law and come down hard on them when they don't. He has failed to do that. Notice how Eric Holder is still in office?
You're trying to rescue an argument that simply doesn't work because you're mixing up many different forms of government and stages of economic development. The data shows you that low inequality is neither necessary nor sufficient for democratic government, simple as that. Economically, if you dig a bit deeper, you'll find that low income inequality is negatively correlated with economic growth for developing nations, but for developed nations it is positively correlated. I'd rather live in a high growth democracy than in a low growth one.
And the US is such an outlier economically, politically, and socially that you can't simply carry over correlations to the US anyway. Places like Finland, Norway, Switzerland, and Luxembourg are data points in all these statistics, but they are smaller than some US counties. And even small, wealthy countries like Luxembourg or Norway are economically far behind wealthy US counties.
If Perl really isn't dead yet, could we please put it out of its misery and shoot it? Then drive a stake through its heart, burn it, encase the ash in cement, and then bury it in a silver urn, just to make sure that it will never, ever come back?
I didn't use the term "inequity", and it means something very different from "inequality". Don't conflate the two terms, and don't put such words in other people's mouths.
Second, to answer your question, simply take this list:
sort by whichever index you like, and then look near the bottom. You'll find plenty of non-democratic nations with low income inequality. A prime example of low income inequality in a non-democratic nation was the GDR. Nazi Germany also managed to reduce income inequality strongly, right until the very end; in fact, "reducing inequality" and "restoring economic fairness" was the core political message of the Nazis and what got them elected. Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Kuwait also seem to have low income inequality despite having undemocratic elites in power.
Finally, your comment that "North Korea has a very high level of inequity when you include the government elite" may or may not be right (GPI estimates 31, which would be quite low), but the fact that you state it as if it were an obvious fact shows that you have another misconception about income inequality: contrary to what you think, measures of income inequality usually don't actually measure elites. In particular, US income inequality is largely a result of a strong upper middle class and professional class, not the super-rich (there simply aren't enough of them, and they don't have that much income); measurably reducing income inequality in the US is only possible by taxing the upper middle class heavily, that is successful doctors, lawyers, engineers, and small business owners.
There's a plausible argument that people shouldn't lose their free speech rights just because they get together in order to exercise them, or formalize their arrangement by forming a corporation.
There's also a plausible argument to be made that if you can't spend your money on, say, traveling places to speak or buying poster boards for signs, you can't actually speak. In fact, if you can't spend any money related to political speech, your speech is largely limited to speaking to yourself at home.
The Eric Cantor case was an exception, not the rule. In most cases, the politician who greatly outspends his opponent usually wins
Usually, politicians who are likely to win simply attract more donations because they are more popular to begin with. They also get lots of money from people who agree with their politics. Those correlations don't mean that spending money causes them to win, nor for that matter that their political decisions are influenced by donations. Actual data shows little actual influence of money on the outcome of elections.
There are many campaign finance systems around the world, and a lot of experience with them in other countries. Can you provide clear and concrete evidence that the kind of mechanisms you envision work better in practice in other countries?
What, in fact, are your objective criteria for "better democracy"?
Note that it is insufficient to cite factors that you prefer for ideological reasons. For example, particular forms of campaign finance may correlate with lower levels of income inequality, but if that's your argument, you are really arguing that we should change the campaign finance system to achieve your political objectives, not in order to achieve a better democracy (low levels of income inequality are not by themselves an indication of a functioning democracy, since low income inequality exists even in many non-democratic nations).
MayDay.US promises to "reduce the influence of money". That's a good sound bite, but the reason other people don't like your proposals is not that they like "the influence of money", but that they don't see any way of reducing that that doesn't do more harm than good. So, please be specific: what outcome do you actually envision and desire, and how are the details going to work? You propose "public funding" or "vouchers", but you are vague on who gets to make the decisions about (1) who violates your rules, (2) who the money can go to, and (3) who will still be allowed to use their own resources for political purposes.
(1) If you impose restrictions on political speech, someone needs to be in charge of determining which political speech is in violation of the restrictions you envision. For example, does generally opposing a political ideology count as political speech that I can't spend money on? Is this determined by the courts? The executive branch? Why wouldn't that power be abused by incumbents?
(2) Who can I give the vouchers that pay for political speech to? Just candidates? Not-for-profits? For-profits? Would it be a felony to sell these vouchers for money?
(3) You work for a rich and powerful organization, and many media organizations are rich and powerful too. Will universities and news corporations be subject to the same restrictions on political speech? Will you be prohibited from speaking on political issues? Will the editors of the NYT be prohibited from commenting on candidates? If not, why should they be exempted? Why should the $32+ billion company you work for have rights to engage in political speech that other companies do not?
There are many campaign finance systems around the world, and a lot of experience with them in other countries. Can you provide clear and concrete evidence that the kind of mechanisms you envision work better in practice? What, in fact, are your quantifiable criteria for "better democracy"?
MayDay.US promises to "reduce the influence of money". That's a good sound bite, but the reason other people don't like your proposals is not that they like "the influence of money", but that they don't see any way of reducing that that doesn't do more harm than good. So, please be specific: what outcome do you actually envision and desire, and how are the details going to work? You propose "public funding" or "vouchers", but you are vague on who gets to make the decisions about (1) who violates your rules, (2) who the money can go to, and (3) who will still be allowed to use their own resources for political purposes.
(1) If you impose restrictions on political speech, someone needs to be in charge of determining which political speech is in violation of the restrictions you envision. For example, does generally opposing a political ideology count as political speech that I can't spend money on? Is this determined by the courts? The executive branch? Why wouldn't that power be abused by incumbents?
(2) Who can I give the vouchers that pay for political speech to? Just candidates? Not-for-profits? For-profits? Would it be a felony to sell these vouchers for money?
(3) You work for a rich and powerful organization, and many media organizations are rich and powerful too. Will universities and news corporations be subject to the same restrictions on political speech? Will you be prohibited from speaking on political issues? Will the editors of the NYT be prohibited from commenting on candidates? If not, why should they be exempted? Why should the $32+ billion company you work for have rights to engage in political speech that other companies do not?
The President - any President - has an obligation to order subordinates (like the US Marshals) to stop acting illegally?
I didn't say he had an obligation to "order" them to stop acting illegally; obviously, talking isn't going to do much good. He has the obligation to actually stop this. He could have started by firing Holder.
The office of the President is not a law enforcement position...
The president is the head of the executive branch and hence the DoJ. He has appointed Eric Holder and tells him what to do. Any major scandal in the DoJ is automatically the president's responsibility, because he either knew about it or should have known about it. That's his job.
What did you think the president's job was? Reading prepared statements off a teleprompter?
Slashdot Mirror
If employee populations should be representative of customers, would Facebook be better off if they made the education and salary of their employees representative of their users? If paid their engineers $50k a year and hired mostly non-STEM majors? Would your hospital deliver better health care if its medical staff was representative of its patients in terms of education and salary? Would teachers teach better if they were representative of the student population? The whole point of an economy and division of labor is that businesses and their customers are not representative of each other.
Of course, as far as race is concerned, it is just irrelevant. I mean, who but a racist would seriously believe that you have to be (fill in some race) in order to write web software for (same race)?
With STEM degrees, you usually go on to at least a Master, if not a Ph.D. A college degree in most STEM fields isn't worth much by itself.
Assuming "lifetime earnings" has the obvious meaning (the actual article is paywalled), the small advantage STEM degrees have in this study is probably more than made up for the loss of a decade of investment and compound interest; it's even worse if you have taken on debt while getting your degree.
Other studies also concluded that both college and advanced degrees are probably largely break-even financially overall.
Citizens United has nothing to do with Walmart. The "corporations" that Citizens United was about was not-for-profit corporations, specifically created for the purpose of citizen participation. You know, everything from the Sierra Club and the ACLU to Citizens United.
There's no reason why we couldn't transform ourselves into a fascist dictatorship either; that doesn't make it a good idea.
If the employer doesn't get the employees he needs with the skill he needs to get the job done, he goes out of business and gets no money, often very quickly.
As an employee, you have lots of choices and options: you can work for many different employers, you can choose to live off your savings, you can change fields, and you can even go on welfare. All of that gives you a lot of power to negotiate.
Of course, if you don't have any savings, aren't flexible, and don't have a good resume, your options are very limited and you may have to take the first job that's offered to you. But that's like saying that when you max out your credit cards, there is a power imbalance between you and the bank. True, there is, but why should anybody care?
Electricity in Germany is about 3x as expensive as it is in the US. Electricity is not just what you pay at home, but it's a big component of the price of goods and services, so German consumers are paying a premium for this.
Well, and that's what the people who hire at a business go through as well: "Is 3 years experience sufficient, or do we need the guy with 10 years? Can we save some money here or is it better to hire the more expensive guy?" AC is complaining about the fact that business make those kinds of tradeoffs.
Most people buy overpriced "luxury" crap that's made in the same Chinese factories as the cheap stuff. Most people buy stuff that is way too expensive for their income(*). Most people have little retirement savings and lots of credit card debt. Many people overpaid for their houses and mortgages. Most Americans are careless with money and don't understand business.
That's his decision to make. You'd be surprised how good businesses are at making those kinds of decisions. And if the cheap employee doesn't work out, they'll fire him and hire someone more qualified.
Businesses are also very good at figuring out how to get rid of your job entirely if it gets too expensive: they'll eliminate it by buying more expensive equipment or just outsource it to a service provider, possibly overseas. That's what usually happens when government tries to keep the wrong people in jobs.
(*) See whether you're driving a car you can afford: http://www.financialsamurai.co...
No, the real solution is for people to get out of fields where there is an oversupply of labor that lets employers get away with this b.s., because employers in fields where supply and demand are in balance don't behave this way. In fields where labor is scarce, employers will go out of their way to make your life good and retain you, and those are the fields you want to be in. Of course, those kinds of fields also require more skill and dedication that a network engineering certificate.
Forcing businesses to overpay for labor just means that your entire job category becomes a candidate for automation, or even outsourcing, either to contracting firms, or straight overseas.
Yes, we have an oversupply of some kinds of IT personnel, and people have inflated expectations. The solution is for people to suck it up, deal with the fact that they spent money and time on a worthless certificate, and then go do something different.
Yes, and it is your responsibility to learn something that people actually want to pay you good money for. If you go to college, then become a network engineer, and then there is no demand for network engineers anymore, that's your responsibility, just as if you go to college, learn art history, and then don't get a job as an art historian.
You seem to think that "business" (really, the rest of the world) owes you a good living just because you learned something you thought would be a marketable skill. That's not just stupid, it's greedy and offensive.
Note that, no matter how dumb and greedy your personal choices are, you don't have to starve in the US.
The irony, of course, is that a lot of those restrictions are really just rooted in middle class greed and selfishness; all that progressive talk about social responsibility and equality is just window dressing, and many of the "social programs" just funnel money and benefits in the hands of the educated middle class. The same people who pretend they want to help the poor look down their noses at Walmart, rednecks, and NASCAR.
Yes, that is the way it's supposed to work. If one car repair shop charges you $200/h and another $100/h, and you know they both get the job done, which one are you going to take your car to? Are you willing to pay extra if the $200/h shop's mechanic has a Ph.D. in English literature?
I don't see what you think is wrong with businesses choosing cheap labor and paying only for qualifications they actually need: you do the same thing in your daily life.
No dilemma at all, and a false analogy.
The mobster threatens you with violence if you don't give him what he wants.
A business simply offers you a job and a salary. If you don't like the offer, pass on it. No threats, no obligation, no coercion involved.
That's because we do have a choice.
In different words, there are other people willing to do your job for less, and you don't like it. Your beef isn't with business, it's with the people you compete against and who are either better or cheaper than you.
I don't see anybody "blaming" anybody. It's a pretty simple transaction: you set the terms under which you offer your labor and businesses either buy from you or they buy from someone else. No blame involved, and nothing personal.
We don't have a "leader". Obama is head of the executive branch; he's supposed to keep the government running, implement the laws that Congress passes, and otherwise, like all the other presidents, Obama should STFU. It's little proto-fascists like you that want to be led by a "Fuhrer".
Yes, appointed by Obama. And it is his job to appoint people who obey the law and come down hard on them when they don't. He has failed to do that. Notice how Eric Holder is still in office?
You're trying to rescue an argument that simply doesn't work because you're mixing up many different forms of government and stages of economic development. The data shows you that low inequality is neither necessary nor sufficient for democratic government, simple as that. Economically, if you dig a bit deeper, you'll find that low income inequality is negatively correlated with economic growth for developing nations, but for developed nations it is positively correlated. I'd rather live in a high growth democracy than in a low growth one.
And the US is such an outlier economically, politically, and socially that you can't simply carry over correlations to the US anyway. Places like Finland, Norway, Switzerland, and Luxembourg are data points in all these statistics, but they are smaller than some US counties. And even small, wealthy countries like Luxembourg or Norway are economically far behind wealthy US counties.
If Perl really isn't dead yet, could we please put it out of its misery and shoot it? Then drive a stake through its heart, burn it, encase the ash in cement, and then bury it in a silver urn, just to make sure that it will never, ever come back?
I didn't use the term "inequity", and it means something very different from "inequality". Don't conflate the two terms, and don't put such words in other people's mouths.
Second, to answer your question, simply take this list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
sort by whichever index you like, and then look near the bottom. You'll find plenty of non-democratic nations with low income inequality. A prime example of low income inequality in a non-democratic nation was the GDR. Nazi Germany also managed to reduce income inequality strongly, right until the very end; in fact, "reducing inequality" and "restoring economic fairness" was the core political message of the Nazis and what got them elected. Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Kuwait also seem to have low income inequality despite having undemocratic elites in power.
Finally, your comment that "North Korea has a very high level of inequity when you include the government elite" may or may not be right (GPI estimates 31, which would be quite low), but the fact that you state it as if it were an obvious fact shows that you have another misconception about income inequality: contrary to what you think, measures of income inequality usually don't actually measure elites. In particular, US income inequality is largely a result of a strong upper middle class and professional class, not the super-rich (there simply aren't enough of them, and they don't have that much income); measurably reducing income inequality in the US is only possible by taxing the upper middle class heavily, that is successful doctors, lawyers, engineers, and small business owners.
There's a plausible argument that people shouldn't lose their free speech rights just because they get together in order to exercise them, or formalize their arrangement by forming a corporation.
There's also a plausible argument to be made that if you can't spend your money on, say, traveling places to speak or buying poster boards for signs, you can't actually speak. In fact, if you can't spend any money related to political speech, your speech is largely limited to speaking to yourself at home.
It's almost intuitive.
Usually, politicians who are likely to win simply attract more donations because they are more popular to begin with. They also get lots of money from people who agree with their politics. Those correlations don't mean that spending money causes them to win, nor for that matter that their political decisions are influenced by donations. Actual data shows little actual influence of money on the outcome of elections.
There are many campaign finance systems around the world, and a lot of experience with them in other countries. Can you provide clear and concrete evidence that the kind of mechanisms you envision work better in practice in other countries?
What, in fact, are your objective criteria for "better democracy"?
Note that it is insufficient to cite factors that you prefer for ideological reasons. For example, particular forms of campaign finance may correlate with lower levels of income inequality, but if that's your argument, you are really arguing that we should change the campaign finance system to achieve your political objectives, not in order to achieve a better democracy (low levels of income inequality are not by themselves an indication of a functioning democracy, since low income inequality exists even in many non-democratic nations).
MayDay.US promises to "reduce the influence of money". That's a good sound bite, but the reason other people don't like your proposals is not that they like "the influence of money", but that they don't see any way of reducing that that doesn't do more harm than good. So, please be specific: what outcome do you actually envision and desire, and how are the details going to work? You propose "public funding" or "vouchers", but you are vague on who gets to make the decisions about (1) who violates your rules, (2) who the money can go to, and (3) who will still be allowed to use their own resources for political purposes.
(1) If you impose restrictions on political speech, someone needs to be in charge of determining which political speech is in violation of the restrictions you envision. For example, does generally opposing a political ideology count as political speech that I can't spend money on? Is this determined by the courts? The executive branch? Why wouldn't that power be abused by incumbents?
(2) Who can I give the vouchers that pay for political speech to? Just candidates? Not-for-profits? For-profits? Would it be a felony to sell these vouchers for money?
(3) You work for a rich and powerful organization, and many media organizations are rich and powerful too. Will universities and news corporations be subject to the same restrictions on political speech? Will you be prohibited from speaking on political issues? Will the editors of the NYT be prohibited from commenting on candidates? If not, why should they be exempted? Why should the $32+ billion company you work for have rights to engage in political speech that other companies do not?
There are many campaign finance systems around the world, and a lot of experience with them in other countries. Can you provide clear and concrete evidence that the kind of mechanisms you envision work better in practice? What, in fact, are your quantifiable criteria for "better democracy"?
MayDay.US promises to "reduce the influence of money". That's a good sound bite, but the reason other people don't like your proposals is not that they like "the influence of money", but that they don't see any way of reducing that that doesn't do more harm than good. So, please be specific: what outcome do you actually envision and desire, and how are the details going to work? You propose "public funding" or "vouchers", but you are vague on who gets to make the decisions about (1) who violates your rules, (2) who the money can go to, and (3) who will still be allowed to use their own resources for political purposes.
(1) If you impose restrictions on political speech, someone needs to be in charge of determining which political speech is in violation of the restrictions you envision. For example, does generally opposing a political ideology count as political speech that I can't spend money on? Is this determined by the courts? The executive branch? Why wouldn't that power be abused by incumbents?
(2) Who can I give the vouchers that pay for political speech to? Just candidates? Not-for-profits? For-profits? Would it be a felony to sell these vouchers for money?
(3) You work for a rich and powerful organization, and many media organizations are rich and powerful too. Will universities and news corporations be subject to the same restrictions on political speech? Will you be prohibited from speaking on political issues? Will the editors of the NYT be prohibited from commenting on candidates? If not, why should they be exempted? Why should the $32+ billion company you work for have rights to engage in political speech that other companies do not?
I didn't say he had an obligation to "order" them to stop acting illegally; obviously, talking isn't going to do much good. He has the obligation to actually stop this. He could have started by firing Holder.
The president is the head of the executive branch and hence the DoJ. He has appointed Eric Holder and tells him what to do. Any major scandal in the DoJ is automatically the president's responsibility, because he either knew about it or should have known about it. That's his job.
What did you think the president's job was? Reading prepared statements off a teleprompter?