But by preventing employees from moving around freely
Nobody is prevented from "moving around". All these companies do is agree not to actively recruit from each other via cold calls. Believe me, employees move between them all the time.
Workers are vendors of their labor, and the owners of the capital are colluding, like a 'trust', to monopolize & unnaturally control the scarcity of that capital.
Your analogy is wrong.
The "scarce product" here is the labor, and workers own that product. When the owners of that scarce product are colluding to keep its price high, that's called a "labor union". Labor unions and collusion among workers to artificially inflate the price of labor are legal. In fact, in many states, you can be forced to participate in such collusion and price fixing against your will.
In this case, the buyers of the labor collude to keep prices low. That is certainly not analogous to "anti-trust" issues in the way you argue.
Should it be illegal? I still don't see a problem. People move between these companies all the time and there is binding agreement not to hire. People apply from one company to another. External recruiters recruit across those companies.
All these companies have agreed on is to have their HR departments not actively recruit from each other, which frankly seems more analogous to keeping telemarketers from constantly bothering you.
How is that not capitalism ? Capitalism is free market, all the player are free to interact as they please, might it be by competing or by cooperating.
A free market is a market economy in which the forces of supply and demand are free of intervention by a government, price-setting monopolies, or other authority
There are few things that companies can't do in a free market. But when companies collude to form a "price setting monopoly" (and that's what these agreements are in effect), it ceases to be a free market. Free market types like myself don't like that to happen.
By your same logic, the whole open-source community should be forbidden by law to cooperate.
Not all open source activity is free market activity. And not all non-free-market activity is illegal. But if open source developers were to collude to create a price setting monopoly, it should probably be illegal. However, the very nature of open source makes that nearly impossible.
Historically, many regions have experienced large amounts of local climate change, often man-made, and we have coped and adapted. Global climate change is no different: it's happening slowly enough that human migration and economic processes will adapt to it efficiently and without any major problems.
You think that the employer is entitled to perfection while the people working for them have to do all the heavy lifting.
No, I support a free market mentality: employees can quit any time they like, employers can terminate employment any time they like, and conditions between the two are negotiated between them, not imposed by government.
People like you don't like free markets because you think of yourself as an impotent wage slave with no control over your life. Perhaps you are. Perhaps you have no significant marketable skills and no initiative. And you should live with the consequences of your attitudes and conduct: job insecurity and low wages.
That is, the employer gets a pass to make arbitrary decisions on requirements while you expect the workers to forgo economies of scale that could be attained through employer-sponsored training.
Every employer I have ever worked for offered training courses, time off for training, and an annual budget for training. Most supported getting a degree part time. All of that was intended to retain employees.
But some employers may choose not to, and that decision may or may not make sense for them. In a free market, the participants decide what is good for them, and sometimes they make bad decisions. If they make bad decisions, they get punished by the market.
You are part of the problem and deserve whatever comes your way.
Actually, people like you are part of the problem. You sit back and opine on what employers and employees should do, as if there were a one size fits all optimal solution. In effect, you engage in central planning, and history has shown again and again that it doesn't work, and it causes economic stagnation and decline.
The only standard of living that has increased is the access to cheap electronic goods made in china. Sure your desktop computer might be equivalent to to a 1980's supercomputer, but the cost of housing, healthcare, food and energy all have skyrocketed while wages have been stagnant for the past 30 years.
If that were true, food, for example, would be an ever increasing share of our income, yet the opposite is true:
For housing, people have chosen larger and larger homes, which also tells you that the money they have available for housing has increased, not decreased:
And all of that despite increases in taxes and expensive regulations.
Health care, of course, really does consume a larger and larger fraction of our income, but that's for two reasons: (1) regulation and poor policy are driving up costs enormously, and (2) health care in the US today really is in a completely different category than what it was 2-3 decades ago.
So, again, your statements are complete and utter bullshit, as the data shows. We're far better off today than we used to be, and if it weren't for dumb government regulations and interference in the market, we'd be even better off.
I think instead of rewriting the C part, they should improve Vim's scripting language to the point where it can be used for moving larger portions of the editor into it. Vim script is a decent effort, but it feels a bit cumbersome and non-standard. I think they'd be better off with something that more widely used and possibly JIT compiled.
That would be very sensible and not at all capitalist. It'll never happen in USA!
Actually, that is exactly the kind of mechanism capitalism and free markets demand.
The problem is that both major parties are significantly anti-capitalist and anti-free market, the Democrats virulently so, but even the Republicans. Just look at the farm bill vote to see examples of blatant political corruption and anti-market activity. Nobody who voted for that bill should get away with pretending to favor free markets, liberty, or meritocracy.
Let's take your numbers. $80k is your current salary, after training, you'd be worth $100k. Let's say training costs $60k (six months of lost productivity plus $20k in training). After training is complete, you are immediately worth $100k. But the company is out $60k. How are they going to recover that? If they keep paying you $80k for the next three years, you're just going to leave. And if they increase your salary to what you're worth now, they're out the $60k they invested in you. And on top of all that, the work they need done gets delayed by six months while you're doing your training.
The only way they can avoid being out $60k is to fire you and hire someone with the experience they need and pay them what they are worth, $100k. Not only do they not lose the $60k on your training, they also get the skills they need six months earlier. Either way, they are going to make the "$50k value", so that simply doesn't factor into the calculation.
If you actually did that it would put a huge cost burden on the customers. The carriers would have to set aside a large portion of their earnings every year to ensure that they would have enough just to keep the spectrum that they have let alone expand
I think that cost would be factored into the bids, which would simply be much lower. If you rent something for 5 years you pay a lot less than if you rent something for an expected 100 years.
Not to mention that if they lost an auction they would also loose most if not everything that they invested in their network
Again, that would be factored into the bids. Keep in mind that people who buy new spectrum also face a huge investment in order to recoup what they paid.
In the end, I think 5 year bidding would work pretty well: prices would stay about the same or get cheaper (due to increased competition), and equipment would likely become more interoperable.
None of the objections you raise seem to stand up to scrutiny. But I'd be interested in a more solid economic analysis of short term vs long term spectrum auctions.
To pretend employers and employees have equal standing in this system is laughable in a booming economy. In one that's seen a falling standard of living for the last 30 years and a borderline depression for the last five, it's a farce.
What's a "farce" is that people still keep quoting that bullshit. The standard of living has generally been steadily increasing, until about five years ago when things started stagnating.
Not voluntary if it's the only thing keeping you from moving into a refrigerator box and living off food stamps.
It's a voluntary arrangement: you and your employer both agree to the arrangement voluntarily.
Whether you choose to work or choose to live in a refrigerator box is also your personal choice.
On some other planet where what you are paid is primarily dictated by your ability, instead of luck and networking?
You're absolutely right that your pay has little to do with your ability. It is determined primarily by supply and demand. So, even if you're a hotshot Java or JavaScript coder, you shouldn't be making that much money these days because there is a huge and growing supply of those skills.
And you're competing with the entire world; being an American doesn't mean you deserve special privileges.
I think companies should simply forced to face an auction for all their wireless frequencies every five years. That includes radio, TV, cell phone, etc.
In addition, a large chunk should be reserved for unlicensed use. I think WiFi has shown that that kind of use works very well, and more spectrum for that would be nice.
People were at companies for decades because they didn't have a choice: corporations wanted people steeped in their own procedures and corporate culture and they didn't want outsiders.
Yes, everything did start to change around the 80's, and for the better: all of a sudden, workers were treated more like free agents or business owners. That meant that you had the option of switching companies and getting paid what you're actually worth, instead of being stuck in a corporate hierarchy, brown-nosing your way to success.
Of course, it also means that if you don't take personal responsibility for your career, you lose.
We changed from a country-club corporate culture to much more of a meritocracy. I think that's a good change. Of course, you may disagree...
Yes, because having some 13 year old yelling "YOUR TEH GHEY FAGOT LOL" is so much fun.
That... I don't care about. But I want characters to stay... in character. An 1960's Italian mafia boss should usually be a misogynist who likes big boobs, a 1980's black teenage gang member character is going to be homophobic, and a 1930's Nazi character should be anti-semitic. Trying to pretend otherwise is just stupid. And even for actual human players, I prefer if they don't pretend to be something they are not.
Of course, it is good if game developers actually have players and game characters that are diverse. On the other hand, they should shut up about framing this as a question of "social justice". I don't want "social justice" meted out to me by some left wing game developer because he thinks it's the right thing to do for poor, helpless me; I want him to take me serious as a paying customer.
Gaming is one of the last bastions where political incorrectness survives. I hope it will stay that way and that gaming won't get invaded by the armies of the politically correct spoilsports. And, yes, I am a minority and a target of some of these "-isms" and "-phobias".
Running your own business is a good idea, but it's really besides the point. If you run your own business, you very much have to keep your skills up to date, because your clients are even more fickle than a corporate employer. If you keep up to date enough to keep your clients happy, corporate employers will also be happy to keep you around.
Corporate America doesn't care about the long-term good for employees,
And why should Corporate America care? If another employer comes to you and says "I give you $1000/month more for the same job", are you going to stay with your current employer because you care about their long-term good? Of course not. Employment in the US is an voluntary arrangement in which each side is looking out for their own best interests. And when you get hired into positions where Corporate America does care about a long term relationship with you, you'll know it, because there will be retention bonuses and other kind of long term incentives.
If your employer trains you in some hot new technology, he won't ever be able to recoup the expense from you: if he keeps your salary low to pay for it, you'll leave for some place with a higher salary right away, and if he raises your salary to what you're worth after training, he won't recoup the expense of training. Either way, the employer is screwed.
Given that employees have the right to quit whenever they want to, the only thing that makes sense is that employees take responsibility for their own training and keeping their skills up to date.
The idea that private companies would voluntarily take on the expense and risk of giving their customer data to the NSA is ridiculous. Whatever "cooperation" the NSA got from companies must have involved legal and other threats by the NSA both to comply with their demands and to keep silent about it.
Unlike prehistoric times, brain damage today is less likely to get you killed or to prevent you from reproducing. In modern societies, the better your brain functions, the less you reproduce.
And, whaddayaknow, your body has elaborate mechanisms for dealing with food deprivation and starvation. You only die from starvation when your body has run out of all options, and you usually recover fully when your food supply is restored. QED.
Being eaten by tigers was also common and natural. Natural is not a synonym for healthy.
Saying that "sleep deprivation is common and natural" is a shorthand for saying that "sleep deprivation has exerted evolutionary pressure on humans frequently and since prehistoric times". If it caused significant and permanent brain damage, it would have reduced human fitness and been selected against, in particular since we know that there are many mammals that can deal with sleep deprivation just fine. Hence, it is implausible that sleep deprivation causes significant and permanent brain damage.
Are you really so biologically illiterate that you need this spelled out for you? Are you really so biologically illiterate that you are confusing my statement with the common "natural is good" fallacy? Geez.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody is prevented from "moving around". All these companies do is agree not to actively recruit from each other via cold calls. Believe me, employees move between them all the time.
Your analogy is wrong.
The "scarce product" here is the labor, and workers own that product. When the owners of that scarce product are colluding to keep its price high, that's called a "labor union". Labor unions and collusion among workers to artificially inflate the price of labor are legal. In fact, in many states, you can be forced to participate in such collusion and price fixing against your will.
In this case, the buyers of the labor collude to keep prices low. That is certainly not analogous to "anti-trust" issues in the way you argue.
Should it be illegal? I still don't see a problem. People move between these companies all the time and there is binding agreement not to hire. People apply from one company to another. External recruiters recruit across those companies.
All these companies have agreed on is to have their HR departments not actively recruit from each other, which frankly seems more analogous to keeping telemarketers from constantly bothering you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
There are few things that companies can't do in a free market. But when companies collude to form a "price setting monopoly" (and that's what these agreements are in effect), it ceases to be a free market. Free market types like myself don't like that to happen.
Not all open source activity is free market activity. And not all non-free-market activity is illegal. But if open source developers were to collude to create a price setting monopoly, it should probably be illegal. However, the very nature of open source makes that nearly impossible.
Historically, many regions have experienced large amounts of local climate change, often man-made, and we have coped and adapted. Global climate change is no different: it's happening slowly enough that human migration and economic processes will adapt to it efficiently and without any major problems.
No, I support a free market mentality: employees can quit any time they like, employers can terminate employment any time they like, and conditions between the two are negotiated between them, not imposed by government.
People like you don't like free markets because you think of yourself as an impotent wage slave with no control over your life. Perhaps you are. Perhaps you have no significant marketable skills and no initiative. And you should live with the consequences of your attitudes and conduct: job insecurity and low wages.
Every employer I have ever worked for offered training courses, time off for training, and an annual budget for training. Most supported getting a degree part time. All of that was intended to retain employees.
But some employers may choose not to, and that decision may or may not make sense for them. In a free market, the participants decide what is good for them, and sometimes they make bad decisions. If they make bad decisions, they get punished by the market.
Actually, people like you are part of the problem. You sit back and opine on what employers and employees should do, as if there were a one size fits all optimal solution. In effect, you engage in central planning, and history has shown again and again that it doesn't work, and it causes economic stagnation and decline.
If that were true, food, for example, would be an ever increasing share of our income, yet the opposite is true:
http://corncorps.wordpress.com...
For housing, people have chosen larger and larger homes, which also tells you that the money they have available for housing has increased, not decreased:
http://activerain.com/blogsvie...
Ditto for energy.
And all of that despite increases in taxes and expensive regulations.
Health care, of course, really does consume a larger and larger fraction of our income, but that's for two reasons: (1) regulation and poor policy are driving up costs enormously, and (2) health care in the US today really is in a completely different category than what it was 2-3 decades ago.
So, again, your statements are complete and utter bullshit, as the data shows. We're far better off today than we used to be, and if it weren't for dumb government regulations and interference in the market, we'd be even better off.
I think instead of rewriting the C part, they should improve Vim's scripting language to the point where it can be used for moving larger portions of the editor into it. Vim script is a decent effort, but it feels a bit cumbersome and non-standard. I think they'd be better off with something that more widely used and possibly JIT compiled.
Actually, that is exactly the kind of mechanism capitalism and free markets demand.
The problem is that both major parties are significantly anti-capitalist and anti-free market, the Democrats virulently so, but even the Republicans. Just look at the farm bill vote to see examples of blatant political corruption and anti-market activity. Nobody who voted for that bill should get away with pretending to favor free markets, liberty, or meritocracy.
No, your thinking is wrong on so many levels.
Let's take your numbers. $80k is your current salary, after training, you'd be worth $100k. Let's say training costs $60k (six months of lost productivity plus $20k in training). After training is complete, you are immediately worth $100k. But the company is out $60k. How are they going to recover that? If they keep paying you $80k for the next three years, you're just going to leave. And if they increase your salary to what you're worth now, they're out the $60k they invested in you. And on top of all that, the work they need done gets delayed by six months while you're doing your training.
The only way they can avoid being out $60k is to fire you and hire someone with the experience they need and pay them what they are worth, $100k. Not only do they not lose the $60k on your training, they also get the skills they need six months earlier. Either way, they are going to make the "$50k value", so that simply doesn't factor into the calculation.
I think that cost would be factored into the bids, which would simply be much lower. If you rent something for 5 years you pay a lot less than if you rent something for an expected 100 years.
Again, that would be factored into the bids. Keep in mind that people who buy new spectrum also face a huge investment in order to recoup what they paid.
In the end, I think 5 year bidding would work pretty well: prices would stay about the same or get cheaper (due to increased competition), and equipment would likely become more interoperable.
None of the objections you raise seem to stand up to scrutiny. But I'd be interested in a more solid economic analysis of short term vs long term spectrum auctions.
What's a "farce" is that people still keep quoting that bullshit. The standard of living has generally been steadily increasing, until about five years ago when things started stagnating.
It's a voluntary arrangement: you and your employer both agree to the arrangement voluntarily.
Whether you choose to work or choose to live in a refrigerator box is also your personal choice.
You're absolutely right that your pay has little to do with your ability. It is determined primarily by supply and demand. So, even if you're a hotshot Java or JavaScript coder, you shouldn't be making that much money these days because there is a huge and growing supply of those skills.
And you're competing with the entire world; being an American doesn't mean you deserve special privileges.
I think companies should simply forced to face an auction for all their wireless frequencies every five years. That includes radio, TV, cell phone, etc.
In addition, a large chunk should be reserved for unlicensed use. I think WiFi has shown that that kind of use works very well, and more spectrum for that would be nice.
People were at companies for decades because they didn't have a choice: corporations wanted people steeped in their own procedures and corporate culture and they didn't want outsiders.
Yes, everything did start to change around the 80's, and for the better: all of a sudden, workers were treated more like free agents or business owners. That meant that you had the option of switching companies and getting paid what you're actually worth, instead of being stuck in a corporate hierarchy, brown-nosing your way to success.
Of course, it also means that if you don't take personal responsibility for your career, you lose.
We changed from a country-club corporate culture to much more of a meritocracy. I think that's a good change. Of course, you may disagree...
That... I don't care about. But I want characters to stay... in character. An 1960's Italian mafia boss should usually be a misogynist who likes big boobs, a 1980's black teenage gang member character is going to be homophobic, and a 1930's Nazi character should be anti-semitic. Trying to pretend otherwise is just stupid. And even for actual human players, I prefer if they don't pretend to be something they are not.
Of course, it is good if game developers actually have players and game characters that are diverse. On the other hand, they should shut up about framing this as a question of "social justice". I don't want "social justice" meted out to me by some left wing game developer because he thinks it's the right thing to do for poor, helpless me; I want him to take me serious as a paying customer.
And you'll find a lot of smarter companies ready to hire you. Letting good and skilled employees go is a quick way of ruining a company.
Gaming is one of the last bastions where political incorrectness survives. I hope it will stay that way and that gaming won't get invaded by the armies of the politically correct spoilsports. And, yes, I am a minority and a target of some of these "-isms" and "-phobias".
Running your own business is a good idea, but it's really besides the point. If you run your own business, you very much have to keep your skills up to date, because your clients are even more fickle than a corporate employer. If you keep up to date enough to keep your clients happy, corporate employers will also be happy to keep you around.
And why should Corporate America care? If another employer comes to you and says "I give you $1000/month more for the same job", are you going to stay with your current employer because you care about their long-term good? Of course not. Employment in the US is an voluntary arrangement in which each side is looking out for their own best interests. And when you get hired into positions where Corporate America does care about a long term relationship with you, you'll know it, because there will be retention bonuses and other kind of long term incentives.
If your employer trains you in some hot new technology, he won't ever be able to recoup the expense from you: if he keeps your salary low to pay for it, you'll leave for some place with a higher salary right away, and if he raises your salary to what you're worth after training, he won't recoup the expense of training. Either way, the employer is screwed.
Given that employees have the right to quit whenever they want to, the only thing that makes sense is that employees take responsibility for their own training and keeping their skills up to date.
The idea that private companies would voluntarily take on the expense and risk of giving their customer data to the NSA is ridiculous. Whatever "cooperation" the NSA got from companies must have involved legal and other threats by the NSA both to comply with their demands and to keep silent about it.
Unlike prehistoric times, brain damage today is less likely to get you killed or to prevent you from reproducing. In modern societies, the better your brain functions, the less you reproduce.
Humans have had fire for hundreds of thousands of years, more than enough to affect evolution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
It's certainly affected evolution of our diet and digestion, and probably our brains.
My comment was on the interpretation of the study on Slashdot: "Research Suggests Pulling All-Nighters Can Cause Permanent Damage"
And, whaddayaknow, your body has elaborate mechanisms for dealing with food deprivation and starvation. You only die from starvation when your body has run out of all options, and you usually recover fully when your food supply is restored. QED.
Saying that "sleep deprivation is common and natural" is a shorthand for saying that "sleep deprivation has exerted evolutionary pressure on humans frequently and since prehistoric times". If it caused significant and permanent brain damage, it would have reduced human fitness and been selected against, in particular since we know that there are many mammals that can deal with sleep deprivation just fine. Hence, it is implausible that sleep deprivation causes significant and permanent brain damage.
Are you really so biologically illiterate that you need this spelled out for you? Are you really so biologically illiterate that you are confusing my statement with the common "natural is good" fallacy? Geez.