The first piece of high tech equipment students should be introduced to is a digital calculator for the calculation of trignometric functions and the rest of the elementary functions. These should most certainly NOT be allowed in the primary school cycle
It's ridiculous that kinds in primary school aren't dealing with trignometric functions. We are just being lazy underachievers when we allow students to be relearning the 4 basic operations in high school. I have an in-law who took a beginning algebra class in college. WTF!!!, but most people are worse!!!
Calculus is something you should master by age 12 at the latest.
I wasted so many years of my life being taught math that I already knew. It feels like a crime that I was made to wait until 8th grade algebra before things got to be tolerably fast enough. The brain changes with time; adults tend to have more difficulty learning. It hurts to think how much better I would be at math had I had the opportunity to learn more of it while still young.
At present, there is a miniscule minority of students who are interested in learning anything at all. This fraction grows smaller as the majority ridicules them for their interest.
It is impossible to teach an unwilling student, and they only serve to disrupt those who are interested in receiving knowledge.
I have a solution for this. We need to provide motivation and/or eliminate the rotten kids. We can do this by selecting the worst 1% each year and putting them to use elsewhere. The low performers can become biodiesel, fertilizer, pet food, and other useful products. This policy will cause many parents to care greatly about their children's educational progress. It's also environmentally friendly.
As a side effect, class sizes could only go down.
My solution does that too, reducing class size in high school by more than 10%.
First, we got better nutrition. This helps brains. Yay!
Then, we changed the evolutionary selection pressure in a HUGE way. 100 years might not be all that long, but we're facing selection pressure like we've never had before: the sudden emergence of effective birth control. If your brain leads you to have "success" with birth control, you are STRONGLY selected against. If your brain leads you to "fail" at birth control, then your descendents will populate the world. There are a few other selection factors at work here too: kids don't have a tendency to starve without a father because of child support and welfare, so there is no evolutionary downside to getting pregnant by a man who won't stick around.
Rich: Jail is yucky. It's boring, the food tastes like crap, and you can't play polo. When you get out, you can go back to your normal routine. (you have no job, the butler has kept the house nice, etc.)
Middle: Jail is a personal disaster of unimaginable horror. You lose your job. You are unable to even respond to your creditors, never mind pay them. You thus lose your car and your home. This likely means you lose a spouse and/or your children; the state will find adoptive parents for your children if your spouse doesn't just take them while moving in with his/her new lover. You will never gain the same sort of employment ever again, because you now have a criminal record. Your finances will never recover.
Poor: Jail kind of sucks sometimes. You might get a bad roommate, it's hard to keep facebook updated, and you have to do unspeakable things to get any drugs. On the upside you don't need to worry about finding food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and heat. All your needs are taken care of, and nothing much is expected of you. You almost certainly didn't have an intact family to begin with, so no loss there. If you are friendly you can even get special treatment, play games, lift weights, and so on. All in all, it's not such a bad deal.
The negotiating countries will need to sign this treaty from the start, but at least they get a chance to water it down.
Other countries get dragged into signing it later, with no chance to change anything. Ever notice how the USA makes DMCA-like laws a requirement of any trade-related treaty?
I expect you're trolling, but you got modded up so...
NO.
Just one single 0-day exploit is out of the ordinary. Of course every exploit becomes public this way, so it's not unheard of. Four 0-day exploits is shocking. It has never happened before. They are some pretty ideal exploits too, suggesting that the attacker has enough that he can pick and choose.
There were two driver signing keys, both normally used by legit companies. These keys were stolen (spy or malware), cracked, or obtained by government demand. Two of them!! I don't think this has ever happened for even one key before, never mind two.
Obscure hardware used to control a factory is manipulated. That's never been publicly seen before.
As an extra bonus, pretty much all anti-virus software is soundly defeated. This includes behavior-analysis types, not just signature-based types.
No kidding. SGI's Altix is a huge box full of multi-core IA-64 processors. 512 to 2048 cores is more normal, but they were reaching 10240 last I checked. This is SMP (NUMA of course), not a cluster. I won't say things work just lovely at that level, but it does run.
The CPSC could stick to something useful, like banning products with hidden and unexpected dangers, but no. As a government agency they must expand to get more power. They are self-interested. They attract power-hungry people who desire to control what we can buy. They attract people who like to show off a list of accomplishments that allegedly protect the children.
I still miss the lawn darts. (jarts) Lawn darts could kill you, but they were fun (unlike anything that meets approval) and they helped to remove idiots from the gene pool.
Fortunately the CPSC haven't yet banned power tools, so I can still find toys for my kids. Home Depot and Lowe's are the new toy stores.
To pick an older one that I'm familiar with, consider the SHARC. Floating point is plenty fast. Assuming you don't take advantage of weird features available only to an assembly language programmer, floating point will be faster than fixed point. (there is special fixed-point hardware that the C compiler will not take advantage of)
The PowerPC "G4" is nearly a DSP, especially if you ignore the MMU. There again, floating point is fast. You get a throughput of 4 floating-point operations (even fused-multiply-add) per cycle.
The danger with floating point is that lots of DSP chips do badly with denormalized floating point numbers. These numbers map to zero or are slower. You can find that code suddenly runs slow when the audio is nearly silent.
I feel like the site has developed (and in part always had) a primary purpose of attacking U.S. foreign policy. The site needs to be more than that if it is to be a true data haven.
It sure does look that way. Assange clearly has political goals that go beyond exposing corruption, fraud, and the like. How can I trust him to not be selectively suppressing things or even editing things?
Originally I recall there was an emphasis on corporate wrongdoing. So-and-so just dumped 50000 gallons of dioxin in the Mississippi River, some OS keyword searching your email and forwarding some of it to the RIAA, etc.
That "collateral murder" thing removed any doubt I had. First of all, "murder" is a specific type of killing; it is a particular class of unlawful killing. Neither accidents nor acts of war qualify, of which the events were both. Before even releasing the original video, he made a short version of of the video which lacked much of the context. He stripped out pictures that showed people running around with AK-47 and RPG-7 weapons. He also stripped out scenes that might remind viewers that there is much confusion in battle.
It's a simple matter of cost/benefit. It wouldn't be reasonable (nor healthy) to have a woman doing absolutely nothing but "looking after" her children for 18+ years. Specially in those last few years, it would be counterproductive. Now, before I go on, I want you to know I didn't answer because I mistook your question as being serious. I did just so you can visualise the level of absurdity
Absurdity, hmmm?
Both my grandmothers did exactly that. One had a college degree. The other had a HS diploma, which was quite fancy for a female who grew up in the Great Depression. My mother did nearly that, except for a bit of part-time work near the end. My wife is a full-time mother. AFAIK, all of her friends are full-time mothers.
It's not counterproductive. It produces decently educated people who stay out of prison.
And if her job description included "being nice and all that", then she could be effortlessly canned for breach of contract without any legal (or ethical, for that matter) repercussions. But I'm guessing her job description didn't include any of that.
Your "job description" sounds like a union concept. It's static. The employer gets in trouble if I tighten a screw on my desk because I'm not in the union with the contract to tighten screws on desks.
In the sane world, a job description is an approximate description used for hiring. The employee is generally expected to do whatever is asked. He can of course refuse because he is not a slave, but then of course he may lose his job.
It's people like you who support the parasitic army of lawyers that is choking our economy. It's people like you who would have me sit idle for weeks while waiting for somebody with the proper job description to get around to unpacking my computer. That union attitude is an anti-productive poison that will ultimately sink our economy below that of places that don't put up with such nonsense.
when removing the white to transparency in a picture, it made the whole thing translucent. I still don't know why or how it happened, since all I did was use the "colour to alpha" tool, which is supposed to turn that specific colour to transparent.
It is "supposed to"??? Why, because that's what it means in Photoshop?
My expectation would be that the amount of the chosen color is used to determine transparency. In your case (you chose white) only pure black would remain opaque.
I will admit that having both alpha and layer masks is complex, but I'd be surprised if Photoshop didn't have this complexity as well.
I think you'd be better off making a color-based selection, paying attention to the feathering and anti-aliasing options. Better yet, use the magic scissors tool, which is sort of a freehand-select that snaps to edges. Hit the quickmask button to fix any defects, especially if you selected by color and there might be areas of that color within the object you want to keep. Once you have the selection, make that transparent or just invert it and copy the object alone.
Remember that the selection, the alpha channel(s), and the layer mask(s) are all interchangable and invertable. You can move the object outline from one to another.
denial, even on Slashdot == we're boned
on
Behind Cyberwar FUD
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
For those of us in-the-know, it's painful to see people like you here on Slashdot. Due to NDA and various laws, we obviously can't go pointing out exactly how the USA truly is at risk.
Rest assured that this stuff is on the Internet, it's buggy as hell, it's misconfigured, and the passwords are as lame as you can imagine. We're already hacked into, at all levels, both government and private.
The main limitations for the attackers are a lack of obscure knowledge and their own preference for quietly stealing information. Why screw with a super-crufty undocumented railroad control system when you could be reading Hillary's email or picking up a copy of the F-35 radar software?
The MOST important stage in development is the first year.
What about the second most important stage, the third most important stage, and so on? Why short change the child? Doesn't the child deserve a full-time mother?
Would you really compare spending half a year playing everquest to raising a child, in the terms of the benefits to society?
Not seriously, but I would compare those things in terms of fairness to other employees.
Are you sure you didn't mean the substitute was way "nicer" instead of "better"? Or hotter? Or flirtier?
That too, but more importantly NOT LAZY and NOT RUDE. For a random office helper (book travel, keep the snacks in stock, run out to buy office supplies, etc.) it is important to be polite and have a can-do attitude. Yes, that means likeable; she's not paid for manual labor or engineering talent. When highly-paid engineers would rather do her work themselves because the she is too painful to deal with, there is a problem.
Then the fact that she has the job in the first place should be investigated. The HR guy who hired should get canned
Maybe the job had to be filled quickly. Maybe there were few candidates who qualified (seriously: many fail the background check) In any case, a candidate isn't going to announce that they are a lazy bitch.
Having hired the person and paid the training costs, getting a replacement isn't cheap. There is even a chance that the replacement will be worse. As long as the lazy bitch does the bare minimum, finding a replacement is too much effort and expense to bother with.
Of course, once we're forced to find somebody else and that person turns out to be wonderful, everything changes.
And I very much doubt you'd just go "hey, such is life! time to find a new job!", and leave the old company alone (legally speaking)
WTF? Why not? I'm not saying I'd be happy of course, but I certainly don't have a right to the job. I could even be slightly pissed off, but seriously NOBODY OWES ME A JOB. How can you possibly think otherwise? That's a disturbing sense of entitlement you have.
There are two sides to the mindless and ruthless corporativism. Poor people benefit tremendously from the way it pushes down prices at Walmart.
The source of the problem is elsewhere. We're expecting more, and often requiring it by law. For example, cars are more expensive because we require air bags and emissions controls. All sorts of laws (safety, environment, etc.) are driving up costs; any cost paid by a corporation is really paid by the customers. We have also made manual labor nearly worthless via automation, illegal immigrants (slaves nearly) and outsourcing.
He's here on slashdot, so it's highly likely that he earns more than enough to support a family on a single income. If he feels that he can't, then the problem is almost certainly his expenses.
For the couple who work low-paying jobs, it's different of course. Childcare can easily cost more than one of them earns. While that can mean that staying home is a financial win, more likely it just means that they can't afford to have kids.
I happen to think this is a sad situation, but we've made life unaffordable with luxury legislation. Consider that Ford's original Model T is cheap to produce, but illegal to sell as a new car. It's like that with everything: homes (building code), medicine, food (FDA), the environment, child labor, social security, worker safety, etc. All these luxuries are nice, and perhaps individually affordable, but in total they make life unaffordable. (your house costs more, etc.) We'd be in trouble even if we weren't stuck competing with countries that don't care about that stuff.
I don't understand your connection between maternity leave and latch-key kids.
It supports the notion that one can be a part-time parent. It encourages mothers to return to work right before the leave runs out, to avoid losing the job. (they may be uncertain if they wish to return; if they don't return on time then they lose the option and thus they feel a need to return at that time)
Also, how does paternity leave factor into that?
In a family that flips the traditional roles around, it amounts to the same thing. (not that I suggest flipping the roles, at least for babies, because formula feeding reduces IQ in the baby and fails to protect the mother from cancer)
If you meant BOTH parents being home for a while, that's just weird. I've never met a guy who wouldn't be embarrassed to do that. There is a feeling that it is being a slacker, letting your coworkers down, and taking unfair advantage of the system.
The problem there is that children benefit from laws that encourage families to stick together and provide full-time parenting. The tax breaks help make it possible for a mother to stay home, and this helps the family to stay intact. Helping the unmarried people with kids would create a perverse incentive, leading to more broken families.
you know, some of us actually believe the point of life is not to labor as a wage slave. that if society were set up in such a way to maximize individual happiness instead of profit, corporations would take a dent, but capitalism would go right on ticking, and we would be happier people with richer lives. exactly what is wrong with that goal?
Nothing. I agree.
It is important for people and corporations to have low costs related to job changes. This keeps things efficient.
BTW, it entends beyond employment: it should be much cheaper and faster to buy/sell a house, and there shouldn't be any tax incentive (property tax oddities for example) to avoid moving as required to get better employment.
meanwhile, you seem wedded to the ravenous idea that toiling for the corporation should be the end-all consume-all point of life
Nope. You seem wedded to the idea that everybody has to have all the latest toys and entertainment, or perhaps you think that fathers are not valuable. A proper family has one wage earner and one homemaker. In so many ways (education, violence, drug abuse, girls getting pregnant in high school, etc) the traditional family has proven superior for kids. Sell the McMansion, sell the second (third???) giant luxury SUV, ditch the cable TV and costly cell phone plans, and forget about travelling around the world. You don't need to keep up with the neighbors; they are drowning in debt and have no time for day-to-day family life.
Slashdot Mirror
The first piece of high tech equipment students should be introduced to is a digital calculator for the calculation of trignometric functions and the rest of the elementary functions. These should most certainly NOT be allowed in the primary school cycle
It's ridiculous that kinds in primary school aren't dealing with trignometric functions. We are just being lazy underachievers when we allow students to be relearning the 4 basic operations in high school. I have an in-law who took a beginning algebra class in college. WTF!!!, but most people are worse!!!
Calculus is something you should master by age 12 at the latest.
I wasted so many years of my life being taught math that I already knew. It feels like a crime that I was made to wait until 8th grade algebra before things got to be tolerably fast enough. The brain changes with time; adults tend to have more difficulty learning. It hurts to think how much better I would be at math had I had the opportunity to learn more of it while still young.
At present, there is a miniscule minority of students who are interested in learning anything at all. This fraction grows smaller as the majority ridicules them for their interest.
It is impossible to teach an unwilling student, and they only serve to disrupt those who are interested in receiving knowledge.
I have a solution for this. We need to provide motivation and/or eliminate the rotten kids. We can do this by selecting the worst 1% each year and putting them to use elsewhere. The low performers can become biodiesel, fertilizer, pet food, and other useful products. This policy will cause many parents to care greatly about their children's educational progress. It's also environmentally friendly.
As a side effect, class sizes could only go down.
My solution does that too, reducing class size in high school by more than 10%.
First, we got better nutrition. This helps brains. Yay!
Then, we changed the evolutionary selection pressure in a HUGE way. 100 years might not be all that long, but we're facing selection pressure like we've never had before: the sudden emergence of effective birth control. If your brain leads you to have "success" with birth control, you are STRONGLY selected against. If your brain leads you to "fail" at birth control, then your descendents will populate the world. There are a few other selection factors at work here too: kids don't have a tendency to starve without a father because of child support and welfare, so there is no evolutionary downside to getting pregnant by a man who won't stick around.
The effect of jail varies greatly with income.
Rich: Jail is yucky. It's boring, the food tastes like crap, and you can't play polo. When you get out, you can go back to your normal routine. (you have no job, the butler has kept the house nice, etc.)
Middle: Jail is a personal disaster of unimaginable horror. You lose your job. You are unable to even respond to your creditors, never mind pay them. You thus lose your car and your home. This likely means you lose a spouse and/or your children; the state will find adoptive parents for your children if your spouse doesn't just take them while moving in with his/her new lover. You will never gain the same sort of employment ever again, because you now have a criminal record. Your finances will never recover.
Poor: Jail kind of sucks sometimes. You might get a bad roommate, it's hard to keep facebook updated, and you have to do unspeakable things to get any drugs. On the upside you don't need to worry about finding food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and heat. All your needs are taken care of, and nothing much is expected of you. You almost certainly didn't have an intact family to begin with, so no loss there. If you are friendly you can even get special treatment, play games, lift weights, and so on. All in all, it's not such a bad deal.
The negotiating countries will need to sign this treaty from the start, but at least they get a chance to water it down.
Other countries get dragged into signing it later, with no chance to change anything. Ever notice how the USA makes DMCA-like laws a requirement of any trade-related treaty?
I expect you're trolling, but you got modded up so...
NO.
Just one single 0-day exploit is out of the ordinary. Of course every exploit becomes public this way, so it's not unheard of. Four 0-day exploits is shocking. It has never happened before. They are some pretty ideal exploits too, suggesting that the attacker has enough that he can pick and choose.
There were two driver signing keys, both normally used by legit companies. These keys were stolen (spy or malware), cracked, or obtained by government demand. Two of them!! I don't think this has ever happened for even one key before, never mind two.
Obscure hardware used to control a factory is manipulated. That's never been publicly seen before.
As an extra bonus, pretty much all anti-virus software is soundly defeated. This includes behavior-analysis types, not just signature-based types.
OK, so why can't I buy lawn darts?
Oddly, I can still buy a chainsaw. We've all heard that "what goes up must come down", but getting saw kickback is not so obvious.
No kidding. SGI's Altix is a huge box full of multi-core IA-64 processors. 512 to 2048 cores is more normal, but they were reaching 10240 last I checked. This is SMP (NUMA of course), not a cluster. I won't say things work just lovely at that level, but it does run.
48 cores is nothing.
The CPSC could stick to something useful, like banning products with hidden and unexpected dangers, but no. As a government agency they must expand to get more power. They are self-interested. They attract power-hungry people who desire to control what we can buy. They attract people who like to show off a list of accomplishments that allegedly protect the children.
I still miss the lawn darts. (jarts) Lawn darts could kill you, but they were fun (unlike anything that meets approval) and they helped to remove idiots from the gene pool.
Fortunately the CPSC haven't yet banned power tools, so I can still find toys for my kids. Home Depot and Lowe's are the new toy stores.
Merely explore the drive, and it runs. It has to do with how Windows draws icons for *.lnk files.
To pick an older one that I'm familiar with, consider the SHARC. Floating point is plenty fast. Assuming you don't take advantage of weird features available only to an assembly language programmer, floating point will be faster than fixed point. (there is special fixed-point hardware that the C compiler will not take advantage of)
The PowerPC "G4" is nearly a DSP, especially if you ignore the MMU. There again, floating point is fast. You get a throughput of 4 floating-point operations (even fused-multiply-add) per cycle.
The danger with floating point is that lots of DSP chips do badly with denormalized floating point numbers. These numbers map to zero or are slower. You can find that code suddenly runs slow when the audio is nearly silent.
I feel like the site has developed (and in part always had) a primary purpose of attacking U.S. foreign policy. The site needs to be more than that if it is to be a true data haven.
It sure does look that way. Assange clearly has political goals that go beyond exposing corruption, fraud, and the like. How can I trust him to not be selectively suppressing things or even editing things?
Originally I recall there was an emphasis on corporate wrongdoing. So-and-so just dumped 50000 gallons of dioxin in the Mississippi River, some OS keyword searching your email and forwarding some of it to the RIAA, etc.
That "collateral murder" thing removed any doubt I had. First of all, "murder" is a specific type of killing; it is a particular class of unlawful killing. Neither accidents nor acts of war qualify, of which the events were both. Before even releasing the original video, he made a short version of of the video which lacked much of the context. He stripped out pictures that showed people running around with AK-47 and RPG-7 weapons. He also stripped out scenes that might remind viewers that there is much confusion in battle.
In shops along the border, they have prices in both dollars and pesos. They carefully distinguish, using $ with 1 or 2 vertical lines as appropriate.
If you'd said "My three daughters" then there would be a glimmer of hope. If you'd said "My twenty children then we'd really have some hope.
One kid isn't even enough to replace you and your wife. It's pitiful. The general-purpose idiots have a half dozen at minimum, more if religous.
Sorry to say it, but your genes are being selected against. Ditch the birth control if you want to improve the world.
It's a simple matter of cost/benefit. It wouldn't be reasonable (nor healthy) to have a woman doing absolutely nothing but "looking after" her children for 18+ years. Specially in those last few years, it would be counterproductive. Now, before I go on, I want you to know I didn't answer because I mistook your question as being serious. I did just so you can visualise the level of absurdity
Absurdity, hmmm?
Both my grandmothers did exactly that. One had a college degree. The other had a HS diploma, which was quite fancy for a female who grew up in the Great Depression. My mother did nearly that, except for a bit of part-time work near the end. My wife is a full-time mother. AFAIK, all of her friends are full-time mothers.
It's not counterproductive. It produces decently educated people who stay out of prison.
And if her job description included "being nice and all that", then she could be effortlessly canned for breach of contract without any legal (or ethical, for that matter) repercussions. But I'm guessing her job description didn't include any of that.
Your "job description" sounds like a union concept. It's static. The employer gets in trouble if I tighten a screw on my desk because I'm not in the union with the contract to tighten screws on desks.
In the sane world, a job description is an approximate description used for hiring. The employee is generally expected to do whatever is asked. He can of course refuse because he is not a slave, but then of course he may lose his job.
It's people like you who support the parasitic army of lawyers that is choking our economy. It's people like you who would have me sit idle for weeks while waiting for somebody with the proper job description to get around to unpacking my computer. That union attitude is an anti-productive poison that will ultimately sink our economy below that of places that don't put up with such nonsense.
Gimp has all that.
Hint: to run filter tools on masks, you can enable quickmask mode (a toggle button in the corner) or you can convert the mask to/from a regular layer.
when removing the white to transparency in a picture, it made the whole thing translucent. I still don't know why or how it happened, since all I did was use the "colour to alpha" tool, which is supposed to turn that specific colour to transparent.
It is "supposed to"??? Why, because that's what it means in Photoshop?
My expectation would be that the amount of the chosen color is used to determine transparency. In your case (you chose white) only pure black would remain opaque.
I will admit that having both alpha and layer masks is complex, but I'd be surprised if Photoshop didn't have this complexity as well.
I think you'd be better off making a color-based selection, paying attention to the feathering and anti-aliasing options. Better yet, use the magic scissors tool, which is sort of a freehand-select that snaps to edges. Hit the quickmask button to fix any defects, especially if you selected by color and there might be areas of that color within the object you want to keep. Once you have the selection, make that transparent or just invert it and copy the object alone.
Remember that the selection, the alpha channel(s), and the layer mask(s) are all interchangable and invertable. You can move the object outline from one to another.
For those of us in-the-know, it's painful to see people like you here on Slashdot. Due to NDA and various laws, we obviously can't go pointing out exactly how the USA truly is at risk.
Rest assured that this stuff is on the Internet, it's buggy as hell, it's misconfigured, and the passwords are as lame as you can imagine. We're already hacked into, at all levels, both government and private.
The main limitations for the attackers are a lack of obscure knowledge and their own preference for quietly stealing information. Why screw with a super-crufty undocumented railroad control system when you could be reading Hillary's email or picking up a copy of the F-35 radar software?
The MOST important stage in development is the first year.
What about the second most important stage, the third most important stage, and so on? Why short change the child? Doesn't the child deserve a full-time mother?
Would you really compare spending half a year playing everquest to raising a child, in the terms of the benefits to society?
Not seriously, but I would compare those things in terms of fairness to other employees.
Are you sure you didn't mean the substitute was way "nicer" instead of "better"? Or hotter? Or flirtier?
That too, but more importantly NOT LAZY and NOT RUDE. For a random office helper (book travel, keep the snacks in stock, run out to buy office supplies, etc.) it is important to be polite and have a can-do attitude. Yes, that means likeable; she's not paid for manual labor or engineering talent. When highly-paid engineers would rather do her work themselves because the she is too painful to deal with, there is a problem.
Then the fact that she has the job in the first place should be investigated. The HR guy who hired should get canned
Maybe the job had to be filled quickly. Maybe there were few candidates who qualified (seriously: many fail the background check) In any case, a candidate isn't going to announce that they are a lazy bitch.
Having hired the person and paid the training costs, getting a replacement isn't cheap. There is even a chance that the replacement will be worse. As long as the lazy bitch does the bare minimum, finding a replacement is too much effort and expense to bother with.
Of course, once we're forced to find somebody else and that person turns out to be wonderful, everything changes.
And I very much doubt you'd just go "hey, such is life! time to find a new job!", and leave the old company alone (legally speaking)
WTF? Why not? I'm not saying I'd be happy of course, but I certainly don't have a right to the job. I could even be slightly pissed off, but seriously NOBODY OWES ME A JOB. How can you possibly think otherwise? That's a disturbing sense of entitlement you have.
There are two sides to the mindless and ruthless corporativism. Poor people benefit tremendously from the way it pushes down prices at Walmart.
The source of the problem is elsewhere. We're expecting more, and often requiring it by law. For example, cars are more expensive because we require air bags and emissions controls. All sorts of laws (safety, environment, etc.) are driving up costs; any cost paid by a corporation is really paid by the customers. We have also made manual labor nearly worthless via automation, illegal immigrants (slaves nearly) and outsourcing.
He's here on slashdot, so it's highly likely that he earns more than enough to support a family on a single income. If he feels that he can't, then the problem is almost certainly his expenses.
For the couple who work low-paying jobs, it's different of course. Childcare can easily cost more than one of them earns. While that can mean that staying home is a financial win, more likely it just means that they can't afford to have kids.
I happen to think this is a sad situation, but we've made life unaffordable with luxury legislation. Consider that Ford's original Model T is cheap to produce, but illegal to sell as a new car. It's like that with everything: homes (building code), medicine, food (FDA), the environment, child labor, social security, worker safety, etc. All these luxuries are nice, and perhaps individually affordable, but in total they make life unaffordable. (your house costs more, etc.) We'd be in trouble even if we weren't stuck competing with countries that don't care about that stuff.
I don't understand your connection between maternity leave and latch-key kids.
It supports the notion that one can be a part-time parent. It encourages mothers to return to work right before the leave runs out, to avoid losing the job. (they may be uncertain if they wish to return; if they don't return on time then they lose the option and thus they feel a need to return at that time)
Also, how does paternity leave factor into that?
In a family that flips the traditional roles around, it amounts to the same thing. (not that I suggest flipping the roles, at least for babies, because formula feeding reduces IQ in the baby and fails to protect the mother from cancer)
If you meant BOTH parents being home for a while, that's just weird. I've never met a guy who wouldn't be embarrassed to do that. There is a feeling that it is being a slacker, letting your coworkers down, and taking unfair advantage of the system.
Here's the deal - there's nothing inherently wrong with polygamy.
Polygamy benefits low-quality women and high-quality men. The high-quality women and low-quality men suffer.
Every society with polygamy has an excess of frustrated men. (the less desirable ones) This causes huge problems.
The problem there is that children benefit from laws that encourage families to stick together and provide full-time parenting. The tax breaks help make it possible for a mother to stay home, and this helps the family to stay intact. Helping the unmarried people with kids would create a perverse incentive, leading to more broken families.
Again, no law can be defect-free.
you know, some of us actually believe the point of life is not to labor as a wage slave. that if society were set up in such a way to maximize individual happiness instead of profit, corporations would take a dent, but capitalism would go right on ticking, and we would be happier people with richer lives. exactly what is wrong with that goal?
Nothing. I agree.
It is important for people and corporations to have low costs related to job changes. This keeps things efficient.
BTW, it entends beyond employment: it should be much cheaper and faster to buy/sell a house, and there shouldn't be any tax incentive (property tax oddities for example) to avoid moving as required to get better employment.
meanwhile, you seem wedded to the ravenous idea that toiling for the corporation should be the end-all consume-all point of life
Nope. You seem wedded to the idea that everybody has to have all the latest toys and entertainment, or perhaps you think that fathers are not valuable. A proper family has one wage earner and one homemaker. In so many ways (education, violence, drug abuse, girls getting pregnant in high school, etc) the traditional family has proven superior for kids. Sell the McMansion, sell the second (third???) giant luxury SUV, ditch the cable TV and costly cell phone plans, and forget about travelling around the world. You don't need to keep up with the neighbors; they are drowning in debt and have no time for day-to-day family life.