You have got to be kidding. Why should employers get every possible right with no responsibility? As employees, we agree to a fairly strict set of rules (the contract) in exchange for benefits we derive from employers. Money is one of those benefits. There is no reason that security (I'm not talking about a hug when you're sad; it's job security - knowing you'll still have money to eat next month) shouldn't be one of the benefits included in the package.
We give up a lot of our time when we're young and eager and bright and motivated to these companies. What do we get in exchange?
people have been brainwashed since the new deal to think everybody owes them something
If I don't work for a company, they owe me nothing. If I pay no taxes and don't vote, the government owes me nothing. But if I enter into a contract (legal, social, implied or otherwise) with a company or a government, I damn well want them to hold up their side of the bargain.
OK. So because all large companies issue stock options to a) avoid paying employees higher wages and b) avoid paying taxes, it's a good thing? It doesn't matter whether fool.com said that Microsoft is 'cheating.' Do you think it's good that the tax system is set up to let companies like MS and Cisco avoid paying any income tax? How much tax did you pay last year so that MS didn't have to pay any?
Is it Microsoft's fault? Maybe not. It's legal, so it's the fault of the government. But you can be sure MS lobbied for this to get passed, so... The system should be changed.
The problem with launching a rocket is that all of the energy comes from burning some sort of fuel. Fuel has mass. So for every kilo of payload you have, you need to add (for instance) 5 kilos of fuel. But to get that extra 5 kilos of fuel up to the point where it will burn off, you need to add another 4 kilos of fuel. But to get that...
With a track/tower/cable, you can use massless energy sources. Like electricity. Generate on the bottom (or top) and use that to power the elevators. All of a sudden, you eliminate the cost of launching all of that fuel all or part way into space, and you save a lot of money.
Plastic cork is not evil. Wine producers have been wanting to switch to plastic corks (or even screw-on caps) for years, because it eliminates problems with things like TCA (and other impurities) leaching into the wine from the cork. The only reason they haven't been able to is because of the perception amongst win fanatics that 'cork is used for good wine.'
Cork was originally selected as a 'best-available' option to stop up the top of a glass bottle - what else would you use? Now that plastics are available, they preserve the flavours in the wine much more effectively. Cork can taint the wine, or allow other impurities to seep in.
A lot of interesting points. But usually if you mention on Slashdot that we need to ditch our obsession with money, you get attacked for espousing communism.
And until recently, a lot more of the money flowing into university research projects came from governments. And then the current rage for making governments 'more efficient' - ie. scrapping a lot of programs - came along, and more and more of the money has to come from corporations.
Democracy and capitalism do not go hand in hand. Look at China. They want capitalism (or corporatism; I'm not sure). But they definitely don't want democracy. And there are a lot of model economies in South America and Asia (Singapore, Argentina, etc...) where capitalism/corporatism are doing fine and democracy isn't.
We need to take back democracy; take back the government, and turn it back into 'for the people, by the people', which is the whole point - and I speak as a Canadian. Democracy is supposed to place checks on the power of corporations, and promote the power of the people. It's horribly inefficient, but that's never been a desirable trait in a government anyway.
For the record, profiteering is "The action or fact of seeking to make an excessive profit, as by providing necessities at extortionate prices," and is illegal in most countries. It's rather similar to what Microsoft has been doing. And in the corporate sense, maybe it should be a capital offense.
It is amazing and frightening at how narrow-minded the readership of slashdot seems to be. Most of the responses to Jon's article seem to be attacking him on minor semantic points. He's not saying "it's bad for universities to make a profit." He's saying that we should be discussing whether or not this is good.
Capitalism is not corporatism. And the way the western economic system is now run has very little to do with Adam Smith's capitalism. Sure, there's not global illuminati. But it costs money to get elected. Corporations provide money to politicians to help them get elected. The politicians pass laws that the corporations like. (If they don't, they don't get money the next time an election comes around, and they're out of a job.)
There might be - I think there probably are - similar forces at work behind the corporate sponsorship of research. It costs money to go research. Corporations have money. The give money to researchers - for specific projects! Might there not be valuable research which doesn't interest some corporation out there? People are always making fun of studies that look at tiny worms responses' to electrical or physical stimulus - but these studies are providing us with completely unprofitable and extremely useful information about simple nervous systems.
Capitalism is a free-market system in which people who are good at doing/making things are rewarded financially for succeeding. Corporatism is a socio-political system where corporations run roughshod over the needs of people. Corporations are _not_ a replacement for the nation state. Corporations have no interest in the rights of their workers. Before bashing communism and Marxism - which were worse than a lot of things - go find out why they were invented. Nobody sets out to create a brand new totalitarian-style government with a new and cool name. They were a response to the rise of corporate power in the late 19th century.
Does JonKatz generalize and gloss over details? Sure. But most of the responses to his essays don't add anything to the discussion. Let's discuss!
Sure, but the prices on pretty much everything are much cheaper in British Columbia than in the US... new CDs go for $12-15 CDN, restaurants charge less, groceries cost the same in CDN as US$. Part of the reason is that the 7% GST replaced a whole hoard of wholesale and manufacturers taxes, which the US still has, but are hidden. The sales tax on pretty much everything in Washington state is 6.75% or so (haven't been there in a while), which is pretty close to the 7% PST in BC.
This is an interesting development, and one that I'm seeing more and more: the (possibly intended) misspelling of the word 'hypocrisy' as 'hypocracy'... the ending 'acy' implies a form of government. Is the observation being made that western nations are becoming countries ruled by the most powerful hypocrites? Is this meme already being integrated into the language? Sort of a freudian slip, on a societal scale.
A real problem with 'open source news', as slashdot likes to be called, is that no one - neither the person submitting the article, nor the person posting it to slashdot, nor the people commenting on it - seems to have the responsibility to check the facts. The recent Perens comment about a lawsuit against Corel was just what 'Signal 11' is railing against: a public airing of a (semi)-private comment. It meant to be aired on slashdot. And with this article, why did no one check what was actually going on before sending comments/flames?
There are a couple of things I can think of that would improve the situation:
slashdot posters should not add a comment that sounds anything like a "conclusion" to the article on slashdot's main page: too many people just read that first paragraph and flame away, rather than reading the inevitably more balanced commentary that follows a story.
slashdot readers shouldn't take the commentary on a story as the truth. As this Wired article shows, the benefits of real (closed-source) reporting are still something to be reckoned with. Sometimes the slashdot model works (articles about privacy/cryptography) and sometimes they don't.
Everyone should just calm down, and count to 10...:-)
Jon, if that's you actually writing this, you have shown a level of humour beyond what I thought possible.
As a representative (unelected) of all of the Canadian-students-who-are-living-in-the-US, I am burning my slashdot shirt on the steps of the Rhode Island capitol building today in protest.
Hey! This is getting good. Don't stop now. Besides, the little paranoid, self-righteous twerp who won't identify himself seems to provide a reasonable archetype for all of the other paranoid, self-righteous, arrogant Linux wackos who are flaming Katz on this site.
Slashdot Mirror
You have got to be kidding. Why should employers get every possible right with no responsibility? As employees, we agree to a fairly strict set of rules (the contract) in exchange for benefits we derive from employers. Money is one of those benefits. There is no reason that security (I'm not talking about a hug when you're sad; it's job security - knowing you'll still have money to eat next month) shouldn't be one of the benefits included in the package.
We give up a lot of our time when we're young and eager and bright and motivated to these companies. What do we get in exchange?
people have been brainwashed since the new deal to think everybody owes them something
If I don't work for a company, they owe me nothing. If I pay no taxes and don't vote, the government owes me nothing. But if I enter into a contract (legal, social, implied or otherwise) with a company or a government, I damn well want them to hold up their side of the bargain.
OK. So because all large companies issue stock options to a) avoid paying employees higher wages and b) avoid paying taxes, it's a good thing? It doesn't matter whether fool.com said that Microsoft is 'cheating.' Do you think it's good that the tax system is set up to let companies like MS and Cisco avoid paying any income tax? How much tax did you pay last year so that MS didn't have to pay any?
Is it Microsoft's fault? Maybe not. It's legal, so it's the fault of the government. But you can be sure MS lobbied for this to get passed, so... The system should be changed.
The problem with launching a rocket is that all of the energy comes from burning some sort of fuel. Fuel has mass. So for every kilo of payload you have, you need to add (for instance) 5 kilos of fuel. But to get that extra 5 kilos of fuel up to the point where it will burn off, you need to add another 4 kilos of fuel. But to get that...
With a track/tower/cable, you can use massless energy sources. Like electricity. Generate on the bottom (or top) and use that to power the elevators. All of a sudden, you eliminate the cost of launching all of that fuel all or part way into space, and you save a lot of money.
Plastic cork is not evil. Wine producers have been wanting to switch to plastic corks (or even screw-on caps) for years, because it eliminates problems with things like TCA (and other impurities) leaching into the wine from the cork. The only reason they haven't been able to is because of the perception amongst win fanatics that 'cork is used for good wine.'
Cork was originally selected as a 'best-available' option to stop up the top of a glass bottle - what else would you use? Now that plastics are available, they preserve the flavours in the wine much more effectively. Cork can taint the wine, or allow other impurities to seep in.
A lot of interesting points. But usually if you mention on Slashdot that we need to ditch our obsession with money, you get attacked for espousing communism.
And until recently, a lot more of the money flowing into university research projects came from governments. And then the current rage for making governments 'more efficient' - ie. scrapping a lot of programs - came along, and more and more of the money has to come from corporations.
Democracy and capitalism do not go hand in hand. Look at China. They want capitalism (or corporatism; I'm not sure). But they definitely don't want democracy. And there are a lot of model economies in South America and Asia (Singapore, Argentina, etc...) where capitalism/corporatism are doing fine and democracy isn't.
We need to take back democracy; take back the government, and turn it back into 'for the people, by the people', which is the whole point - and I speak as a Canadian. Democracy is supposed to place checks on the power of corporations, and promote the power of the people. It's horribly inefficient, but that's never been a desirable trait in a government anyway.
For the record, profiteering is "The action or fact of seeking to make an excessive profit, as by providing necessities at extortionate prices," and is illegal in most countries. It's rather similar to what Microsoft has been doing. And in the corporate sense, maybe it should be a capital offense.
It is amazing and frightening at how narrow-minded the readership of slashdot seems to be. Most of the responses to Jon's article seem to be attacking him on minor semantic points. He's not saying "it's bad for universities to make a profit." He's saying that we should be discussing whether or not this is good.
Capitalism is not corporatism. And the way the western economic system is now run has very little to do with Adam Smith's capitalism. Sure, there's not global illuminati. But it costs money to get elected. Corporations provide money to politicians to help them get elected. The politicians pass laws that the corporations like. (If they don't, they don't get money the next time an election comes around, and they're out of a job.)
There might be - I think there probably are - similar forces at work behind the corporate sponsorship of research. It costs money to go research. Corporations have money. The give money to researchers - for specific projects! Might there not be valuable research which doesn't interest some corporation out there? People are always making fun of studies that look at tiny worms responses' to electrical or physical stimulus - but these studies are providing us with completely unprofitable and extremely useful information about simple nervous systems.
Capitalism is a free-market system in which people who are good at doing/making things are rewarded financially for succeeding. Corporatism is a socio-political system where corporations run roughshod over the needs of people. Corporations are _not_ a replacement for the nation state. Corporations have no interest in the rights of their workers. Before bashing communism and Marxism - which were worse than a lot of things - go find out why they were invented. Nobody sets out to create a brand new totalitarian-style government with a new and cool name. They were a response to the rise of corporate power in the late 19th century.
Does JonKatz generalize and gloss over details? Sure. But most of the responses to his essays don't add anything to the discussion. Let's discuss!
Sure, but the prices on pretty much everything are much cheaper in British Columbia than in the US... new CDs go for $12-15 CDN, restaurants charge less, groceries cost the same in CDN as US$. Part of the reason is that the 7% GST replaced a whole hoard of wholesale and manufacturers taxes, which the US still has, but are hidden. The sales tax on pretty much everything in Washington state is 6.75% or so (haven't been there in a while), which is pretty close to the 7% PST in BC.
This is an interesting development, and one that I'm seeing more and more: the (possibly intended) misspelling of the word 'hypocrisy' as 'hypocracy'... the ending 'acy' implies a form of government. Is the observation being made that western nations are becoming countries ruled by the most powerful hypocrites? Is this meme already being integrated into the language? Sort of a freudian slip, on a societal scale.
Actually, I think that was irony. He appears to be mimicking the tone of the flames slashdotters sent him.
There are a couple of things I can think of that would improve the situation:
Jon, if that's you actually writing this, you have shown a level of humour beyond what I thought possible.
As a representative (unelected) of all of the Canadian-students-who-are-living-in-the-US, I am burning my slashdot shirt on the steps of the Rhode Island capitol building today in protest.
Be sure to edit the C-Kermit, indeed.
Hey! This is getting good. Don't stop now. Besides, the little paranoid, self-righteous twerp who won't identify himself seems to provide a reasonable archetype for all of the other paranoid, self-righteous, arrogant Linux wackos who are flaming Katz on this site.