I think you're missing the point. If there's something systemic that is preventing women from breaking into directing, that's potentially a huge pool of talent wasted.
If those women are smart, there are many more useful things they can dedicate their talents to than directing "Avatar 5" or "Terminator: Gerontocracy", which is the kind of crap that James Cameron makes money with. The fact is that directing isn't very important, and even if there were systemic problems preventing otherwise capable women from directing, it wouldn't matter to society.
Meanwhile, the Guardian reports an alternate perspective from 86-year-old social scientist Mayer Hillman: "We're doomed." He's predicting the end of most life on the planet, citing the lack of any way to reverse the process that's already melting the polar ice caps.
Life in general, mammals, and primates were doing great before we had polar ice caps. Perhaps we shouldn't listen to "social scientists" about matters of biology and economics.
He believes that accepting that our civilization is doomed could make humanity rather like an individual who recognizes he is terminally ill. Such people rarely go on a disastrous binge; instead, they do all they can to prolong their lives."
Or they turn into self-important, selfish pricks who want to achieve their 15 minutes of fame by spreading FUD, as is apparently the case with Dr. Hillman.
I'm also not callous enough to pull the ladder up behind me, and not stupid enough to think I'm more then one health disaster away from destitution
So you think that you got what you got because of privilege ("ladders"), and you are afraid of losing it for reasons beyond your control. And you are absolutely right: that's probably your situation. And that's why you take the political positions you take: not out of concern for poor people, but to justify your own success and protect your own interests.
I don't begrudge you or any other privileged American the fact that you had it a lot easier than me to make it into the upper middle class. In fact, I kind of pity you because you obviously lack important life skills and resilience. Where I draw the line, however, is when you project your own ignorance and your insecurities onto others. Hard as that may be for you to understand, many other people who made it to where you are didn't have ladders and aren't "one health disaster away from destitution".
Your political views are as absurd as those of a lottery winner who's arguing that the way to solve poverty is for the government to hand out as many free lottery tickets to people as they need in order to win. A society can't function that way.
You want one-on-one interviews? Reduce the supply of low-skilled workers and reduce the stifling regulations and legal risks that surround hiring.
The fact remains that big companies hiring low skill workers are increasingly using computerized interviews. Nothing you have said contradicts my statement that they are doing this because of "regulations and legal risks that surround hiring". You have offered no other explanation. All you are doing is throwing temper tantrums.
The impact on low skill workers is still very high and very negative: most of them lose their jobs.
Oh, and before you reply with the predictable "studies show that minimum wage doesn't cause job loss", it's not the jobs that are lost. The jobs are still around, they are just filled with different people.
From arriving on American soil as a young immigrant with no money and working my way up.
The current system dangles incentives in front of everyone, but the simple fact is very few of us will become millionaires. Those that don't make the cut deserve a nice quality of life.
You're like a little rich kid asking your dad for more pocket money. The real world doesn't work that way. Nobody owes you anything, and nobody is going to give you anything for being a spoiled American (or European) brat who thinks he "deserves a nice quality of life". If you want a nice quality of life, work for it.
America is one of the easiest countries to succeed in. If you don't make a decent living and decent retirement in the US, you only have yourself to blame.
You may have noticed that productivity has gone way up in the past several decades, and inflation-adjusted wages haven't. That's empirical evidence that being more productive doesn't mean being paid more.
Correct, being more productive doesn't mean being paid more. But it also doesn't mean higher profit margins for companies. So where has all that extra productivity gone? Mostly into taxes, regulatory compliance, and benefits. That is, politicians and voters decided to force companies to spend money on things that seemed politically attractive, instead of giving that money to employees (either as part of their wages or through lower prices). Worse yet, these effects are regressive, meaning they hurt low income workers the most and increase income inequality.
The irony is that the people complaining most about income inequality and stagnating wages are the very people that advocate policies that cause these problems in the first place.
Okay, let's get really specific here. Consider a grocery store that needs one clerk to operate. When the store is open in the late evening, it makes $50/hour profit, not counting what's paid to the clerk.... If the owner can hire a clerk for $10/hour, the owner will hire the clerk and pay $10/hour. Therefore, there is a difference between how much an employee is paid and how much they're worth.
Well, if the value of the employee to the business were $50/h, then you could raise the minimum wage to $50/h. But that's a number that you fabricated out of thin air. That number can't be real because if it were, it would show up as huge profit margins in the business' accounting sheets, and we know that there are no such huge profit margins.
You're now claiming that paying people a minimum wage cuts into profits to the point where it will hurt the economy.
Not at all. I said that corporations refuse to cut into profits. Second, I never use the term "hurting the economy" because it is bullshit. What I said is that if you impose a minimum wage, two things happen. First, businesses let go of anybody who is worth less to the business than that minimum wage and replace them with more valuable workers. Second, if their operating costs increase, they will pass those costs on as price increases, which act like a regressive tax. Both of those don't "hurt the economy", they hurt workers.
For most businesses, the cost of low-wage employees is not a large part of the expenses.
Yes, the overall impact of modest minimum wage hikes on the economy is small. So what? The impact on low skill workers is still very high and very negative: most of them lose their jobs.
And, of course, you're wrong about unions, which have fixed a lot of problems for workers.
No, they have fixed a lot of problems for union members.
What they do is change the amount of bargaining leverage workers have vs. owners to be more equitable.
Again, you somehow believe that I'm anti-union. I'm not anti-union or anti-collective bargaining. I think collective bargaining is great. That doesn't change the fact that the history of unions in America is one of corruption, racism, and special interest legislation. It also doesn't change the reality that unions in the US are not actually "equitable" partners in negotiations with employers, they have been given special and harmful legal privileges that they exploit to enrich themselves at the expense of non-unionized workers.
The legislation is fine. It's not the fault of the legislation that some companies are so poorly managed they cannot follow these admittedly very simple regulations.
They are following the regulations: they have eliminated all human bias from the screening process. You simply don't like the way they are doing it. That's not their fault.
Even better, in 400 years, extrapolation shows that the larges land mammal will have negative mass.
Negative mass is great news: not only can we use such animals for large scale balloon powered flight (in place of expensive helium or dangerous hydrogen), when such negative masses are properly arranged they can create wormholes, allowing for instantaneous interstellar travel!
Iggymanz claimed that fossils didn't last more than a million years; it was in response to that. We also have found plenty of fossils of uncommon species, so that objection is bogus as well.
The idea that there was a prior civilization on earth that killed itself through climate change is on the level with believing that the earth is a flat disk resting on the back of a turtle; it is utterly preposterous.
"fighting back" against the dangers posed by new face-swapping technologies that have been used to digitally superimpose the faces of its members onto the bodies of porn stars
Where is the "danger" in that? Porn stars usually have great bodies, so you'll end up looking great. And you don't have to worry about leaked sex tapes anymore because you always have plausible deniability.
I think the real reason the screen actor's guild is so up in arms about this is because it makes it much easier for movie producers to mix and match acting ability with looks: they can go for an unknown actor and paste exactly the kind of face on him they want. And licensing your face to be pasted on an unknown actor isn't as lucrative as acting yourself.
I, and most American's, have no problem setting a floor on employment pay, and requirements of what should be provided to employees; insurance, holidays, vacation, FMLA, etc.
Of course you don't have a problem condemning people to permanent servitude and poverty; Democrats and progressives never had.a problem with that.
fossils are rare and hard to find, including any kind of tools even for less than one million years.
Fossils are neither rare nor hard to find. Good grief, I went fossil hunting as a kid. Some of the most common fossils are trilobites; they appeared about 520 million years ago and died out 250 million years ago.
When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization—things like cities, factories, and roads—the geologic record doesn’t go back past what’s called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago.
We find fossils all the way to the beginning of multicellular organisms. What we find is consistent with what DNA tells us. We can say with certainty that there was no intelligent, tool-making vertebrate on the surface of the earth before us and hence no large scale technical civilization. It doesn't matter whether all their achievements decayed.
Furthermore, given that we find 170 million year old fossilized dinosaur tracks from populations much smaller than would be required for civilizations, tracks from widespread wheeled vehicle use should be abundant, let alone fossilized technology. But there is absolutely nothing.
It's a good question to ponder, for about a minute. If it takes you any longer to figure out why this can't be true, you aren't a scientist. The authors of this paper are little different from flat earthers.
So, what's "actually worth"? There's now much the workers benefit the company, and there's what the company can replace the workers for. The former would seem to be actual worth, and the latter is what the company will pay.
Your error is in assuming that there is a difference.
An attempt to raise pay above how much the worker contributes to the company won't work.
Glad we agree on that.
An attempt to raise pay above the current replacement rate can work very nicely, as long as it doesn't raise too many people's pay above their worth to the company.
That's where you are wrong. Competition forces companies to set prices at cost plus profit. The profit is return on investment for investors and has to be about 7% for investors to invest, which is about the average net profit margin. That's also the return that pension funds assume, so if companies return less than that, it destroys the retirement plans of most Americans. Costs are labor costs plus to costs other inputs. So where is the extra money you want workers to get paid supposed to come from?
Ah yes, if someone isn't rich, it's because they didn't choose to be, and therefore they're to be blamed. Telling people to make more money is useless, since most people really want to make more money.
I'm not "blaming" anybody and we aren't talking about "getting rich" here. We're talking about the basic facts of life: if your labor is worth $8/h to society, that's the maximum you can earn ever, even with minimum wage. If someone pays you $15/h, that's still just $8/h earnings, plus $7/h charity or theft, depending on how you got the extra money. The only way you can change that is to figure out how you can be more valuable to society. And nobody can do that for you because only you know what you are capable of and willing to do.
And, no, people don't "choose" to be poor; it's jerks like you who go around telling people fairy tales about how other people are screwing them over and hoarding wealth, and that instead of figuring out how to make themselves more competitive, they should spend their time forcing other people to share more with them. You're selling them a lie: there is no magic pot of gold hidden somewhere. Voting for Democrats, unionizing, or getting more welfare isn't going to fix their problems. Instead of doing what people actually need to do to get out of poverty, you are causing them to remain in perpetual poverty and dependence.
Yes, this seems surprising to you because in the topsy turvy world of progressive propaganda, "racist" now means "doesn't give special privileges to minorities". So, anybody who wants race-blind government is "racist" according to Democrats and progressives.
What you care about is giving a nominal reason for not doing anything
There is nothing I or the government can do to raise people's real wages; people can only earn what their labor is actually worth to other people. Any attempt to raise their salaries above that means either that they get fired, or it means that you supplement their salaries with various forms of redistribution, and the bad consequences that that has in the long run. Your inability to comprehend such basic economics is what hurts people most.
The best way to raise people's real wages is to tell them the truth: they need to improve themselves and figure out how to become more useful and productive members of society.
You seem not to get what I say: 70% (probbaly more) of the population in germany lives on welfare.
No, I pointed out that your reasoning is bullshit because you count insurance, families, and retirement plans as "welfare". In actual fact, Germany has under 5 million welfare recipients. The German welfare system does not amount to a UBI for Germans. And even if it did, it wouldn't amount to a UBI for Americans because German incomes are so low.
So what are you saying? Companies make bad decisions all the time. In this case, company B was out a potentially good employee. Or maybe they were not. They'll have to live with the consequences of their choice.
Hiring workers is a voluntary transaction between a company and an individual. Dumping waste is a violation of property rights and the non-aggression principle. I'm sorry you don't understand the difference, but the two actions are completely different.
As for unions, I have no problem with voluntary collective bargaining. The problem with unions in the US is that membership is coerced by government.
Slashdot Mirror
If those women are smart, there are many more useful things they can dedicate their talents to than directing "Avatar 5" or "Terminator: Gerontocracy", which is the kind of crap that James Cameron makes money with. The fact is that directing isn't very important, and even if there were systemic problems preventing otherwise capable women from directing, it wouldn't matter to society.
Life in general, mammals, and primates were doing great before we had polar ice caps. Perhaps we shouldn't listen to "social scientists" about matters of biology and economics.
Or they turn into self-important, selfish pricks who want to achieve their 15 minutes of fame by spreading FUD, as is apparently the case with Dr. Hillman.
So you think that you got what you got because of privilege ("ladders"), and you are afraid of losing it for reasons beyond your control. And you are absolutely right: that's probably your situation. And that's why you take the political positions you take: not out of concern for poor people, but to justify your own success and protect your own interests.
I don't begrudge you or any other privileged American the fact that you had it a lot easier than me to make it into the upper middle class. In fact, I kind of pity you because you obviously lack important life skills and resilience. Where I draw the line, however, is when you project your own ignorance and your insecurities onto others. Hard as that may be for you to understand, many other people who made it to where you are didn't have ladders and aren't "one health disaster away from destitution".
Your political views are as absurd as those of a lottery winner who's arguing that the way to solve poverty is for the government to hand out as many free lottery tickets to people as they need in order to win. A society can't function that way.
Well, as I was saying:
The fact remains that big companies hiring low skill workers are increasingly using computerized interviews. Nothing you have said contradicts my statement that they are doing this because of "regulations and legal risks that surround hiring". You have offered no other explanation. All you are doing is throwing temper tantrums.
Oh, and before you reply with the predictable "studies show that minimum wage doesn't cause job loss", it's not the jobs that are lost. The jobs are still around, they are just filled with different people.
From arriving on American soil as a young immigrant with no money and working my way up.
You're like a little rich kid asking your dad for more pocket money. The real world doesn't work that way. Nobody owes you anything, and nobody is going to give you anything for being a spoiled American (or European) brat who thinks he "deserves a nice quality of life". If you want a nice quality of life, work for it.
America is one of the easiest countries to succeed in. If you don't make a decent living and decent retirement in the US, you only have yourself to blame.
Correct, being more productive doesn't mean being paid more. But it also doesn't mean higher profit margins for companies. So where has all that extra productivity gone? Mostly into taxes, regulatory compliance, and benefits. That is, politicians and voters decided to force companies to spend money on things that seemed politically attractive, instead of giving that money to employees (either as part of their wages or through lower prices). Worse yet, these effects are regressive, meaning they hurt low income workers the most and increase income inequality.
The irony is that the people complaining most about income inequality and stagnating wages are the very people that advocate policies that cause these problems in the first place.
Well, if the value of the employee to the business were $50/h, then you could raise the minimum wage to $50/h. But that's a number that you fabricated out of thin air. That number can't be real because if it were, it would show up as huge profit margins in the business' accounting sheets, and we know that there are no such huge profit margins.
Not at all. I said that corporations refuse to cut into profits. Second, I never use the term "hurting the economy" because it is bullshit. What I said is that if you impose a minimum wage, two things happen. First, businesses let go of anybody who is worth less to the business than that minimum wage and replace them with more valuable workers. Second, if their operating costs increase, they will pass those costs on as price increases, which act like a regressive tax. Both of those don't "hurt the economy", they hurt workers.
Yes, the overall impact of modest minimum wage hikes on the economy is small. So what? The impact on low skill workers is still very high and very negative: most of them lose their jobs.
No, they have fixed a lot of problems for union members.
Again, you somehow believe that I'm anti-union. I'm not anti-union or anti-collective bargaining. I think collective bargaining is great. That doesn't change the fact that the history of unions in America is one of corruption, racism, and special interest legislation. It also doesn't change the reality that unions in the US are not actually "equitable" partners in negotiations with employers, they have been given special and harmful legal privileges that they exploit to enrich themselves at the expense of non-unionized workers.
The point is: they are older than a million years.
Yes, and I found plenty of those too.
Really, talking to you is like talking to a young earth creationist.
They are following the regulations: they have eliminated all human bias from the screening process. You simply don't like the way they are doing it. That's not their fault.
Even better, in 400 years, extrapolation shows that the larges land mammal will have negative mass.
Negative mass is great news: not only can we use such animals for large scale balloon powered flight (in place of expensive helium or dangerous hydrogen), when such negative masses are properly arranged they can create wormholes, allowing for instantaneous interstellar travel!
Iggymanz claimed that fossils didn't last more than a million years; it was in response to that. We also have found plenty of fossils of uncommon species, so that objection is bogus as well.
The idea that there was a prior civilization on earth that killed itself through climate change is on the level with believing that the earth is a flat disk resting on the back of a turtle; it is utterly preposterous.
Where is the "danger" in that? Porn stars usually have great bodies, so you'll end up looking great. And you don't have to worry about leaked sex tapes anymore because you always have plausible deniability.
I think the real reason the screen actor's guild is so up in arms about this is because it makes it much easier for movie producers to mix and match acting ability with looks: they can go for an unknown actor and paste exactly the kind of face on him they want. And licensing your face to be pasted on an unknown actor isn't as lucrative as acting yourself.
Of course you don't have a problem condemning people to permanent servitude and poverty; Democrats and progressives never had .a problem with that.
Fossils are neither rare nor hard to find. Good grief, I went fossil hunting as a kid. Some of the most common fossils are trilobites; they appeared about 520 million years ago and died out 250 million years ago.
Seriously, what is wrong with you people?
We find fossils all the way to the beginning of multicellular organisms. What we find is consistent with what DNA tells us. We can say with certainty that there was no intelligent, tool-making vertebrate on the surface of the earth before us and hence no large scale technical civilization. It doesn't matter whether all their achievements decayed.
Furthermore, given that we find 170 million year old fossilized dinosaur tracks from populations much smaller than would be required for civilizations, tracks from widespread wheeled vehicle use should be abundant, let alone fossilized technology. But there is absolutely nothing.
It's a good question to ponder, for about a minute. If it takes you any longer to figure out why this can't be true, you aren't a scientist. The authors of this paper are little different from flat earthers.
Your error is in assuming that there is a difference.
Glad we agree on that.
That's where you are wrong. Competition forces companies to set prices at cost plus profit. The profit is return on investment for investors and has to be about 7% for investors to invest, which is about the average net profit margin. That's also the return that pension funds assume, so if companies return less than that, it destroys the retirement plans of most Americans. Costs are labor costs plus to costs other inputs. So where is the extra money you want workers to get paid supposed to come from?
I'm not "blaming" anybody and we aren't talking about "getting rich" here. We're talking about the basic facts of life: if your labor is worth $8/h to society, that's the maximum you can earn ever, even with minimum wage. If someone pays you $15/h, that's still just $8/h earnings, plus $7/h charity or theft, depending on how you got the extra money. The only way you can change that is to figure out how you can be more valuable to society. And nobody can do that for you because only you know what you are capable of and willing to do.
And, no, people don't "choose" to be poor; it's jerks like you who go around telling people fairy tales about how other people are screwing them over and hoarding wealth, and that instead of figuring out how to make themselves more competitive, they should spend their time forcing other people to share more with them. You're selling them a lie: there is no magic pot of gold hidden somewhere. Voting for Democrats, unionizing, or getting more welfare isn't going to fix their problems. Instead of doing what people actually need to do to get out of poverty, you are causing them to remain in perpetual poverty and dependence.
Yes, this seems surprising to you because in the topsy turvy world of progressive propaganda, "racist" now means "doesn't give special privileges to minorities". So, anybody who wants race-blind government is "racist" according to Democrats and progressives.
There is nothing I or the government can do to raise people's real wages; people can only earn what their labor is actually worth to other people. Any attempt to raise their salaries above that means either that they get fired, or it means that you supplement their salaries with various forms of redistribution, and the bad consequences that that has in the long run. Your inability to comprehend such basic economics is what hurts people most.
The best way to raise people's real wages is to tell them the truth: they need to improve themselves and figure out how to become more useful and productive members of society.
Some platforms don't insert "normal apostrophes" by default anymore.
How about Slashdot move into the 21st century and start supporting Unicode properly?
No, I pointed out that your reasoning is bullshit because you count insurance, families, and retirement plans as "welfare". In actual fact, Germany has under 5 million welfare recipients. The German welfare system does not amount to a UBI for Germans. And even if it did, it wouldn't amount to a UBI for Americans because German incomes are so low.
You need to network more, take part in professional organizations, develop a circle of friends and acquaintances and project partners.
So what are you saying? Companies make bad decisions all the time. In this case, company B was out a potentially good employee. Or maybe they were not. They'll have to live with the consequences of their choice.
Hiring workers is a voluntary transaction between a company and an individual. Dumping waste is a violation of property rights and the non-aggression principle. I'm sorry you don't understand the difference, but the two actions are completely different.
As for unions, I have no problem with voluntary collective bargaining. The problem with unions in the US is that membership is coerced by government.
Ironic coming from someone with a net worth of around $70 million.