But in Europe a typical valid answer is "if management did not treat the workers like shit, they would not be unionized."
Europe's a mess. I'm sorry for not kissing your ass like a guilty American, but I've been there recently and over the last 20 years a lot has changed. Not for the better. Good luck to you all.
Back to the topic. There are valid answers and then there are truthful ones.
The truth in this is complex:
1. Some employers treated their workers like shit, especially when the workers were from ethnic groups who came into the country in such huge numbers they reduced their average value to near nothing (Irish, Mexicans). 2. Many employers treated their workers like shit because the workers, like 90% of humanity, were disorganized, lazy, slovenly, etc. and did a bad job. 3. Most employers treated their workers well for the same reason most employers do today, which is that happy people paid at market rate and overseen by decent people will in turn produce the best labor.
And then there's every total union, like the Soviet republic, where the workers were so not treated like shit that the economy fell apart.
When your workforce is so unstable that you might be crushed at any moment by a strike, you hide behind layers of bureaucracy. The system turns to chaos.
With mincing steps, the non-union contractorâ"a middle-aged man in a blue short-sleeved shirtâ"tries to sneak in behind them, sidling through a narrow gap between a temporary chain-link fence and a stone wall. But the union men spot him, move toward the fence, and start to lean against it. Then we see four of them take turns pushingâ"using the fence like a microscope slide to fix the contractor against the wall. In one of the videos, you can hear the man start to cry out, his voice tremulous as heâ(TM)s crushed. Finally, he slumps to the ground.
The most troubling part, though, isnâ(TM)t the sight of the men trapping the contractor; itâ(TM)s the brief glimpse of one of the protesters grinning as the contractor wails. And the way the union guys stroll casually away from the scene when their victim collapses.
âoeItâ(TM)s standard for construction sites to have surveillance cameras,â says one of the two 30-something brothers responsible for capturing the incident on video, Michael Pestronk. âoeThe only novel thing we did, which just seemed obvious to me, was to post the videos on the Internet.â
These are the people who killed American manufacturing.
Foxconn will be doing great, and paying probably good wages, until the union parasites appear.
Then they'll move the factory again.
After all, that's why the American companies moved in the first place.
Do you think that someone that's on this registry that decides to seduce or rape a child is going to register the account they plan to use for that purpose with the police?
The point is that if they DO NOT register, and you catch them, it's a good way of getting charges on them before they harm a kid again.
Let's see who's talking in Romney's camp: Evangelical Christians who believe the earth is a couple thousand years old. Then there's Mormons, who refer to their church as "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints" so the evangelicals don't realize that they're Mormons.
What's wrong with this? They're entitled to their faith.
There's the KKK and other racists.
Proof, please.
Also, proof that they're so wrong we should write them out of the debate.
Also, proof that no racists voted for Obama.
The Koch brothers and Karl Rove.
I always confuse them with George Soros.
People who believe that spending money is an exercise of free speech. The Ayn Rand fans who believe that altruism is a sin.
This sounds like you've run out of ideas and are firing on empty rhetoric.
While I'm no big fan of Ayn Rand, libertarians frequently make good economic sense. Do you want a better economy?
Our society places pedophiles in a special category because they compulsively attempt to lure children to them for purposes of illicit intergenerational sex.
It's not unreasonable for us to limit their access, or create more laws that they can be found in violation of.
After all, "the people" start screaming bloody murder when it turns out that the pedophile who killed 14-year-old honor student Jane lived just down the street, and there were warning signs, and yet the police could do nothing!
Instead of pretending that their rights are somehow linked to our own, let's accept that every society has an ultimate taboo and for us it's the child-rapists. The EFF is wasting their time fighting this symbolic non-issue while real issues pass on the breeze.
This is a good compilation of what otherwise was scattered data, and at a level of complexity that people can read quickly to grasp the history of Open Source software.
I wish it had included one major source of free 1980s software, which was software written in BASIC and/or "poke assembler" (DATA statements from BASIC that were POKEd into the memory of your A2+ or C64). Much of this was designed to hack: war dialers, exchange hackers, copy programs, deprotectors, compressors, etc.
While that may be a bit distracting as the uses were illegal, it's important to remember that at this time, finding software was difficult and with computers costing the equivalent of $5000 today, it was very hard to afford or find software. "Sharing" was how you explored the world.
I wish machines had a universal language today, as the BASIC/assembler mix was back then. The closest I've found is Perl.
I know this is an unpopular topic, but I see that throughout history that diversity -- of any form: religious, ethnic, cultural, racial -- has failed wherever it has been tried because it offers people a choice between having no culture or being ostracized for maintaining a cultural identity.
Immigration seems to be popular with the construction industry, cheap labor employers, and serf-masters like the big Silicon Valley companies. Cheap lawn mowing and cheap software production are high on their agendas. However, it's not really working in that this country continues to have clashes between value systems, including those rooted in culture, and increasingly, between our lack of values and anyone who does have cultural values.
Can anyone name a time and place in which diversity has thrived? It seems like all of our accounts come from a couple centuries later when the experiment has failed, and left behind a culturally-confused third world nation.
Perhaps instead of just walking lock-step with the rest of the herd, we should think independently about this issue, and unlike the rest of our society, question whether it's a good thing at all.
Most computer users don't want a Wild West computer experience. They want a safe, functional one where the computer interface is as inobtrusive as possible. They want as little burden on their consciousness as possible, so they can focus on what they want to use the computer to do in the first place.
When you have an audience like that, expect tradeoffs. Less flexibility, more stability. Fewer options, more consistency. And now, the days of downloading random bits of code are over.
For 90% of the users out there, this will be a great experience. The rest will dual-boot...
I am not opposed to gathering up all the organic waste that we can, fermenting it and making alcohol. Nor am I against flushing all toilet and livestock waste into giant fermentation tanks to capture the methane energy.
However, I don't think this is a "solution" to the problem of energy in the future. It will produce some, but not all of our needs, and there will be significant energy inputs required to make it work.
I am more interested in throwing all of our spare money, time and energy into long-term solutions, like cleaner nuclear reactors, better fuel cells, solar sails and even personal methane harvesters.
I don't have anything against Iran, but different cultures are different and each needs its own space. Our values clash because we're different, and no amount of hippie kumbayaing is going to wish that away.
However, I don't think the time is right for Iran to have nuclear power. In particular, it is an unstable country with frequent political turnover, missiles and a possible intention to smite its neighbor Israel.
When Iran shows it's stable and mature, maybe it can have nukes. Until that time, I think it's insane to hand this dangerous technology to unstable people.
Taken to its logical conclusion, only genetically-perfect, clean-living supermen will be employable.
This is what slippery slopes arguments do best: show us the ultimate conclusion of our present path.
However, I'm not sure we'll even get to such a healthy place. If we're going to go Nietzschean, and implement an uebermensch, humanity will be better for it!
But instead we're going to penalize anyone who does anything other than conform, and claim it's progress.
We'll just chip away at "negatives" until we're left with the Nietzschean last man, who lives to work, consume and die with no greater depth of thought than Honey Boo-Boo.
Why is our leadership so bad? Because it's based on appearance not results.
If you can fool 51 out of 100 people into thinking you're cool for a one-year period, you win.
Since intelligence (in all ethnic, racial, etc. groups) fits a bell curve, most people are on the left side of that curve, which is below the level required to understand college courses.
As society has gotten more complex, it has become clear that the herd doesn't make good decisions; it's questionable whether they ever did, which is why our founding fathers effectively limited the vote to land-owning males over 30.
Perhaps we should consider choosing people for their inward abilities instead of external appearance:
Schopenhauer believed that personality and intellect were inherited. He quotes Horace's saying, "From the brave and good are the brave descended" (Odes, iv, 4, 29) and Shakespeare's line from Cymbeline, "Cowards father cowards, and base things sire base" (IV, 2) to reinforce his hereditarian argument.[49] Mechanistically, Schopenhauer believed that a person inherits his level of intellect through his mother, and personal character through one's father.[50] This belief in heritability of traits informed Schopenhauer's view of love â" placing it at the highest level of importance. For Schopenhauer the âoefinal aim of all love intrigues, be they comic or tragic, is really of more importance than all other ends in human life. What it all turns upon is nothing less than the composition of the next generation.... It is not the weal or woe of any one individual, but that of the human race to come, which is here at stake.â This view of the importance for the species of whom we choose to love was reflected in his views on eugenics or good breeding. Here Schopenhauer wrote:
With our knowledge of the complete unalterability both of character and of mental faculties, we are led to the view that a real and thorough improvement of the human race might be reached not so much from outside as from within, not so much by theory and instruction as rather by the path of generation. Plato had something of the kind in mind when, in the fifth book of his Republic, he explained his plan for increasing and improving his warrior caste. If we could castrate all scoundrels and stick all stupid geese in a convent, and give men of noble character a whole harem, and procure men, and indeed thorough men, for all girls of intellect and understanding, then a generation would soon arise which would produce a better age than that of Pericles. - Wikipedia: Arthur Schopenhauer: Heredity and Eugenics
It seems like in so many cases, our society is unable to address problems until they explode in our faces, simply because it is unpopular to do so. Popularity is a poor metric of choice.
If the rest of us are going to pay for their health care through insurance, we deserve the right to shut them off from their carcinogenic cigarettes.
There is a bit of a slippery slope here. If diet soft drinks cause cancer, we should have the right to shut those off, too. At some point, we're going to find certain genes are responsible for susceptibility to cancer too (well beyond the 17% of smokers who get lung cancer). We should have the right to shut them out, too.
Machines do a better job of repetitive tasks, and humans should be (if you believe all the promises made about technology a century ago) healthier, working less, and spending more time in pursuit of self-fulfillment.
It's time to liberate ourselves. Put the robots in the factories, and put the humans back on the couch (with crisps, remote control, maybe a bluetooth keyboard and game controller).
Sorry to burst bubbles, but this overly dramatic and sappy story is obviously designed for readership consumption and to get famous. It's 100% fake, doubled-down vague on details.
Like learning math, writing an English paper, speaking a foreign language, riding a bicycle, etc. it's a learned skill and anyone over about 110 IQ points can do it with the proper instruction and motivation.
Volunteers view their time as hobby-time, which means they want to work on what interests them.
Paid employees do that, and also the un-interesting stuff, like documentation, drivers, non-critical bug-fixes, interface standardization and so forth.
If you want to fix Linux on the desktop, imitate those who are succeeding (Microsoft and Apple): be customer-driven, not developer-driven.
Work on what the customers need. To do that, you may need to make the volunteer community a paid one, or at least one where there are consequences for not doing what is necessary, and leaders to implement those strategies.
Heresy, I know. But heresy that works, and would have avoided the absence of market share that Linux desktop solutions now experience.
However, the degree of regulation must be carefully weighed.
In any industry, adding regulation means:
1. Higher cost to the consumer 2. More boredom of paperwork for employees, so often lowered standards 3. More bureaucrats and other unimaginative people in power
If we regulate anything, we should make our rules short and clear and the approval process fast and supportive of industry, or we shoot ourselves in the foot.
Slashdot Mirror
"This is a false issue" was the original.
Fucking wireless keyboards.
Europe's a mess. I'm sorry for not kissing your ass like a guilty American, but I've been there recently and over the last 20 years a lot has changed. Not for the better. Good luck to you all.
Back to the topic. There are valid answers and then there are truthful ones.
The truth in this is complex:
1. Some employers treated their workers like shit, especially when the workers were from ethnic groups who came into the country in such huge numbers they reduced their average value to near nothing (Irish, Mexicans).
2. Many employers treated their workers like shit because the workers, like 90% of humanity, were disorganized, lazy, slovenly, etc. and did a bad job.
3. Most employers treated their workers well for the same reason most employers do today, which is that happy people paid at market rate and overseen by decent people will in turn produce the best labor.
And then there's every total union, like the Soviet republic, where the workers were so not treated like shit that the economy fell apart.
Unions are parasites that ruined American labor.
When your workforce is so unstable that you might be crushed at any moment by a strike, you hide behind layers of bureaucracy. The system turns to chaos.
Organized crime moves in with unions too.
Check out these unions in action:
http://www.phillymag.com/articles/busting-philly-unions-pestronk-brothers/
These are the people who killed American manufacturing.
Foxconn will be doing great, and paying probably good wages, until the union parasites appear.
Then they'll move the factory again.
After all, that's why the American companies moved in the first place.
The point is that if they DO NOT register, and you catch them, it's a good way of getting charges on them before they harm a kid again.
That's why this exists.
What's wrong with this? They're entitled to their faith.
Proof, please.
Also, proof that they're so wrong we should write them out of the debate.
Also, proof that no racists voted for Obama.
I always confuse them with George Soros.
This sounds like you've run out of ideas and are firing on empty rhetoric.
While I'm no big fan of Ayn Rand, libertarians frequently make good economic sense. Do you want a better economy?
Our society places pedophiles in a special category because they compulsively attempt to lure children to them for purposes of illicit intergenerational sex.
It's not unreasonable for us to limit their access, or create more laws that they can be found in violation of.
After all, "the people" start screaming bloody murder when it turns out that the pedophile who killed 14-year-old honor student Jane lived just down the street, and there were warning signs, and yet the police could do nothing!
Instead of pretending that their rights are somehow linked to our own, let's accept that every society has an ultimate taboo and for us it's the child-rapists. The EFF is wasting their time fighting this symbolic non-issue while real issues pass on the breeze.
The media, all of America's competitors, our unions and large swathes of Wall Street all agree that Obama is the choice we should make.
When you view it that way, the choice becomes clear.
This is a good compilation of what otherwise was scattered data, and at a level of complexity that people can read quickly to grasp the history of Open Source software.
I wish it had included one major source of free 1980s software, which was software written in BASIC and/or "poke assembler" (DATA statements from BASIC that were POKEd into the memory of your A2+ or C64). Much of this was designed to hack: war dialers, exchange hackers, copy programs, deprotectors, compressors, etc.
While that may be a bit distracting as the uses were illegal, it's important to remember that at this time, finding software was difficult and with computers costing the equivalent of $5000 today, it was very hard to afford or find software. "Sharing" was how you explored the world.
I wish machines had a universal language today, as the BASIC/assembler mix was back then. The closest I've found is Perl.
That's a long shot plan right there.
I think sending Bruce Willis with a thermonuclear device and a boatload of family drama might work even better.
This rule applies to a lot more than just hosting!
What you tolerate, you get more of. Your tolerance is an implicit endorsement of it.
If you reward the good, and punish the bad, you always get more good than bad.
Very few people have the experience/wisdom/gumption to see this however.
I know this is an unpopular topic, but I see that throughout history that diversity -- of any form: religious, ethnic, cultural, racial -- has failed wherever it has been tried because it offers people a choice between having no culture or being ostracized for maintaining a cultural identity.
Immigration seems to be popular with the construction industry, cheap labor employers, and serf-masters like the big Silicon Valley companies. Cheap lawn mowing and cheap software production are high on their agendas. However, it's not really working in that this country continues to have clashes between value systems, including those rooted in culture, and increasingly, between our lack of values and anyone who does have cultural values.
Can anyone name a time and place in which diversity has thrived? It seems like all of our accounts come from a couple centuries later when the experiment has failed, and left behind a culturally-confused third world nation.
Perhaps instead of just walking lock-step with the rest of the herd, we should think independently about this issue, and unlike the rest of our society, question whether it's a good thing at all.
After all, he has no dog in this fight.
Oh wait, he's from a competitor.
Wonder if he has incentive to twist the truth a little bit?
Apple seems desperate these days.
Most computer users don't want a Wild West computer experience. They want a safe, functional one where the computer interface is as inobtrusive as possible. They want as little burden on their consciousness as possible, so they can focus on what they want to use the computer to do in the first place.
When you have an audience like that, expect tradeoffs. Less flexibility, more stability. Fewer options, more consistency. And now, the days of downloading random bits of code are over.
For 90% of the users out there, this will be a great experience. The rest will dual-boot...
I am not opposed to gathering up all the organic waste that we can, fermenting it and making alcohol. Nor am I against flushing all toilet and livestock waste into giant fermentation tanks to capture the methane energy.
However, I don't think this is a "solution" to the problem of energy in the future. It will produce some, but not all of our needs, and there will be significant energy inputs required to make it work.
I am more interested in throwing all of our spare money, time and energy into long-term solutions, like cleaner nuclear reactors, better fuel cells, solar sails and even personal methane harvesters.
If you flout their rules, AND THEY CATCH YOU, expect to find yourself in solitary confinement.
Moral of the story: don't get caught.
-or-
Have sensible rules.
Separate "what is considered genius" from "what is genius."
I don't have anything against Iran, but different cultures are different and each needs its own space. Our values clash because we're different, and no amount of hippie kumbayaing is going to wish that away.
However, I don't think the time is right for Iran to have nuclear power. In particular, it is an unstable country with frequent political turnover, missiles and a possible intention to smite its neighbor Israel.
When Iran shows it's stable and mature, maybe it can have nukes. Until that time, I think it's insane to hand this dangerous technology to unstable people.
This is what slippery slopes arguments do best: show us the ultimate conclusion of our present path.
However, I'm not sure we'll even get to such a healthy place. If we're going to go Nietzschean, and implement an uebermensch, humanity will be better for it!
But instead we're going to penalize anyone who does anything other than conform, and claim it's progress.
Compared to what we will do, Aktion T4 and The Eugenics Movement are at least whole plans.
We'll just chip away at "negatives" until we're left with the Nietzschean last man, who lives to work, consume and die with no greater depth of thought than Honey Boo-Boo.
Why is our leadership so bad? Because it's based on appearance not results.
If you can fool 51 out of 100 people into thinking you're cool for a one-year period, you win.
Since intelligence (in all ethnic, racial, etc. groups) fits a bell curve, most people are on the left side of that curve, which is below the level required to understand college courses.
As society has gotten more complex, it has become clear that the herd doesn't make good decisions; it's questionable whether they ever did, which is why our founding fathers effectively limited the vote to land-owning males over 30.
Perhaps we should consider choosing people for their inward abilities instead of external appearance:
It seems like in so many cases, our society is unable to address problems until they explode in our faces, simply because it is unpopular to do so. Popularity is a poor metric of choice.
If the rest of us are going to pay for their health care through insurance, we deserve the right to shut them off from their carcinogenic cigarettes.
There is a bit of a slippery slope here. If diet soft drinks cause cancer, we should have the right to shut those off, too. At some point, we're going to find certain genes are responsible for susceptibility to cancer too (well beyond the 17% of smokers who get lung cancer). We should have the right to shut them out, too.
Right?
Machines do a better job of repetitive tasks, and humans should be (if you believe all the promises made about technology a century ago) healthier, working less, and spending more time in pursuit of self-fulfillment.
It's time to liberate ourselves. Put the robots in the factories, and put the humans back on the couch (with crisps, remote control, maybe a bluetooth keyboard and game controller).
Sorry to burst bubbles, but this overly dramatic and sappy story is obviously designed for readership consumption and to get famous. It's 100% fake, doubled-down vague on details.
Like learning math, writing an English paper, speaking a foreign language, riding a bicycle, etc. it's a learned skill and anyone over about 110 IQ points can do it with the proper instruction and motivation.
Volunteers view their time as hobby-time, which means they want to work on what interests them.
Paid employees do that, and also the un-interesting stuff, like documentation, drivers, non-critical bug-fixes, interface standardization and so forth.
If you want to fix Linux on the desktop, imitate those who are succeeding (Microsoft and Apple): be customer-driven, not developer-driven.
Work on what the customers need. To do that, you may need to make the volunteer community a paid one, or at least one where there are consequences for not doing what is necessary, and leaders to implement those strategies.
Heresy, I know. But heresy that works, and would have avoided the absence of market share that Linux desktop solutions now experience.
For a little bit of background:
Regulation is necessary on a good many things.
However, the degree of regulation must be carefully weighed.
In any industry, adding regulation means:
1. Higher cost to the consumer
2. More boredom of paperwork for employees, so often lowered standards
3. More bureaucrats and other unimaginative people in power
If we regulate anything, we should make our rules short and clear and the approval process fast and supportive of industry, or we shoot ourselves in the foot.