No doubt you are partially correct, but I'd like to add that the government certainly played a role. What's a taxi license cost in SF? Here's an excerpt from a news article
Some drivers spent 10, 15 or even 20 years on a waiting list, just for a chance to buy one for upwards of $20,000 to $25,000.
That is fucking insane...The government created or at least maintained an artificial shortage of taxis.. That fucks over the consumer.. We haven't ever (that I am aware of) had anything even approaching a free market..
$25K is not reasonable... And 20 years is not reasonable...
Linus has already delegated large amounts of his responsibility to others.. But, you're too busy talking about shit you know nothing about...
I suppose you don't think Bill Gates was the final authority on Windows, at the end of the day? He may not have meddled but, as Chairman/CEO, I can guarantee you that if he did have something to say, it would have been implemented..
You really don't understand how any of this works do you? At any point in time you are welcome to fork the kernel.. You just don't get to call it Linux... Don't like that? Too fucking bad..
Copyright Law and Trademark Law are two different things..
Are you for real? The whole Android OS is open source.. Some drivers supplied by other companies are closed source binary blobs, but that's even the case in normal desktop Linux.
So... either you don't know what the fuck you are talking about, or you are lying on purpose. Which is it?
There's an old saying... If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...
Your post accuses the GP of punching down and thinking of the working class as peasants. He never said anything of the sort.. He just said that to use debt as an investment instrument was idiocy. That is a factual statement. If you use debt to invest, you risk not only losing your investment but having an equal amount of debt if the investment sours. You are doubling your risk. That is IDIOCY.
For all we know, the GP is working class as well. But he implied that the person making the investment was personally responsible for their situation and you attacked him for it.
Abandonment of personal responsibility is a hallmark of the left. They blame everyone else.. It's always some else's fault...
I propose that you may not think you are on the left, but you are, in fact, on the left. This whole concept of "I identify as...." is immoral, deceptive, and delusional. So, you may identify as a centrist or a conservative, but your actions seem to contradict that. A person may identify as a female, dress as a female, talk like a female.. But if they're packing a dick, that person is a male.. Every cell in their body is male. To disregard their statement that they are female is not an attack on them, it's acceptance of reality. To support their claim is to abandon reality and accept fantasy. Your statements mark you as leftist. I will not abandon reality.
Is that the straw-man de jure? If someone responds to a statement, they are triggered? You know it's a comment section, right? I mean.. comments are kind of expected.
One person could, given enough time, create many thousands of cryptocurrencies, all by themselves. There is nothing that prevents anyone from creating any number of things. We could create a, practically, unlimited number of nations. Well, we probably couldn't go past 6 billion or we'd run out of heads-of-state.
I could also, quite legally, mint my own coins out of whatever metal I so chose. As long as I don't call them dollars, I'm in the clear.. I could make coins for any unlimited number of imaginary nations...
Your statement about cryptocurrencies outnumbering nations, is of no practical value, other than an attempt to scare the reader into thinking there is something inherently wrong with cryptocurrencies outnumbering sovereign nations.
But, alas, the two are not related. You might think they are, but you are wrong. Part of that wrongness stems from your ignorance as to how cryptocurrencies actually work (or don't work, depending on your view).
By the way, one of the reasons your statement regarding ratio of cryptocurrencies to number of nations is invalid to begin, is that some nations have no currency. Some nations have more than one currency. Nations are not required to have, nor prohibited from having, any number of monies. Thus, the number of nations can have no bearing on what is to be considered a proper number of currencies. It can only be arbitrary and based upon what the viewer believes.
Your logic is flawed. Because "some" Libertarians say something, doesn't mean "most" believe that same thing. Unless you've done a comprehensive poll.....
Using your logic, members of NAMBLA tend to be liberal.... So, even if you, personally, don't support child rape, your fellow liberals do..Just because you close your eyes and ears to your fellow Liberals doesn't mean people, like me, aren't subjected to hearing from the wide range of Liberals their hare-brained ideas all the time. Maybe next time, look around and see what your libtard friends really say.
My issue with this isn't that you care about the working class, it's that you blame anyone but the workers who bought into something they did not understand. You lefties have abandoned ALL personal responsibility. No matter what happens, it is ALWAYS someone else's fault. Somehow the "man" is behind everything, fucking with everyone.
Why don't you chide people who tossed thousands of dollars at something they had absolutely no knowledge of?
I went to public school.. I learned about the tulips.. I learned basic math.. I learned that when something sounds to good to be true... I also learned (from my very conservative parents) that my actions were my responsibility. My Dad didn't take kindly to blaming others for my poor decisions.
I've watched the cryptocurrencies with a fair amount of amusement..I've seen a few people make a little money and a few people lose a little money.. But not a single one of them really understood ANYTHING about bitcoin. It was simply a word to throw money at and hope it paid off. To those I knew, who played the bitcoin game, it was gambling..
Yes we can.. You don't build the rocket on the ground. You build it in orbit, in pieces. it would be gargantuanly expensive and would probably take a long time to do it, but we certainly have the ability to do it.
Now, where you would point it, that's another story...
Nobody has the technology to lift anything as large as the ISS to orbit, yet it's there.... You build in pieces....
Bitcoin wasn't designed to be anonymous. It was designed to be verifiable and traceable.. Those two things are almost in direct opposition to anonymous.
keep pulling the other crabs back into the bucket just as your wealthy overlords want you to...
Are you for real? Your whole philosophy is bucket-crab.. Nobody gets too much higher than anyone else because of feelz and privilege.
You seriously have to be delusional.. My philosophy is the exact fucking opposite of bucket-crab. Under capitalism you get to climb out of the bucket. You and millions of others. The rich get richer and the poor get richer too.
In the last 100 years we've lifted nearly 60% of the Earth's population out of poverty. Yet you continue to worry about CEO pay that does not, on the grand scale of things, matter a fuckbit.
See, most people work.. Most people want to keep what is theirs. They don't mind helping the less fortunate, but they aren't gonna be told that their success should make them feel guilty about it.
It's funny... you leftie assholes claim to want to help the less fortunate, but it's those on the right who are the most generous and give the most to charity... I have no doubt in my mind that you do want to help the poor, but the problem I have with you is that you don't want to do it with your own money. You want to do it with everyone else's. You are a fucking hypocrite and you have a superiority complex. You have decided what is right for everyone else.
I say let the market sort it out. Not total lassiez faire, but only as much regulation as necessary to prevent criminal activity. To keep and eye on things, as it were. I don't even think there should be a minimum wage. It's because of that bullshit that I can't hire the kid across the street to mow the lawn. He's too goddamn slow for our local minimum wage, but he's a nice kid. But because of your stupid exclusionary laws I can't pay him what he's actually worth. So, he gets nothing.
Furthermore, you assholes have actually decided that two grown adults of sound mind can't come to an agreement to exchange labor for wages if that agreement is below what YOU have decided is reasonable. You declare that that grown man is incompetent to decide for himself if he's willing to accept a job that pays $0.10 less that what YOU have decided he should be paid.
Minimum wage laws are the elites telling the masses that they are incapable of deciding their own value. Minimum wage laws are destroying the incomes of those who work for tips in our area. As the wages rise higher and higher, and the price of eating at a restaurant ever increases, servers are seeing smaller tips. Why the fuck should I tip someone, for handing me a plate of food, who's making just as much as some fella that busts his ass all day pouring concrete? Only problem was.. the tips were actually much higher, on average, than the minimum wage. But when the masses learn that the server is now paid exactly the same as they are, they are much less likely to leave a tip...
California, the 8th largest economy on the planet... Run by Democrats for nearly a half century, has the lowest quality of life of all 50 states... Why? If liberal policies are so good, why is the most liberal state in the worst shape? Why are the states with the highest quality of life mostly run by conservatives?
I can't wait to hear your logic on these questions...
Gates used his mother's connections to sell a product made by someone else to a large company. Then he hired people to work for him.
Big decisions? Wow.
Amazing how you turn 50 years of a company's progress into a 2 dismissive sentences. Please keep telling me how it isn't jealousy and hatred for the successful.
Today's amazing insight, it's easy not to care about economic problems when you're a well-paid happy worker swaddled in privilege, thus solving inequality once and for all!
And there we have it..... You fucking cunt... You just reduced the massive amount of hours I put in to my job... The training it took... The hard and dangerous work (that I enjoyed, but hard work none the less) to privilege.. "Once you're well paid"... Fuck you.. As if it happened magically.. or was inevitable....
You aren't going to solve economic inequality. EVER. The pay that I was offered was available to all my peers.. Did all of them earn it? Fuck no... Privilege nothing... A lot of guys worked way less hours.. A lot of guys worked way more hours... I came in about the middle. I balanced my free time with work time.. Some of the guys were animals... They had a plan.. One guy wanted to pay off his house in 5 years.. He worked every last second the company would let him. That fucker worked and worked and worked.. For 5 years.. He was averaging about $250K/year. And he did it.. He paid off his house in 5 years.. Then he stopped working overtime.
What about that inequality eh? Why should he make 3x what a regular worker made? It was obviously privilege.. Had nothing to do with the fact that he put his fun on hold for 5 years... Had nothing to do with him sleeping at the yard on more than one occasion so the moment he had his mandatory 9 hours of off-time, he could go right back to working...By his choice... Now, he doesn't work one minute of voluntary overtime.. But we can't have that inequality.. Of is that gap too small for you to care about?
For the rest of us, that CEO's pay is a drain on the economy that is hurting us. That is why we care. That money comes from our paychecks and goes into overseas economic oubliettes, starving out the economy on both ends.
Bullshit... If you took the CEO pay for the top 500 companies on Earth and compared it next to the amount of wages those companies pay out, it wouldn't amount to a hill of beans. Microsoft (as an example) employees 131,000 people.. What do you suppose those wages total up to? Apple - 121,000 employees.. Tesla, 37,000+ employees... I could go on and on..
You commie cunts reduce everything to privilege or luck. You absolutely despise the fact that given the same exact starting point, people will end up in different places. Some of that difference is due to ethics, or drive, or ambition, or even luck.. But you don't care about that.. All you care about is the results. You don't give a shit how we got to those results.. You don't care that one fucker worked his ass off to achieve his goals.. You only care that he ended up off better than his peers..He was unequal...
This made me remember a time when the company had opened up overtime due to massive storm damage in this area.. We were basically told we could work up to 12 hours per day (if we so desired), for as long as it took to repair the damage... So on Monday we all started working 10-12 hour shifts... At 40 hours we switched to time and a half.. at 49 hours we entered double-time pay... So by Friday morning, we're looking at nearly an entire day of double time, with the option to come in on Sat/Sun at double-time as well... That's $900/day.. For work we already do every day... Then the little union cunt shows up and announces a strike... Didn't matter to him that everyone had been busting ass so they could have 3 days of double time pay. $2,400 for 3 days of work...Hard work, but good work.
No.. Matters not to him... Didn't bother to announce it on Monday, so we didn't waste our time.. Typical lefty cunt... Just decides that 5 minutes notice is plenty... See, he doesn't really care about the workers.. If he did he'd have shown that care by actually visiting the yard once in a while.. Keeping us informed... Getting feedback... Finding out if this was a good day to have a strike...
Best evidence for "marxists don't like the poor, they just hate the rich" I've seen in a long time.
Hear hear.. This is what it always boils down to. These lefties always pick some obscure example or two and think it defines the entire class.. They will refuse to acknowledge that, most of the time, high paid CEOs are running companies that are very successful and provide good jobs to, perhaps, thousands of people.. The only thing that matters to them is the gap..
I swear.... I suspect you could have a company where the CEO made $100 million a year, staffed by 1,000 employees making $1 million a year, and the left would still bitch.... All we'd hear is "blah blah blah, 100X". Not one of these commies would even care that every single employee was an actual millionaire...
Do you really think Steve Jobs and Bill Gates didn't do work?
I've read several pieces on both that basically described both guys as workaholics.. Gates was famous for being the first to get to, and the last to leave, MS headquaters every day. Did this happen the entire time he was at MS? Probably not.. I imagine he slowed down in his later years, but that guy absolutely made the big (and probably a lot of the medium) decisions that built MS into what it is.. Regardless of if you love or hate MS, Gates earned his money..
After Jobs was was rehired, he returned Apple from near bankruptcy to the most profitable tech company in the world.. Don't tell me he didn't make the decisions.
The same thing could be said about Ellison, Musk, and a whole bunch of other CEOs.
I don't know about Jenner.. Although I suspect you've picked one obscure CEO, who is more of an entertainment piece, for your example. I could name dozens of CEOs that do actual work and/or are directly responsible for starting the companies they run.
The CEOs responsibility is to his shareholders and, at the end of the day, most of these CEOs are running very profitable (good for the shareholder) companies.
You people whine and whine about pay... How many programmers worked at MS and left as millionaires? Or, if you prefer, how many left and were very comfortable financially? I bet it's more than you think...
You focus on the handful of companies that had financial issues and paid their CEOs ridiculous amounts of money.. Is that a problem? Sure... I'd call it fraud... If I ran things I'd have a law that said that the CEO couldn't be paid a bonus if the company lost money. I certainly wouldn't have any upper limit on pay if the company is profitable. Neither you, nor I, are qualified to decide what the appropriate level of pay is for a guy that takes his company from $1 billion a year to $5 billion a year in profits.... Or from $0/year to $1 million a year.. We don't know how many hours he put in, we don't know what risks he took...
Even if we toss out reality and decide that Gates does no real work and we lay the wreath of success at the feet of the executive VPs at MS, they were hired by him... He certainly approved the hiring of his direct subordinates.. He certainly approved their pay.. He certainly was the guy most involved in their hiring.. You don't go to H.R. and say "go hire me an executive". You might say "give me a list of qualified candidates", but the guy at the top absolutely does make some damned important decisions...
But I bet you can find someone who can run that company for $500,000.
This is the problem with you lefties, It's like you don't care that this $56M CEO has brought in $1 Billion in new business.. Or maybe he's hired 20,000 new workers at a really good wage to run the new factory in Utah... Or maybe he dumps a billion dollars a year into R&D that results in a thousand research scientists with a job they love.. No.. you simply care that he makes a gob more money than regular employees... Even if those regular employees have top paying jobs for their field.
When I worked at AT&T, the CEO was making something like $20M. I couldn't have cared less if he was being paid $100M. I had a great paying job that I loved doing. I was making about $120K a year and the work was, mostly, fun and interesting. Why should I care what Randall Stephenson (CEO) was making? There were days when I worked at double and a half rate and made $1000. Why would I be so petty as to care that another person was rich?
None of those CEOs are being paid a dime more than the shareholders allow. 50.1% of voting shareholders can fire his ass or choose not to fire him if they think he's doing a good job.
These are publicly traded companies.. They are run by a Board of Directors.. Another voting situation. They decide how much the CEO is paid. Those Directors are ELECTED by voting shares.
You don't like how much a CEO is being paid? Then vote for a Board of Directors that will fire him.
You can't vote because you don't own stock? Then why the fuck do you care how much he's making?
This idea that it doesn't matter if the bottom is being lifted up if the top is being lifted higher... it's wrong. The US is in the top 20 "highest quality of life" list. We have it great here. Most people are not in poverty.. Every year even less people are in poverty.. The bottom is being lifted up.. Quit worrying about the speed at which the top goes up and worry about the speed at which the bottom goes up... Work to improve that.. Don't waste effort on trying to slow the top... That is a waste of energy..
Yeah, there's multiple fucking layers, but each on of those layers has a boss. And guess what, asshole, that boss has a boss as well. Eventually you get to the top.. To the guy that makes the big decisions.
Yeah, the CEO doesn't decide if Alice comes in on Friday. The CEO is the guy who increased the employee levels so that Alice got a job in the first place. The CEO is the fella that signed off on the $50M expenditure to build a new store in X new city. I suppose you think Harold, in accounting, made that decision?
It's like you lefties are devoid of brains and/or logic. I dunno, maybe you assholes really believe in magic fairy farts, STD free sex, and some sort of commune commie running of businesses by democratic vote.
Technology is, and has been, eroding our privacy without us being involved at all. Leaving the internet out of the debate for a moment, technology has stripped us of many privacies that we have enjoyed since we crawled out of the mud.
One used to have a certain level of privacy inside their house. This is no longer the case as we have technology that can see through walls (xrays, infrared, radio tracking). This technology is available to the public and is no longer solely in the hands of nation states. So, while laws are in place to punish your neighbor for watching you bang you wife through the walls, nothing we have now prevents it in the first place.. Well, nothing as cost effective as the technology itself.
Again, I realize this is outside the scope of the GDPR, but our internet privacy is just one small slice of our overall privacy "health".
Your privacy on the internet isn't going to amount to a hill of beans once the technology to spy on you from a distance becomes cheap enough. If I can aim a doodad at your house, from across the street, and record everything on your computer screen, and determine everything you are doing inside the house as well, who the fuck cares if Slashdot is storing cookies or not?
I'm not sure if our privacy can ever be regained. At the best, I think, will be small band-aids like GDPR. A dedicated and determined individual can strip you of all of your false notions of privacy pretty quickly.
If you are in the US, as I am, you are absolutely incorrect. The US Constitution is quite clear that treaties do, in fact, supersede all laws written by any state. In fact, the text of the constitution does seem to imply that the constitution itself can be superseded by treaty. But that is a matter of some debate. I, myself, have studied this particular clause and can't make up my mind on it.
Here is the relevant text:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
I know this particular debate is in regards to the GDPR, but to some extent, a treaty will at least supersede any local (non federal) laws no matter what nation is involved. I think a reasonable person would agree that a treaty would be worthless if any local or regional governor, mayor, etc could override it.
So the blanket statement that treaties do not supersede laws is, at least, in need of clarification.
Slashdot Mirror
Oversimplification on your part, as well..
No doubt you are partially correct, but I'd like to add that the government certainly played a role. What's a taxi license cost in SF? Here's an excerpt from a news article
Some drivers spent 10, 15 or even 20 years on a waiting list, just for a chance to buy one for upwards of $20,000 to $25,000.
That is fucking insane...The government created or at least maintained an artificial shortage of taxis.. That fucks over the consumer.. We haven't ever (that I am aware of) had anything even approaching a free market..
$25K is not reasonable... And 20 years is not reasonable...
Linus has already delegated large amounts of his responsibility to others.. But, you're too busy talking about shit you know nothing about...
I suppose you don't think Bill Gates was the final authority on Windows, at the end of the day? He may not have meddled but, as Chairman/CEO, I can guarantee you that if he did have something to say, it would have been implemented..
You really don't understand how any of this works do you? At any point in time you are welcome to fork the kernel.. You just don't get to call it Linux... Don't like that? Too fucking bad..
Copyright Law and Trademark Law are two different things..
Are you for real? The whole Android OS is open source.. Some drivers supplied by other companies are closed source binary blobs, but that's even the case in normal desktop Linux.
So... either you don't know what the fuck you are talking about, or you are lying on purpose. Which is it?
There's an old saying... If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...
Your post accuses the GP of punching down and thinking of the working class as peasants. He never said anything of the sort.. He just said that to use debt as an investment instrument was idiocy. That is a factual statement. If you use debt to invest, you risk not only losing your investment but having an equal amount of debt if the investment sours. You are doubling your risk. That is IDIOCY.
For all we know, the GP is working class as well. But he implied that the person making the investment was personally responsible for their situation and you attacked him for it.
Abandonment of personal responsibility is a hallmark of the left. They blame everyone else.. It's always some else's fault...
I propose that you may not think you are on the left, but you are, in fact, on the left. This whole concept of "I identify as...." is immoral, deceptive, and delusional. So, you may identify as a centrist or a conservative, but your actions seem to contradict that. A person may identify as a female, dress as a female, talk like a female.. But if they're packing a dick, that person is a male.. Every cell in their body is male. To disregard their statement that they are female is not an attack on them, it's acceptance of reality. To support their claim is to abandon reality and accept fantasy. Your statements mark you as leftist. I will not abandon reality.
No... You missed the point, but that's to be expected.
Is that the straw-man de jure? If someone responds to a statement, they are triggered? You know it's a comment section, right? I mean.. comments are kind of expected.
Is the widdle liberal upset?
Scared of the new thing? Don't worry, it won't bite you..
You don't sound like you disprove of Bitcoin, you sound like you are terrified of it, terrified of something you don't understand..
I'm not making a call on cryptocurrencies either way. No pro or con. I don't know enough about them.
One person could, given enough time, create many thousands of cryptocurrencies, all by themselves. There is nothing that prevents anyone from creating any number of things. We could create a, practically, unlimited number of nations. Well, we probably couldn't go past 6 billion or we'd run out of heads-of-state.
I could also, quite legally, mint my own coins out of whatever metal I so chose. As long as I don't call them dollars, I'm in the clear.. I could make coins for any unlimited number of imaginary nations...
Your statement about cryptocurrencies outnumbering nations, is of no practical value, other than an attempt to scare the reader into thinking there is something inherently wrong with cryptocurrencies outnumbering sovereign nations.
But, alas, the two are not related. You might think they are, but you are wrong. Part of that wrongness stems from your ignorance as to how cryptocurrencies actually work (or don't work, depending on your view).
By the way, one of the reasons your statement regarding ratio of cryptocurrencies to number of nations is invalid to begin, is that some nations have no currency. Some nations have more than one currency. Nations are not required to have, nor prohibited from having, any number of monies. Thus, the number of nations can have no bearing on what is to be considered a proper number of currencies. It can only be arbitrary and based upon what the viewer believes.
Now, fuck off :)
Your logic is flawed. Because "some" Libertarians say something, doesn't mean "most" believe that same thing. Unless you've done a comprehensive poll.....
Using your logic, members of NAMBLA tend to be liberal.... So, even if you, personally, don't support child rape, your fellow liberals do..Just because you close your eyes and ears to your fellow Liberals doesn't mean people, like me, aren't subjected to hearing from the wide range of Liberals their hare-brained ideas all the time. Maybe next time, look around and see what your libtard friends really say.
I don't know if I should laugh or be sad...
You haven't written a check.. so they aren't a thing...
What businesses do you know that don't use at least some checks?
You are a moron who is convinced the world is the size of the bubble you live in..
My issue with this isn't that you care about the working class, it's that you blame anyone but the workers who bought into something they did not understand. You lefties have abandoned ALL personal responsibility. No matter what happens, it is ALWAYS someone else's fault. Somehow the "man" is behind everything, fucking with everyone.
Why don't you chide people who tossed thousands of dollars at something they had absolutely no knowledge of?
I went to public school.. I learned about the tulips.. I learned basic math.. I learned that when something sounds to good to be true... I also learned (from my very conservative parents) that my actions were my responsibility. My Dad didn't take kindly to blaming others for my poor decisions.
I've watched the cryptocurrencies with a fair amount of amusement..I've seen a few people make a little money and a few people lose a little money.. But not a single one of them really understood ANYTHING about bitcoin. It was simply a word to throw money at and hope it paid off. To those I knew, who played the bitcoin game, it was gambling..
GAMBLING. End of story..
Yes we can.. You don't build the rocket on the ground. You build it in orbit, in pieces. it would be gargantuanly expensive and would probably take a long time to do it, but we certainly have the ability to do it.
Now, where you would point it, that's another story...
Nobody has the technology to lift anything as large as the ISS to orbit, yet it's there.... You build in pieces....
Bitcoin wasn't designed to be anonymous. It was designed to be verifiable and traceable.. Those two things are almost in direct opposition to anonymous.
Uh... Not always. You can make plenty of money selling stocks for less than was paid for them.. It's called shorting..
Uh... they have made aircraft engines.. For ... a very very long time..
keep pulling the other crabs back into the bucket just as your wealthy overlords want you to...
Are you for real? Your whole philosophy is bucket-crab.. Nobody gets too much higher than anyone else because of feelz and privilege.
You seriously have to be delusional.. My philosophy is the exact fucking opposite of bucket-crab. Under capitalism you get to climb out of the bucket. You and millions of others. The rich get richer and the poor get richer too.
In the last 100 years we've lifted nearly 60% of the Earth's population out of poverty. Yet you continue to worry about CEO pay that does not, on the grand scale of things, matter a fuckbit.
See, most people work.. Most people want to keep what is theirs. They don't mind helping the less fortunate, but they aren't gonna be told that their success should make them feel guilty about it.
It's funny... you leftie assholes claim to want to help the less fortunate, but it's those on the right who are the most generous and give the most to charity... I have no doubt in my mind that you do want to help the poor, but the problem I have with you is that you don't want to do it with your own money. You want to do it with everyone else's. You are a fucking hypocrite and you have a superiority complex. You have decided what is right for everyone else.
I say let the market sort it out. Not total lassiez faire, but only as much regulation as necessary to prevent criminal activity. To keep and eye on things, as it were. I don't even think there should be a minimum wage. It's because of that bullshit that I can't hire the kid across the street to mow the lawn. He's too goddamn slow for our local minimum wage, but he's a nice kid. But because of your stupid exclusionary laws I can't pay him what he's actually worth. So, he gets nothing.
Furthermore, you assholes have actually decided that two grown adults of sound mind can't come to an agreement to exchange labor for wages if that agreement is below what YOU have decided is reasonable. You declare that that grown man is incompetent to decide for himself if he's willing to accept a job that pays $0.10 less that what YOU have decided he should be paid.
Minimum wage laws are the elites telling the masses that they are incapable of deciding their own value. Minimum wage laws are destroying the incomes of those who work for tips in our area. As the wages rise higher and higher, and the price of eating at a restaurant ever increases, servers are seeing smaller tips. Why the fuck should I tip someone, for handing me a plate of food, who's making just as much as some fella that busts his ass all day pouring concrete? Only problem was.. the tips were actually much higher, on average, than the minimum wage. But when the masses learn that the server is now paid exactly the same as they are, they are much less likely to leave a tip...
California, the 8th largest economy on the planet... Run by Democrats for nearly a half century, has the lowest quality of life of all 50 states... Why? If liberal policies are so good, why is the most liberal state in the worst shape? Why are the states with the highest quality of life mostly run by conservatives?
I can't wait to hear your logic on these questions...
Gates used his mother's connections to sell a product made by someone else to a large company. Then he hired people to work for him.
Big decisions? Wow.
Amazing how you turn 50 years of a company's progress into a 2 dismissive sentences. Please keep telling me how it isn't jealousy and hatred for the successful.
Today's amazing insight, it's easy not to care about economic problems when you're a well-paid happy worker swaddled in privilege, thus solving inequality once and for all!
And there we have it..... You fucking cunt... You just reduced the massive amount of hours I put in to my job... The training it took... The hard and dangerous work (that I enjoyed, but hard work none the less) to privilege.. "Once you're well paid"... Fuck you.. As if it happened magically.. or was inevitable....
You aren't going to solve economic inequality. EVER. The pay that I was offered was available to all my peers.. Did all of them earn it? Fuck no... Privilege nothing... A lot of guys worked way less hours.. A lot of guys worked way more hours... I came in about the middle. I balanced my free time with work time.. Some of the guys were animals... They had a plan.. One guy wanted to pay off his house in 5 years.. He worked every last second the company would let him. That fucker worked and worked and worked.. For 5 years.. He was averaging about $250K/year. And he did it.. He paid off his house in 5 years.. Then he stopped working overtime.
What about that inequality eh? Why should he make 3x what a regular worker made? It was obviously privilege.. Had nothing to do with the fact that he put his fun on hold for 5 years... Had nothing to do with him sleeping at the yard on more than one occasion so the moment he had his mandatory 9 hours of off-time, he could go right back to working...By his choice... Now, he doesn't work one minute of voluntary overtime.. But we can't have that inequality.. Of is that gap too small for you to care about?
For the rest of us, that CEO's pay is a drain on the economy that is hurting us. That is why we care. That money comes from our paychecks and goes into overseas economic oubliettes, starving out the economy on both ends.
Bullshit... If you took the CEO pay for the top 500 companies on Earth and compared it next to the amount of wages those companies pay out, it wouldn't amount to a hill of beans. Microsoft (as an example) employees 131,000 people.. What do you suppose those wages total up to? Apple - 121,000 employees.. Tesla, 37,000+ employees... I could go on and on..
You commie cunts reduce everything to privilege or luck. You absolutely despise the fact that given the same exact starting point, people will end up in different places. Some of that difference is due to ethics, or drive, or ambition, or even luck.. But you don't care about that.. All you care about is the results. You don't give a shit how we got to those results.. You don't care that one fucker worked his ass off to achieve his goals.. You only care that he ended up off better than his peers..He was unequal...
This made me remember a time when the company had opened up overtime due to massive storm damage in this area.. We were basically told we could work up to 12 hours per day (if we so desired), for as long as it took to repair the damage... So on Monday we all started working 10-12 hour shifts... At 40 hours we switched to time and a half.. at 49 hours we entered double-time pay... So by Friday morning, we're looking at nearly an entire day of double time, with the option to come in on Sat/Sun at double-time as well... That's $900/day.. For work we already do every day... Then the little union cunt shows up and announces a strike... Didn't matter to him that everyone had been busting ass so they could have 3 days of double time pay. $2,400 for 3 days of work...Hard work, but good work.
No.. Matters not to him... Didn't bother to announce it on Monday, so we didn't waste our time.. Typical lefty cunt... Just decides that 5 minutes notice is plenty... See, he doesn't really care about the workers.. If he did he'd have shown that care by actually visiting the yard once in a while.. Keeping us informed... Getting feedback... Finding out if this was a good day to have a strike...
That asshole barely made it
Best evidence for "marxists don't like the poor, they just hate the rich" I've seen in a long time.
Hear hear.. This is what it always boils down to. These lefties always pick some obscure example or two and think it defines the entire class.. They will refuse to acknowledge that, most of the time, high paid CEOs are running companies that are very successful and provide good jobs to, perhaps, thousands of people.. The only thing that matters to them is the gap..
I swear.... I suspect you could have a company where the CEO made $100 million a year, staffed by 1,000 employees making $1 million a year, and the left would still bitch.... All we'd hear is "blah blah blah, 100X". Not one of these commies would even care that every single employee was an actual millionaire...
Do you really think Steve Jobs and Bill Gates didn't do work?
I've read several pieces on both that basically described both guys as workaholics.. Gates was famous for being the first to get to, and the last to leave, MS headquaters every day. Did this happen the entire time he was at MS? Probably not.. I imagine he slowed down in his later years, but that guy absolutely made the big (and probably a lot of the medium) decisions that built MS into what it is.. Regardless of if you love or hate MS, Gates earned his money..
After Jobs was was rehired, he returned Apple from near bankruptcy to the most profitable tech company in the world.. Don't tell me he didn't make the decisions.
The same thing could be said about Ellison, Musk, and a whole bunch of other CEOs.
I don't know about Jenner.. Although I suspect you've picked one obscure CEO, who is more of an entertainment piece, for your example. I could name dozens of CEOs that do actual work and/or are directly responsible for starting the companies they run.
The CEOs responsibility is to his shareholders and, at the end of the day, most of these CEOs are running very profitable (good for the shareholder) companies.
You people whine and whine about pay... How many programmers worked at MS and left as millionaires? Or, if you prefer, how many left and were very comfortable financially? I bet it's more than you think...
You focus on the handful of companies that had financial issues and paid their CEOs ridiculous amounts of money.. Is that a problem? Sure... I'd call it fraud... If I ran things I'd have a law that said that the CEO couldn't be paid a bonus if the company lost money. I certainly wouldn't have any upper limit on pay if the company is profitable. Neither you, nor I, are qualified to decide what the appropriate level of pay is for a guy that takes his company from $1 billion a year to $5 billion a year in profits.... Or from $0/year to $1 million a year.. We don't know how many hours he put in, we don't know what risks he took...
Even if we toss out reality and decide that Gates does no real work and we lay the wreath of success at the feet of the executive VPs at MS, they were hired by him... He certainly approved the hiring of his direct subordinates.. He certainly approved their pay.. He certainly was the guy most involved in their hiring.. You don't go to H.R. and say "go hire me an executive". You might say "give me a list of qualified candidates", but the guy at the top absolutely does make some damned important decisions...
But I bet you can find someone who can run that company for $500,000.
This is the problem with you lefties, It's like you don't care that this $56M CEO has brought in $1 Billion in new business.. Or maybe he's hired 20,000 new workers at a really good wage to run the new factory in Utah... Or maybe he dumps a billion dollars a year into R&D that results in a thousand research scientists with a job they love.. No.. you simply care that he makes a gob more money than regular employees... Even if those regular employees have top paying jobs for their field.
When I worked at AT&T, the CEO was making something like $20M. I couldn't have cared less if he was being paid $100M. I had a great paying job that I loved doing. I was making about $120K a year and the work was, mostly, fun and interesting. Why should I care what Randall Stephenson (CEO) was making? There were days when I worked at double and a half rate and made $1000. Why would I be so petty as to care that another person was rich?
None of those CEOs are being paid a dime more than the shareholders allow. 50.1% of voting shareholders can fire his ass or choose not to fire him if they think he's doing a good job.
These are publicly traded companies.. They are run by a Board of Directors.. Another voting situation. They decide how much the CEO is paid. Those Directors are ELECTED by voting shares.
You don't like how much a CEO is being paid? Then vote for a Board of Directors that will fire him.
You can't vote because you don't own stock? Then why the fuck do you care how much he's making?
This idea that it doesn't matter if the bottom is being lifted up if the top is being lifted higher... it's wrong. The US is in the top 20 "highest quality of life" list. We have it great here. Most people are not in poverty.. Every year even less people are in poverty.. The bottom is being lifted up.. Quit worrying about the speed at which the top goes up and worry about the speed at which the bottom goes up... Work to improve that.. Don't waste effort on trying to slow the top... That is a waste of energy..
You're deluded if you don't think he does.
Yeah, there's multiple fucking layers, but each on of those layers has a boss. And guess what, asshole, that boss has a boss as well. Eventually you get to the top.. To the guy that makes the big decisions.
Yeah, the CEO doesn't decide if Alice comes in on Friday. The CEO is the guy who increased the employee levels so that Alice got a job in the first place. The CEO is the fella that signed off on the $50M expenditure to build a new store in X new city. I suppose you think Harold, in accounting, made that decision?
It's like you lefties are devoid of brains and/or logic. I dunno, maybe you assholes really believe in magic fairy farts, STD free sex, and some sort of commune commie running of businesses by democratic vote.
Technology is, and has been, eroding our privacy without us being involved at all. Leaving the internet out of the debate for a moment, technology has stripped us of many privacies that we have enjoyed since we crawled out of the mud.
One used to have a certain level of privacy inside their house. This is no longer the case as we have technology that can see through walls (xrays, infrared, radio tracking). This technology is available to the public and is no longer solely in the hands of nation states. So, while laws are in place to punish your neighbor for watching you bang you wife through the walls, nothing we have now prevents it in the first place.. Well, nothing as cost effective as the technology itself.
Again, I realize this is outside the scope of the GDPR, but our internet privacy is just one small slice of our overall privacy "health".
Your privacy on the internet isn't going to amount to a hill of beans once the technology to spy on you from a distance becomes cheap enough. If I can aim a doodad at your house, from across the street, and record everything on your computer screen, and determine everything you are doing inside the house as well, who the fuck cares if Slashdot is storing cookies or not?
I'm not sure if our privacy can ever be regained. At the best, I think, will be small band-aids like GDPR. A dedicated and determined individual can strip you of all of your false notions of privacy pretty quickly.
No treaties does not supersede laws.
If you are in the US, as I am, you are absolutely incorrect. The US Constitution is quite clear that treaties do, in fact, supersede all laws written by any state. In fact, the text of the constitution does seem to imply that the constitution itself can be superseded by treaty. But that is a matter of some debate. I, myself, have studied this particular clause and can't make up my mind on it.
Here is the relevant text:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
I know this particular debate is in regards to the GDPR, but to some extent, a treaty will at least supersede any local (non federal) laws no matter what nation is involved. I think a reasonable person would agree that a treaty would be worthless if any local or regional governor, mayor, etc could override it.
So the blanket statement that treaties do not supersede laws is, at least, in need of clarification.