I have been running "e-commerce" sites since 1997 when I set up a site that used Broadvision (and Taxware on the backend). Right now I run a site using osCommerce.
The article mentions how some states consider candy different than other food as an example of the many little differences in tax code. Another one is different counties charge different taxes - in New York state, Queens county and Nassau county have slightly different tax rates. And then these tax rates change every time a new law is passed. So you have to update your tax tables whenever that happens. Most people who are truly concerned about this pay thousands to get regular Taxware updates. Luckily, right now I only have to worry about one state.
Now in general terms, I would not mind if some flat, national tax were charged on items going from me to a consumer. I could just say "add x.y%" to every sale, just like everyone else would be doing. But the way this is being done is ridiculous. What has happened in the US is that federal taxes have remained the same, I suppose to pay for the increased military spending for the war in Iraq and whatnot, while money the federal government used to give to the states was cut. So now the states are all scrambling to get money, and since the politicians don't want to go after locals, they are fighting to gouge out of state people for taxes. So we have this mess. And it doesn't effect Amazon.com who can afford to pay for Taxware updates and whatnot, it hurts the small businessman like me, who now has a lot more work to do and may have to buy expensive Taxware updates to be in compliance with this. If one steps back and looks at the whole country, this is a ridiculous way to do things. It's not even that I have to pay the tax, if everyone else had to, it's that now I have to be concerned about not just the tax laws of each state, but the tax laws of each county in each state. It's ridiculous. So much for "state's rights".
I have been on Wikipedia for years. You are absolutely correct, Wikipedia does not handle controversial issues well. And I do not see much hope that it ever will. Things keep getting more and more complicated and large, and the issue gets more and more difficult to solve, and with every step, Wikipedia takes a step away from being able to solve it.
If you go to Wikipedia's fonr page, they have everything cataloged in eight master categories. Wikipedia does the Mathematics and Science categories very well. How many edit wars are there over Mandelbrot sets? Not many. Science is the same way, quantum mechanics is a good article everyone can agree on. Once in a while you get some nutty guy with weird theories, but the community will not put up with it. When politics and religion intrude on science, like with global warming or creationism, then some of the edit warring can come in, but in Science and Mathematics, arguments are small, and usually in categories with some crossover to other categories.
At the other end of the spectrum are the History and Society categories. I find these very biased, with edit wars that get worse and worse and so forth. If people are shooting each other in Kashmir, north Ireland, Gaza and whatnot, isn't it normal to expect people won't collaborate together on Wikipedia? With the situation not headed towards a solution, but getting worse, I see the eventual outcome of pro-Bush, pro-Israel people going to wikis like Wikinfo, and anti-Bush, pro-Palestinian people going to wikis like Demopedia, Dkosopedia, or even Anarchopedia and Red Wiki. There seem to be more left-wing wiki encyclopedias than right-wing ones - Wikinfo doesn't even call itself conservative, although the owner of Wikinfo is conservative, and Wikinfo's content is sort of conservative. Anyhow this is how I see things going, left and right wingers will have their own wikis for Society and History category articles, and perhaps they'll come to Wikipedia to duke it out over Wikipedia's article.
Can one be happy working for others?
on
Pay vs. Happiness
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· Score: 1
Most people I know talk all the time of being their own boss. Not only in IT, but other fields as well. I think lack of happiness at work is due to not having control over your own labor. Centuries and decades ago people seemed to understand this, but this idea is not heavily promoted now, except on the grassroots level of people saying they want to be there own boss.
To me, happiness and control over my own labor is the most important thing right now. I worked at dot-bombs, I worked on Wall Street, and I decided I would rather make (for a little while anyhow) half or even a quarter of what I was making. And while to me the control of my labor is the important thing, I also see working on Wall Street as a dead end unless I wanted to climb the corporate management ladder, which I don't want to do.
In 1999, I was working at a dot-com where if the stock had just stayed flat, I would have made a ton of money in options. I was making $85k, my boss was great, the IT staff was great and close-knit, the environment was great, everything was great - and I was happy - but *one* of the reasons I was happy is I knew that if those options came through, I wouldn't have had to work for some crappy job if I didn't want to.
And finally, while control of my labor is most important, and even in great situations you don't control it if you have a boss, the truth is that if you're not your own boss, you're never going to make real money anyhow - your boss will. If you make $100k at a company, you can be sure you're actually contributing $125k worth of value to that company. The owner is taking all the $25ks of all of those workers he has under him, adding them together and that's why he's a millionaire. I don't necessarily want to be that guy, I'd be happy working for myself and making a decent salary. $70k was more than enough for me when I was making it, when I got bumped up to $85k, that was $15k on top of more than enough for me. And I don't think you make real money unless you are your own boss.
I don't see why these two things are incongruous. You can have a system that rewards sociopaths like Steve Ballmer, or, in the case of your analogy, people like Klaus Barbie. This doesn't mean if Klaus Barbie sends a bunch of children from Izieu to death camps he isn't guilty of anything. He just existed in a system of social relationships that rewarded him, and that behavior. Then the system of social relationships changed, and that behavior went from being something that was rewarded to something to be punished for.
The reason people concentrate on systems and are less concerned with individual guilt is that they want to get rid of the rotten system first, and then worry about individual guilt. Otherwise, the powers-that-be can blame scapegoats when the uglier manifestations of a policy are revealed. They deal with the bad apples, and then continue the policy. An example would be Lynndie England, the woman who helped torture prisoners in Iraq. Most people condemn her individual behavior. Some people see her as not being fully responsible for her actions, but see her commanders, going up to the commander-in-chief, as responsible, and say it is symptomatic of the policy of war she is a part of. This group wants to show her as part of a system, while those who support the war want to disassociate her from the system by saying she is an aberration, a rotten apple and punishing her. And this scenario has played out before - for the US, My Lai in Vietnam, or to other countries - France's torture in Algeria, British torture in Ireland and so forth. The Lynddie Englands are pawns in a much larger game.
When I was in my teens and early 20s I was interested in every new tech thing that came out. Nowadays I don't care, if it has any traction, I'll wind up looking at it eventually. For example, I have no interest in the RUBY or Python languages since I have no reason to look at them, and that they're new and cool doesn't cut it any more for me. I do know PHP though, which is relatively new, because it was designed for stuff like Apache/MySQL scripting, and I often find it simpler to do scripting for that stuff in PHP than in PERL.
I have no desire to do a solitary tech blog either, and it would seem like a waste for me, but something like Advogato I do have a sort of blog on. The last time I wrote a lot there was when I switched my desktop from Windows to Linux. I also posted an entry asking for recommendations for web hosting that needed MySQL, PHP, PERL etc. and got some good replies. So that type of collaborative thing makes more sense to me, especially being I rarely post. But my stuff runs alongside people like Bram Cohen there, so people tend to read it.
You are not talking about reality, but in the theoretical lala-land that most American economists are in. The type of modern capital risk nowadays is not a blacksmith who paid off his anvil and hammer years ago deciding whether or not to make a new horseshoe, it is a factory producing millions of horseshoes, and not knowing whether or not anyone wants to buy them. Often, no one does. The effects of this problem were alluded to by former GE CEO Jack Welch recently, "I think...you have a lot of capacity. So you got weak pricing power....You've got globalization. You've got global capacity everywhere...There are plants all over China that just built 20 million things that are coming in to this or that, so pricing pressure is what we're facing. The reason why jobs are tough is not volume. The reason why jobs are tough is there's no profitability."
All flaws in the system - chronic overproduction, recessions, chronic unemployment (to where in the US, the economic term "full employment" actually means 5% or so are unemployed who want jobs and can't find them). Companies can't "break even" - they must profit, meaning if some of the wealth created by people working isn't going to say some heir who inherited a company, the job will cease to exist. Not to mention that the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was 30 years ago. But that too is just another side effect.
Your argument is tautological - the system should be flawed due to a flaw in a system. Why should there be any "risk" at all? If one goes back to the 16th century, a blacksmith and a tanner would come to an agreement - the blacksmith would work a few hours on a few horseshoes, the tanner would work a few hours on a hide, and then they would trade. If the blacksmith didn't know someone needed a horseshoe, and would pay him (or the tanner with the hide for that manner), he wouldn't make one. Yet you talk about people using capital to create commodities they don't know if anyone wants to buy or can even afford to. Then you say because they take this completely unnecessary risk, they are entitled to the wealth others create. Your scenario only works if work-for-hire is not a possibility, when of course it is, and has been how things were always done up until the last few centuries.
If a business is self-governing, one wonders why a dividend check would be going out every month to the company owners. What are they doing? The workers are doing all the work, the workers are managing the company, all the owners are doing is taking a profit from the wealth created by the workers. For part of the day the workers are earning their own wages, for part of the day they are working for free, all the wealth they're creating in that period going to profit.. You could say capital reinvestment, but capital reinvestment does not go into a dividend check, and that money was created by the workers anyhow. It is just a grand ripoff, no different than serfs plowing wheat, or slaves picking cotton. Democratic indeed, it's not democratic at all unless you own it. There are much better examples of what is really a more democratic workplace. Like this for example. This sounds like one of those "safety circles" corporations set up, in an attempt to prevent any kind of democratic controll in the workplace.
I live in New York City. I didn't go into Manhattan (the main borough of New York City, and where the WTC was) for months after 9/11, but when I did there were troops everywhere. When I walk into one of the main train stations nowadays, Penn Station, I often see police walking in a group with German shepherds, which reminds me of old black-and-white filmstrips of a police force of another country patrolling with German shepherds, and the association is unpleasant. I also still see uniformed troops carrying rifles, which reminds me of my travels in third world countries. Which is to the point, the US is beginning to look more and more, visibly, like one of the third-world banana republics I have visited. I've even heard talk on TV and the radio of creating "free trade zones" so the US can do more manufacturing work. I've passed by free trade zones in third world countries - usually they are big factories surrounded by shantytowns, the police presence around which is akin to what the police presence was like in Northern Ireland years ago. I don't think all of this is a new phenomena, it seems like the US has been on the same course since the early 1970s in all things economic, military and political.
As far as to some of the people here talking about terrorism, I find this quite ridiculous. There is a complete blackout in the US media as to what is going on in most of the world. Osama Bin Laden was a Saudi, his main demand since US troops entered Saudi Arabia were for them to leave. Nothing happened so, if it's true Al Qaeda did 9/11 (which seems the most likely hypothesis to me), then it was due to his desire for the US army to leave Saudi Arabia. The US could care less, but less than two years after 9/11 the US did leave, so Al Queda got what it wanted out of 9/11. This has not been discussed at all in the US corporate media of course. Nor why the US has military bases in Panama, Colombia, Cuba (where the US is torturing prisoners, a base the Cuban government has been asking the US to leave for years), the Philippines and so forth, and why everyone who wants the US military to leave these places is a "terrorist" or drug dealer or Islamic radical or whatever. It's all a lot of nonsense. The US military is all over the world for the benefit of the richest 1% of Americans, it is horribly oppressive, and I along with other people around the world are fighting to roll back this evil empire. Create all the rationalizations you want, mod me down to -1 Flamebait so people won't read this, but we will act and we will win.
Windows crappiness tends to make you use it as a desktop - it's easy to connect to a Linux remotely while not the case with Windows. Or things like DOC, XLS, WMV and whatnot are geared towards not being portable. Or DirectX focused games. The drawbacks, not the benefits, are what tends to keep one locked to Windows.
Anyhow, despite loving Linux, RMS etc. I used Windows as my desktop until December 2004. Then I got a Linksys USB wireless ethernet adapter that my desktop could not handle. In fact, it completely crashed my Windows. So I backed up everything on C: (but not D:, E: or F:) and put the crappy OEM reinstall CD in (which is devolution - the straight Microsoft Windows 95 installs were much better, now it's crappy Compaq OEM reinstalls). So C is wiped - and D is wiped as well! And it wipes D to put a 2k or so file.
So by now I am sick of my wireless ethernet not working and with my crappy OEM reinstaller. I boot up a Debian rescue CD and read my D drive raw. This allows me to get my list of people's phone numbers. Then I figure, screw it, and wipe my Windows machine. I installed Debian.
I've missed it less than I thought. I thought I might have to read Microsoft Word files that would be unreadable, but haven't had to. So the main problem, Microsoft Word, I haven't needed in 8 months. My roommate has a Windows anyhow, so if I'm desperate I'll just use his to make or read a Word file if Abiword or whatever can't.
The other thing is games, although since I am now self-employed, it's probably better I'm not wasting time on games anyhow.
In many ways I'm much happier. I just have all kinds of PERL and C programs connecting to a MySQL backend sifting data for various things. Then I check it out on my local Apache with PHP scripts. I guess some things are a pain - I bought a CD-ROM burner and haven't figured out how to connect it and my DVD player together nicely so I just use the burner for now. Also, Java and some video tends to run at a load average of over 1 (for my one processor). I have an old 3dfx card and figuring out how to get it working good is a pain in the ass, not that there's much to do with it anyhow. But aside from these things, I'm happy. I can probably do whatever I want to do, it's just that some things take time. I keep adding kernel modules, although for some things a complete kernel reinstall has been necessary. I'm running 2.4 because I don't want to go through all the hassle of upgrading to 2.6.
Wikipedia says all over it that anyone can edit and that it is not a "reliable" source, so this is not a big deal.
I see the larger problem with Wikipedia in that it is run by a millionaire, Jimbo Wales, who has said he manages it according to the philosophy of Ludwig von Mises. And the powers-that-be who have a hand in shaping rules, what content gets in, which users get banned, follow on some level from this.
While anyone can contribute, in a democratic fashion, there is a counter-force to this, in the same manner that the US is a democratic republic, with a counterforce of an authoritarian financial hierarchy, with landlords and tenants, moneylenders and debtors, company owners and workers. In the same manner, while anyone can contribute to Wikipedia, the "cabal" as they themselves mockingly call it, headed by Jimbo Wales, and with his various lieutenants in Arbcom (the Arbitration Committee), on the Mediation Committee, as bureaucrats, as admins, exercises a great deal of change over things, and points in the direction things will go.
There is a project on Wikipedia whose premise is that the English Wikipedia users are mostly from England and its former colonies and they have a certain view of the world. Plus demographically the users are generally people like me, white male professionals from the US and whatnot. Wikipedia says it is "neutral point of view" on topics like Palestine and Israel, the US vs. the USSR and that sort of thing, but that's BS. But anyhow the "counetring systematic bias" project mainly works on things by spending time writing articles about stuff most white male professionals from the US don't spend much time thinking about, like culture in Burundi and stuff like that.
Wikipedia does very well in it's top categories of mathematics and science, because most everyone is on the same page about these things. Wikipedia completely falls apart in terms of neutrality with things like the John Kerry and George W. Bush pages. They are not neutral. And it has not gotten better, and I am not Panglossian about the worsening situation, unlike the Wikipedia core group. It is obvious to me that the main categories that experience massive edit wars and fights like history and society, will eventually break off into different wikis. The most hardcore John Kerry people will go to one of the wikis, the most hardcore Bush people will go to another wiki. Then these groups might draw more people. This has already happened to some extent. And I tell people - don't bang your head against a brick wall. See how these things will not work out for you on Wikipedia, then go check out a wiki encyclopedia run by either a conservative (wikinfo) or by liberals (dkosopedia or Demopedia). And if all you're interested in is looking up articles on Wikipedia in quantum mechanics - well then, you'll probably be happy with Wikipedia. And I'm sure all the non-political people would love to see all the fanatic Air America listeners and Fox News watchers leave (actually that's being mild, communists and fascists are the real ends of the extremes that exist on Wikipedia).
Wikipedia divides itself up into eight master categories. Two of these are mathematics and science - topics it handles well. There is cooperation, deference to expertise and those categories are usually pretty good. Then on the other end of the spectrum you have categories like history and society. Those categories it does not handle well at all - there is no cooperation, and unending arguments break out for nationalist reasons (see Gdansk
or Palestine)
or left vs. right reasons (see Ken Mehlman), or both.
Wikipedia's is owned by a millionaire who is a big fan of Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises and so forth. This should begin to give you an idea of where it's head is at. He has appointed people to positions of power like admin, bureaucrat, arbitrator, and mediator, more often of a like mind then not. One of these people is part of the far-right Moonie cult.
Then we have the natural bias of an English-speaking audience of people mostly from England and its former and current colonies (the US, Canada, Ireland, Australia etc.) On top of this, the editors tend to be male, white, professional and whatnot. That this bias exists is recognized at a high level. But what is done about it? Most editors who are of more of a say world-view than US/UK-centric view, left than right and so forth are persecuted. Most left-wing admins have been persecuted - Secretlondon (sent a nasty e-mail by Jimbo Wales), 172, and Everyking. There are a few more who are more moderate, some have privately told me more recently that Wikipedia is going bonkers in this respect, that the inmates are taking over the asylum.
I believe wikis can survive only with cooperation. A wiki, like Slashdot, can survive mostly good users and a few vandals. But when say 30% of Wikipedia is left-wing, with 70% being right-wing or what in the US would be called centrist, you have a problem that is not going away. It just gets worse, really.
My prediction is that since wikis need cooperation, the controversial categories (history, society, life) will break off into separate wikis - right-leaning ones like Wikinfo and left-leaning ones like Dkosopedia or the even further left Red Wiki.
This is inevitable. The edit wars over the Israel/Palestine pages mimics the actual war going on. The arbitrators are just becoming more and more overburdened over time, and these sections are becoming more and more chaotic and sectarian. On the other hand, articles about scientific and mathematic concepts like quantum mechanics are doing just fine. I think eventually, Wikipedia itself will see the wisdom of the Kahanists and jihadis leaving for their own respective wikis. It will be better for everyone.
What if it was allowed that employers can come to your home, rape your wife, and kill your children, would you think that most employers wouldn't necessarily do that so it is no big deal and nothing to worry about? You don't have to worry about it, but I'm worried about it.
"Just because you cant stand up to your boss, doesnt mean that the rest of us cant."
You seem to miss the point of the ruling. The managers and owners of this company are united in their activities. They are united with the might of the US government, which has backed what they are doing. Less obvious, they are working with the managers and owners of other companies, who have helped bring this ruling into effect by various means (the NRTW and so forth). The object of the ruling is to isolate the individual worker. Which is precisely what you are saying, you are one worker who does one thing, I am here doing my thing, and so forth. For some reason, the employer seems to prefer to mobilize an army rather than fight a war singlehandedly, as you seem to sugegst doing.
It should trump it, but it's been a long time since we had a Supreme Court justice like William O. Douglas, who took the "no law" part of the First Amendment seriously. Without active political pressure, without people out there fighting to defend it, the Constitution is just a piece of paper.
The ruling says workers can never meet outside of work while in work uniforms, yes, but more importantly it says workers can not socialize together outside of work whether or not they are wearing their uniforms. This is why this is a big deal. Workers are only allowed to go to union meetings, and only are because there is a law that says workers are allowed to (there's no law protecting socialization). And they can't go to the meetings in work uniforms, due to a rule against that. So you are just spreading FUD.
Whether or not this is the case, the rule forbids workers from socializing (not just dating) with co-workers (not just clients) when they're not wearing their uniform (not just if they are). If the rule only specified what you say, it would not be a big deal.
Some people here have said that normal socialization is allowed, and that this is just a rule about uniforms, or applying to unions. This is incorrect. This is a ruling against workers socializing outside of work, wearing their uniform or something else, period. That is why it is a big deal, and anyone reading the ruling can see this.
Since there is no law protecting the right of workers to socialize outside of work, the court allowed the rule that they couldn't to stand. There is a law, thanks to union lobbying, saying workers can meet outside of work to discuss unions or union business - so this is the ONLY reason workers are allowed to meet each other outside of work. As far as uniforms, the court further put the restriction that workers can not wear their work uniforms at these meetings.
People are trying to spread disinformation and FUD about this. If it was a ruling only applying to some little rule about uniforms or some obscure union regulation, it would not be a big deal. Anyone who reads the ruling can see what it says.
Um, you are quoting something that supports my case. This says that workers should implicitly assume that the ban on fraternization does not extend to rights protected by the NLR Act, specifically discussions of unions. Anyone who reads the quote that you just put up can see that I am right, you are wrong. If this was just some minor ruling about union solicitation and uniforms it would not be such a big deal.
This is completely incorrect, anyone who reads the ruling can see this is not the case. There is no law that says workers can socialize, so workers are not allowed to socialize, period. There is a law saying workers can meet to discuss unions, so the court had to protect workers rights to do that. But they said that such meetings could not take place in the company uniform. Your statement "This has no affect (sic) on individual employees after ours (sic) and out of uniform." is incorrect, not just in the spelling, but in the meaning, which is obvious to anyone who reads the ruling.
As I stated before, you are giving incorrect information. All co-workers are forbidden from all fraternization except for union matters, since the NLRA says workers are allowed to meet to discuss union matters. But workers are not allowed to meet to discuss union matters wearing their uniform. You are talking about this, and completely ignoring the real issue, that workers are not allowed to socialize with each other, and can only go to union meetings or discussions of whether to form a union together, if they're not in uniform. And the only reason why this can happen is because a law exists on the books that protect the rights of unions to discuss union business (but no rights exist for worker fraternization).
No, YOU'RE the one who has it wrong. Off-work fraternization for all non-union matters is completely out, as stated. Since there is a law saying workers can discuss union business, workers can fraternize for the purpose of discussing a union. However, they are not allowed to have these discussions if one of them is wearing a Guardsmark uniform, even if it is in their homes.
As the ruling notes, dating co-workers is already noted in the rules, so the rule against fraternization clearly means one can not socialize with co-workers during off-hours.
The circumstances show why it is clear that this company, or other companies, seek to have such 24-hour control over their workers. The circumstances being that some workers are considering organizing in the SEIU union, who brought this case. All of the work done at Guardsmark, all of the wealth created at Guardsmark is done by the people who work there. If they got together after work, they might start wondering why so much of the wealth they created is going towards the profit of the company owners, instead of to their own wages. If the company forbids this from happening, and the government uses its might to enforce this, then they are merely wage slaves working at the behest of the company. US companies were allowed to get away with this, company towns and many other things up until the 1930s, when the government was pushed back from enforcing things as extreme as this, but starting in the 1970s it began coming back, and now we are at things such as this, and it's going to get worse.
The whole point is that the workers get individualized, while the ownership and management of this company and other companies and the government all work together. Thus it becomes this array of forces against the individual. Companies have been trying to isolate people, and make them think of themselves in terms of individuality for a long time. In the US this has been very successful. In Europe less so, which is why they have mandatory month-long vacations every year and things such as that. Then again, Europe has had peasant uprisings going back to the Middle Ages, and slave uprisings going back to Spartacus, so workers there have a long tradition of solidarity and standing up for themselves. Such rulings seek to put the force of the government against such cooperation in the US.
One thing I have noticed with a lot of atrocious stuff is something like this: a program comes out that installs spyware, sends all of your information to who knows where, changes all your automatic launches to this product, starts up the program with each reboot and so forth. However - these programs have in the fine print stuff that says "if you use a hex editor to modify this INI file, all of that bad stuff will be disabled". The techs who know what they're doing will do this, and stop complaining about it. The 99% of other clueless users will be stuck with this the garbage.
Which leads me to put my tin foil hat on and say: was this really a hack? Or is Microsoft happy to have this effect 99% of people on earth, and allow the 1% of techies who are unhappy about this either for privacy reasons, or because they have have a "pirate" edition of Windows, to get around it and stop complaining? I don't really see this as getting one over on Microsoft, smart authoritarian hierarchies often leave little safety valves for discontent like this around, allowing a few people to get away with breaking the rules, instead of them going about trying to change or get rid of the rules.
I am a big fan of V is for Vendetta, and a movie with Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman could have been great. From what I understand though, they have cut out really the heart of the story, and basically made it into a sci-fi/thriller without any of the context. So it would be kind of like the Matrix with all of the special effects, but none of the plot, philosophy and whatnot. This is what I've heard, and I am going to skip the movie since Hollywood seems to have ruined it. This is how it's going to be unless I hear from existing V is for Vendetta fans hat I have somehow been mistaken. But I don't think I am. Perhaps in a few years someone can do this script the right way. It's too bad someone like Alex Cox (Sid and Nancy, Repo Man) didn't direct this years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
The article mentions how some states consider candy different than other food as an example of the many little differences in tax code. Another one is different counties charge different taxes - in New York state, Queens county and Nassau county have slightly different tax rates. And then these tax rates change every time a new law is passed. So you have to update your tax tables whenever that happens. Most people who are truly concerned about this pay thousands to get regular Taxware updates. Luckily, right now I only have to worry about one state.
Now in general terms, I would not mind if some flat, national tax were charged on items going from me to a consumer. I could just say "add x.y%" to every sale, just like everyone else would be doing. But the way this is being done is ridiculous. What has happened in the US is that federal taxes have remained the same, I suppose to pay for the increased military spending for the war in Iraq and whatnot, while money the federal government used to give to the states was cut. So now the states are all scrambling to get money, and since the politicians don't want to go after locals, they are fighting to gouge out of state people for taxes. So we have this mess. And it doesn't effect Amazon.com who can afford to pay for Taxware updates and whatnot, it hurts the small businessman like me, who now has a lot more work to do and may have to buy expensive Taxware updates to be in compliance with this. If one steps back and looks at the whole country, this is a ridiculous way to do things. It's not even that I have to pay the tax, if everyone else had to, it's that now I have to be concerned about not just the tax laws of each state, but the tax laws of each county in each state. It's ridiculous. So much for "state's rights".
If you go to Wikipedia's fonr page, they have everything cataloged in eight master categories. Wikipedia does the Mathematics and Science categories very well. How many edit wars are there over Mandelbrot sets? Not many. Science is the same way, quantum mechanics is a good article everyone can agree on. Once in a while you get some nutty guy with weird theories, but the community will not put up with it. When politics and religion intrude on science, like with global warming or creationism, then some of the edit warring can come in, but in Science and Mathematics, arguments are small, and usually in categories with some crossover to other categories.
At the other end of the spectrum are the History and Society categories. I find these very biased, with edit wars that get worse and worse and so forth. If people are shooting each other in Kashmir, north Ireland, Gaza and whatnot, isn't it normal to expect people won't collaborate together on Wikipedia? With the situation not headed towards a solution, but getting worse, I see the eventual outcome of pro-Bush, pro-Israel people going to wikis like Wikinfo, and anti-Bush, pro-Palestinian people going to wikis like Demopedia, Dkosopedia, or even Anarchopedia and Red Wiki. There seem to be more left-wing wiki encyclopedias than right-wing ones - Wikinfo doesn't even call itself conservative, although the owner of Wikinfo is conservative, and Wikinfo's content is sort of conservative. Anyhow this is how I see things going, left and right wingers will have their own wikis for Society and History category articles, and perhaps they'll come to Wikipedia to duke it out over Wikipedia's article.
To me, happiness and control over my own labor is the most important thing right now. I worked at dot-bombs, I worked on Wall Street, and I decided I would rather make (for a little while anyhow) half or even a quarter of what I was making. And while to me the control of my labor is the important thing, I also see working on Wall Street as a dead end unless I wanted to climb the corporate management ladder, which I don't want to do.
In 1999, I was working at a dot-com where if the stock had just stayed flat, I would have made a ton of money in options. I was making $85k, my boss was great, the IT staff was great and close-knit, the environment was great, everything was great - and I was happy - but *one* of the reasons I was happy is I knew that if those options came through, I wouldn't have had to work for some crappy job if I didn't want to.
And finally, while control of my labor is most important, and even in great situations you don't control it if you have a boss, the truth is that if you're not your own boss, you're never going to make real money anyhow - your boss will. If you make $100k at a company, you can be sure you're actually contributing $125k worth of value to that company. The owner is taking all the $25ks of all of those workers he has under him, adding them together and that's why he's a millionaire. I don't necessarily want to be that guy, I'd be happy working for myself and making a decent salary. $70k was more than enough for me when I was making it, when I got bumped up to $85k, that was $15k on top of more than enough for me. And I don't think you make real money unless you are your own boss.
The reason people concentrate on systems and are less concerned with individual guilt is that they want to get rid of the rotten system first, and then worry about individual guilt. Otherwise, the powers-that-be can blame scapegoats when the uglier manifestations of a policy are revealed. They deal with the bad apples, and then continue the policy. An example would be Lynndie England, the woman who helped torture prisoners in Iraq. Most people condemn her individual behavior. Some people see her as not being fully responsible for her actions, but see her commanders, going up to the commander-in-chief, as responsible, and say it is symptomatic of the policy of war she is a part of. This group wants to show her as part of a system, while those who support the war want to disassociate her from the system by saying she is an aberration, a rotten apple and punishing her. And this scenario has played out before - for the US, My Lai in Vietnam, or to other countries - France's torture in Algeria, British torture in Ireland and so forth. The Lynddie Englands are pawns in a much larger game.
I have no desire to do a solitary tech blog either, and it would seem like a waste for me, but something like Advogato I do have a sort of blog on. The last time I wrote a lot there was when I switched my desktop from Windows to Linux. I also posted an entry asking for recommendations for web hosting that needed MySQL, PHP, PERL etc. and got some good replies. So that type of collaborative thing makes more sense to me, especially being I rarely post. But my stuff runs alongside people like Bram Cohen there, so people tend to read it.
All flaws in the system - chronic overproduction, recessions, chronic unemployment (to where in the US, the economic term "full employment" actually means 5% or so are unemployed who want jobs and can't find them). Companies can't "break even" - they must profit, meaning if some of the wealth created by people working isn't going to say some heir who inherited a company, the job will cease to exist. Not to mention that the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was 30 years ago. But that too is just another side effect.
Your argument is tautological - the system should be flawed due to a flaw in a system. Why should there be any "risk" at all? If one goes back to the 16th century, a blacksmith and a tanner would come to an agreement - the blacksmith would work a few hours on a few horseshoes, the tanner would work a few hours on a hide, and then they would trade. If the blacksmith didn't know someone needed a horseshoe, and would pay him (or the tanner with the hide for that manner), he wouldn't make one. Yet you talk about people using capital to create commodities they don't know if anyone wants to buy or can even afford to. Then you say because they take this completely unnecessary risk, they are entitled to the wealth others create. Your scenario only works if work-for-hire is not a possibility, when of course it is, and has been how things were always done up until the last few centuries.
If a business is self-governing, one wonders why a dividend check would be going out every month to the company owners. What are they doing? The workers are doing all the work, the workers are managing the company, all the owners are doing is taking a profit from the wealth created by the workers. For part of the day the workers are earning their own wages, for part of the day they are working for free, all the wealth they're creating in that period going to profit.. You could say capital reinvestment, but capital reinvestment does not go into a dividend check, and that money was created by the workers anyhow. It is just a grand ripoff, no different than serfs plowing wheat, or slaves picking cotton. Democratic indeed, it's not democratic at all unless you own it. There are much better examples of what is really a more democratic workplace. Like this for example. This sounds like one of those "safety circles" corporations set up, in an attempt to prevent any kind of democratic controll in the workplace.
As far as to some of the people here talking about terrorism, I find this quite ridiculous. There is a complete blackout in the US media as to what is going on in most of the world. Osama Bin Laden was a Saudi, his main demand since US troops entered Saudi Arabia were for them to leave. Nothing happened so, if it's true Al Qaeda did 9/11 (which seems the most likely hypothesis to me), then it was due to his desire for the US army to leave Saudi Arabia. The US could care less, but less than two years after 9/11 the US did leave, so Al Queda got what it wanted out of 9/11. This has not been discussed at all in the US corporate media of course. Nor why the US has military bases in Panama, Colombia, Cuba (where the US is torturing prisoners, a base the Cuban government has been asking the US to leave for years), the Philippines and so forth, and why everyone who wants the US military to leave these places is a "terrorist" or drug dealer or Islamic radical or whatever. It's all a lot of nonsense. The US military is all over the world for the benefit of the richest 1% of Americans, it is horribly oppressive, and I along with other people around the world are fighting to roll back this evil empire. Create all the rationalizations you want, mod me down to -1 Flamebait so people won't read this, but we will act and we will win.
Anyhow, despite loving Linux, RMS etc. I used Windows as my desktop until December 2004. Then I got a Linksys USB wireless ethernet adapter that my desktop could not handle. In fact, it completely crashed my Windows. So I backed up everything on C: (but not D:, E: or F:) and put the crappy OEM reinstall CD in (which is devolution - the straight Microsoft Windows 95 installs were much better, now it's crappy Compaq OEM reinstalls). So C is wiped - and D is wiped as well! And it wipes D to put a 2k or so file.
So by now I am sick of my wireless ethernet not working and with my crappy OEM reinstaller. I boot up a Debian rescue CD and read my D drive raw. This allows me to get my list of people's phone numbers. Then I figure, screw it, and wipe my Windows machine. I installed Debian.
I've missed it less than I thought. I thought I might have to read Microsoft Word files that would be unreadable, but haven't had to. So the main problem, Microsoft Word, I haven't needed in 8 months. My roommate has a Windows anyhow, so if I'm desperate I'll just use his to make or read a Word file if Abiword or whatever can't.
The other thing is games, although since I am now self-employed, it's probably better I'm not wasting time on games anyhow.
In many ways I'm much happier. I just have all kinds of PERL and C programs connecting to a MySQL backend sifting data for various things. Then I check it out on my local Apache with PHP scripts. I guess some things are a pain - I bought a CD-ROM burner and haven't figured out how to connect it and my DVD player together nicely so I just use the burner for now. Also, Java and some video tends to run at a load average of over 1 (for my one processor). I have an old 3dfx card and figuring out how to get it working good is a pain in the ass, not that there's much to do with it anyhow. But aside from these things, I'm happy. I can probably do whatever I want to do, it's just that some things take time. I keep adding kernel modules, although for some things a complete kernel reinstall has been necessary. I'm running 2.4 because I don't want to go through all the hassle of upgrading to 2.6.
I see the larger problem with Wikipedia in that it is run by a millionaire, Jimbo Wales, who has said he manages it according to the philosophy of Ludwig von Mises. And the powers-that-be who have a hand in shaping rules, what content gets in, which users get banned, follow on some level from this.
While anyone can contribute, in a democratic fashion, there is a counter-force to this, in the same manner that the US is a democratic republic, with a counterforce of an authoritarian financial hierarchy, with landlords and tenants, moneylenders and debtors, company owners and workers. In the same manner, while anyone can contribute to Wikipedia, the "cabal" as they themselves mockingly call it, headed by Jimbo Wales, and with his various lieutenants in Arbcom (the Arbitration Committee), on the Mediation Committee, as bureaucrats, as admins, exercises a great deal of change over things, and points in the direction things will go.
There is a project on Wikipedia whose premise is that the English Wikipedia users are mostly from England and its former colonies and they have a certain view of the world. Plus demographically the users are generally people like me, white male professionals from the US and whatnot. Wikipedia says it is "neutral point of view" on topics like Palestine and Israel, the US vs. the USSR and that sort of thing, but that's BS. But anyhow the "counetring systematic bias" project mainly works on things by spending time writing articles about stuff most white male professionals from the US don't spend much time thinking about, like culture in Burundi and stuff like that.
Wikipedia does very well in it's top categories of mathematics and science, because most everyone is on the same page about these things. Wikipedia completely falls apart in terms of neutrality with things like the John Kerry and George W. Bush pages. They are not neutral. And it has not gotten better, and I am not Panglossian about the worsening situation, unlike the Wikipedia core group. It is obvious to me that the main categories that experience massive edit wars and fights like history and society, will eventually break off into different wikis. The most hardcore John Kerry people will go to one of the wikis, the most hardcore Bush people will go to another wiki. Then these groups might draw more people. This has already happened to some extent. And I tell people - don't bang your head against a brick wall. See how these things will not work out for you on Wikipedia, then go check out a wiki encyclopedia run by either a conservative (wikinfo) or by liberals (dkosopedia or Demopedia). And if all you're interested in is looking up articles on Wikipedia in quantum mechanics - well then, you'll probably be happy with Wikipedia. And I'm sure all the non-political people would love to see all the fanatic Air America listeners and Fox News watchers leave (actually that's being mild, communists and fascists are the real ends of the extremes that exist on Wikipedia).
Wikipedia's is owned by a millionaire who is a big fan of Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises and so forth. This should begin to give you an idea of where it's head is at. He has appointed people to positions of power like admin, bureaucrat, arbitrator, and mediator, more often of a like mind then not. One of these people is part of the far-right Moonie cult.
Then we have the natural bias of an English-speaking audience of people mostly from England and its former and current colonies (the US, Canada, Ireland, Australia etc.) On top of this, the editors tend to be male, white, professional and whatnot. That this bias exists is recognized at a high level. But what is done about it? Most editors who are of more of a say world-view than US/UK-centric view, left than right and so forth are persecuted. Most left-wing admins have been persecuted - Secretlondon (sent a nasty e-mail by Jimbo Wales), 172, and Everyking. There are a few more who are more moderate, some have privately told me more recently that Wikipedia is going bonkers in this respect, that the inmates are taking over the asylum.
I believe wikis can survive only with cooperation. A wiki, like Slashdot, can survive mostly good users and a few vandals. But when say 30% of Wikipedia is left-wing, with 70% being right-wing or what in the US would be called centrist, you have a problem that is not going away. It just gets worse, really.
My prediction is that since wikis need cooperation, the controversial categories (history, society, life) will break off into separate wikis - right-leaning ones like Wikinfo and left-leaning ones like Dkosopedia or the even further left Red Wiki.
This is inevitable. The edit wars over the Israel/Palestine pages mimics the actual war going on. The arbitrators are just becoming more and more overburdened over time, and these sections are becoming more and more chaotic and sectarian. On the other hand, articles about scientific and mathematic concepts like quantum mechanics are doing just fine. I think eventually, Wikipedia itself will see the wisdom of the Kahanists and jihadis leaving for their own respective wikis. It will be better for everyone.
What if it was allowed that employers can come to your home, rape your wife, and kill your children, would you think that most employers wouldn't necessarily do that so it is no big deal and nothing to worry about? You don't have to worry about it, but I'm worried about it.
You seem to miss the point of the ruling. The managers and owners of this company are united in their activities. They are united with the might of the US government, which has backed what they are doing. Less obvious, they are working with the managers and owners of other companies, who have helped bring this ruling into effect by various means (the NRTW and so forth). The object of the ruling is to isolate the individual worker. Which is precisely what you are saying, you are one worker who does one thing, I am here doing my thing, and so forth. For some reason, the employer seems to prefer to mobilize an army rather than fight a war singlehandedly, as you seem to sugegst doing.
It should trump it, but it's been a long time since we had a Supreme Court justice like William O. Douglas, who took the "no law" part of the First Amendment seriously. Without active political pressure, without people out there fighting to defend it, the Constitution is just a piece of paper.
The ruling says workers can never meet outside of work while in work uniforms, yes, but more importantly it says workers can not socialize together outside of work whether or not they are wearing their uniforms. This is why this is a big deal. Workers are only allowed to go to union meetings, and only are because there is a law that says workers are allowed to (there's no law protecting socialization). And they can't go to the meetings in work uniforms, due to a rule against that. So you are just spreading FUD.
Whether or not this is the case, the rule forbids workers from socializing (not just dating) with co-workers (not just clients) when they're not wearing their uniform (not just if they are). If the rule only specified what you say, it would not be a big deal.
Since there is no law protecting the right of workers to socialize outside of work, the court allowed the rule that they couldn't to stand. There is a law, thanks to union lobbying, saying workers can meet outside of work to discuss unions or union business - so this is the ONLY reason workers are allowed to meet each other outside of work. As far as uniforms, the court further put the restriction that workers can not wear their work uniforms at these meetings.
People are trying to spread disinformation and FUD about this. If it was a ruling only applying to some little rule about uniforms or some obscure union regulation, it would not be a big deal. Anyone who reads the ruling can see what it says.
Um, you are quoting something that supports my case. This says that workers should implicitly assume that the ban on fraternization does not extend to rights protected by the NLR Act, specifically discussions of unions. Anyone who reads the quote that you just put up can see that I am right, you are wrong. If this was just some minor ruling about union solicitation and uniforms it would not be such a big deal.
This is completely incorrect, anyone who reads the ruling can see this is not the case. There is no law that says workers can socialize, so workers are not allowed to socialize, period. There is a law saying workers can meet to discuss unions, so the court had to protect workers rights to do that. But they said that such meetings could not take place in the company uniform. Your statement "This has no affect (sic) on individual employees after ours (sic) and out of uniform." is incorrect, not just in the spelling, but in the meaning, which is obvious to anyone who reads the ruling.
As I stated before, you are giving incorrect information. All co-workers are forbidden from all fraternization except for union matters, since the NLRA says workers are allowed to meet to discuss union matters. But workers are not allowed to meet to discuss union matters wearing their uniform. You are talking about this, and completely ignoring the real issue, that workers are not allowed to socialize with each other, and can only go to union meetings or discussions of whether to form a union together, if they're not in uniform. And the only reason why this can happen is because a law exists on the books that protect the rights of unions to discuss union business (but no rights exist for worker fraternization).
No, YOU'RE the one who has it wrong. Off-work fraternization for all non-union matters is completely out, as stated. Since there is a law saying workers can discuss union business, workers can fraternize for the purpose of discussing a union. However, they are not allowed to have these discussions if one of them is wearing a Guardsmark uniform, even if it is in their homes.
The circumstances show why it is clear that this company, or other companies, seek to have such 24-hour control over their workers. The circumstances being that some workers are considering organizing in the SEIU union, who brought this case. All of the work done at Guardsmark, all of the wealth created at Guardsmark is done by the people who work there. If they got together after work, they might start wondering why so much of the wealth they created is going towards the profit of the company owners, instead of to their own wages. If the company forbids this from happening, and the government uses its might to enforce this, then they are merely wage slaves working at the behest of the company. US companies were allowed to get away with this, company towns and many other things up until the 1930s, when the government was pushed back from enforcing things as extreme as this, but starting in the 1970s it began coming back, and now we are at things such as this, and it's going to get worse.
The whole point is that the workers get individualized, while the ownership and management of this company and other companies and the government all work together. Thus it becomes this array of forces against the individual. Companies have been trying to isolate people, and make them think of themselves in terms of individuality for a long time. In the US this has been very successful. In Europe less so, which is why they have mandatory month-long vacations every year and things such as that. Then again, Europe has had peasant uprisings going back to the Middle Ages, and slave uprisings going back to Spartacus, so workers there have a long tradition of solidarity and standing up for themselves. Such rulings seek to put the force of the government against such cooperation in the US.
Which leads me to put my tin foil hat on and say: was this really a hack? Or is Microsoft happy to have this effect 99% of people on earth, and allow the 1% of techies who are unhappy about this either for privacy reasons, or because they have have a "pirate" edition of Windows, to get around it and stop complaining? I don't really see this as getting one over on Microsoft, smart authoritarian hierarchies often leave little safety valves for discontent like this around, allowing a few people to get away with breaking the rules, instead of them going about trying to change or get rid of the rules.
I am a big fan of V is for Vendetta, and a movie with Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman could have been great. From what I understand though, they have cut out really the heart of the story, and basically made it into a sci-fi/thriller without any of the context. So it would be kind of like the Matrix with all of the special effects, but none of the plot, philosophy and whatnot. This is what I've heard, and I am going to skip the movie since Hollywood seems to have ruined it. This is how it's going to be unless I hear from existing V is for Vendetta fans hat I have somehow been mistaken. But I don't think I am. Perhaps in a few years someone can do this script the right way. It's too bad someone like Alex Cox (Sid and Nancy, Repo Man) didn't direct this years ago.