Vizcaino v. Microsoft was about freelancers (who signed agreements saying that they were independent contractors who were not entitled to participate in any of Microsoft's employee benefits) suing to participate in the employee stock option plan. It isn't like these people were making minimum wage...
The decision has made it more difficult to do work as an independent contractor, because now companies are afraid that if you lose your other clients you might "convert" into being one of their employees.
Surely you don't claim that MS Windows is "worth" $300?
It is to people who pay $300 for it, because it would be silly for them to spend more on an OS than the value that it brings them. XP was worth it to me to buy, because the value of being able to run Windows programs for me (mainly professional video analysis applications that do not exist on Mac or Linux) was higher than the cost of the OS. Note that I do run XP in VMWare on my Mac.
"Worth" is a personal viewpoint. That is one of the wonders of the free market. You can say yes or no.
In my country (Portugal) it's very hard to get an MD degree, and getting one is like a licence to print money.
2005 Portugal General Physician average salary $ 23,808/year PPP or $ 19,092/year USD.
2005 US General Physician average salary $98,268/year. (Data from worldsalaries.org)
THAT is why US health care costs so much. We pay our doctors far more than most European countries. Even more if you account for the fact that US doctors pay for their own medical school.
First-contact doctors working directly for the insurance company sounds like a bit of a conflict of interest.
Of course, one could argue that health insurance companies compete with one another to provide the best service, or else they may lose contracts with employers (which I have seen happen).
The problem is that the person choosing your health insurance (in the USA) is not you, but your employer's HR staff, due to WWII-era tax rules.
The new 802.1 "AVB" standards (IEEE 802.1AS:Timing and Synchronization for Time-Sensitive Applications, IEEE 802.1Qat: Stream Reservation Protocol (SRP), and IEEE 802.1Qav: Forwarding and Queuing for Time-Sensitive Streams) are awesome.
This finally will allow for the reliable transmission of high-bandwidth data streams (such as uncompressed HD video at 1.5 Gbps) over Ethernet switched networks.
It couldn't be that everyone had over leveraged themselves...
It is true that the stock market was in an unsustainable bubble in 1929. Make no mistake that the Fed was on record as saying they were purposely bursting the bubble with deflation, and then they continued to deflate the money supply until 1933 when FDR left the hard gold standard and made pay-in-gold clauses in contracts unenforceable.
It is very possible that the 1929 stock crash could have been a bad recession instead of a major depression without the deflation.
Yes, I can say "no, I won't buy your product" to them. I can't say "no" to the government.
You have far more control over what happens with government provided access then you do with private organizations
Honestly, have YOU ever controlled something that government has done? Just you.
I have regularly told cable companies and DSL providers, on my own, that I don't want their service. And I now have AT&T Uverse and 5Mbps down, and I am basically happy:)
Where is it written that corporations which have been getting an (almost) free ride virtually since the dawn of broadcasting are entitled to expect it in perpetuity?
"Free ride" is a bit of a misnomer. Broadcasters will be pretty upset that the $20 billion they just spent on the FCC mandated transition to digital television is to be thrown away (not to mention the >$1 billion taxpayer dollars spent for DTV converter box coupons, and the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars spent on Public Television's DTV transition).
So we live in a free country, where you are free to fail or succeed.
Then I suppose they fail, and will be replaced by illegal immigrants. Or robots.
But are we expected to tolerate the literal invasion of illegal immigrants?
As illegal immigrants are not actually committing real crimes (such as: theft, murder, etc.), a lot of people don't truly care that they stepped over an imaginary line drawn by governments - governments which, in the case of the Americas, were actually invaders (as in: theft of land, murder, etc.).
Only when our war spending (Keynesian by nature) skyrocketed us to a 120% deficit per GDP did we exit the recession. We borrowed money, gave everyone a job, and virtually created the middle class who paid their debt off with taxes.
You'll also note that during WWII, business was not "the enemy", but was now a partner with FDR. This is a huge change from before Pearl Harbor. There was a change from entrepreneurs being afraid of the government and regulation to one of assured profits.
It is true that many of the long-term unemployed were put to work during WWII (in some cases, at the point of a gun), which may have been beneficial, but during the war few people felt "middle class" because of rations and shortages. And that whole being shipped to the hell holes of the world to be shot at. It was only after WWII that a normal economic situation truly returned. Entrepreneurs now felt safe to invest, and they could expand their markets without competition from destroyed Europe.
During the Vietnam War, the US raised spending again, which only lead to inflation and set the stage for the 1970's stagflation.
Keynesian-style spending did happen during WII, but I'd argue it was not the important part of the story - the important part was a change in the political mood and actions of the government from anti-business to pro-business. Keynesian spending did not work in Japan in the 1990's, and it is not working in the US today.
Fuck illegal immigrants. My wife and I jumped through all the fucking hoops proving she was who she was
I'd be careful. The only difference between your wife and an illegal immigrant is a law. Law can change at any time. In Israel, citizens who marry Arabs from the occupied territories can't bring them into the country like you can. All it took is one change in a law. I'm sure some political group in the US feels your wife should not have come into the country.
Personally, I think it is stupid that you and your wife had to jump through any hoops. How did that help the economy? How did that help humanity?
Who cleaned toilets in Maine before illegals came?
The same kind of people who now learn English as their first language, get 12 years of free education, have access to grants or loans for college, and should have gone to college to become a computer programmer or doctor or lawyer in 2010.
If you are worried about competing with someone regarding cleaning toilets, it is you who should go to Mexico. Besides, a robot will take the job soon anyway.
How come its OK for capital to transfer across borders but labor can't move freely?
Indeed, arguments by economists show that the potential benefits to the economy as a whole from labor migration is far higher than potential benefits due to reduction of trade barriers. Just as capital should be free to move where it is most productive, so should labor.
The greatest enemy of immigration is socialism. Redistributionist policies make native populations wary of immigrants "who come just for the benefits", or at least it provides a logical support to latent racism.
If we reduce socialism at home, we remove this barrier to immigration.
Conversely, the greatest cause of unskilled migration is lack of economic freedom in the home country. If developing countries adopted policies of higher levels of economic freedom, their economies would develop faster, and there would be less need for their workers to migrate.
This takes the wind out of the sails of the anti-Keynesians, since WWII was massively Keynesian and the real end of the Great Depression.
The other issue is that FDR died, and the threat of communism in the US went away (especially as the USSR became our new enemy), and entrepreneurs felt safe to invest again (this is backed up with opinion polls of business leaders at the time). That, and all of our industrial competitors were bombed back into the stone age for 10 years.
But I'm glad you recognize that while FDR may have stabilized the Depression in 1933 by ending deflation (which was awesome), his other efforts lead to 8 years of not much progress and much concern by businessmen.
something like the Glass-Steagall Act would have keep the markets free from similar crashes.
The Glass-Steagall Act had very little to do with the fact that everyone from bankers to politicians forgot that real estate prices could drop. Banks followed the Basel regulations, and capitalized their accounts with a lot of AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities. It turns out the AAA-rated securities became illiquid when it was unclear how many of the mortgages that backed them were in default, then everyone was afraid/unable to trade them.
Bank capitalization is HIGHLY REGULATED. You have to back it with cash or high rated securities. Banks can offer customers other investments due to Glass-Steagall, but they don't make "risky" investments with standard depositor demand-deposit money. It turns out that the "safe" investments required by Basel regulations might have been just as bad as "risky" ones like stocks.
I'd love to say "oh, the government should have regulated the government-anointed ratings agencies so they didn't put an AAA-rating on mortgage backed securities", but I didn't hear many politicians claiming that housing prices were too high and about to fall. You only get a bubble when even smart people are wrong.
Of course ALMOST EVERY ECONOMIST has been against the mortgage interest rate deduction for years. I believe this contributed to the final size of the bubble, although it certainly wasn't the main cause.
The sound Canadian banking system holds the real answer
Indeed. The Canadian banking industry is more centralized, because it never had state/province level limitations to bank ownership. Also all Canadian mortgages are recourse loans, meaning unlike California, if you default, you are still on the hook for what you owe. Finally, Canadian banks did not have Freddie/Fannie to help securitize their mortgages, so they ended up securitizing less, which meant less illiquidity problems.
Canada does not separate investment banking from commercial banking, i.e., they don't have a Glass-Steagall style regulation.
The truth is that China is 1.3 billion people with 1.3 billion different political beliefs. A good number of them are pushing for democracy. As to how many, we can't know in a non-democracy that jails people who are "subversive" to the autocracy.
It is easy to be supportive of your government when your whole future life depends on you saying that you support it.
Currently since africa et al are at the bottom of the food chain they have no bargaining chips WTO then allows rich countries to fuck them over.
While clearly Western countries have a lot of agricultural price supports, it is unclear that developing countries are getting "fucked over" by the WTO in terms of any other products.
What we do know is that Sub-Saharan Africa has incredibly low levels of Economic Freedom. Some of the lowest ranked countries in Economic Freedom include: Zimbabwe, Eritrea, D.R. Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Togo, Chad, Burundi, Chad, Lesotho, Angola, C.A.R., Equatorial Guinea. These all fall into the Economically "repressed" category.
For example, look at Angola:
Pervasive corruption and a lack of institutional capacity continue to undermine the implementation of other important reform policies. Angola scores poorly in most of the 10 economic freedoms. Monetary stability remains fragile, regulation chokes private business investment, and the judiciary is politically influenced. Inconsistent and confusing regulations make entrepreneurial activity costly and difficult. Despite the government's plan to diversify its economic base away from oil and diamonds, progress in stimulating the development of the non-oil private sector has been sluggish. Monopolies and quasi-monopolies still dominate the leading sectors of the economy.
and speaking of trade:
Angola's weighted average tariff rate was 7.3 percent in 2008. Despite progress in trade reform, restrictions on some imports, variable and high customs fees and taxes, import licensing, government import authorizations, the regulatory environment, non-transparent government procurement, subsidies, inadequate customs capacity, and issues involving enforcement of intellectual property rights add to the cost of trade.
compare with the USA:
The weighted average U.S. tariff rate was 1.5 percent in 2008. Anti-dumping and countervailing duties, domestic preferences in government procurement, high out-of-quota tariffs, services market access restrictions, import licensing, restrictive labeling and standards, and export-promotion programs and subsidies add to the cost of trade.
Any economist will tell you there needs to be ways of moderating the natural boom-bust cycle of capitalism.
No, some economists would say that government attempts to moderate the boom-bust cycle of capitalism (such as the Fed's action to purposely burst the stock bubble of the late 1920's through deflation) have often proven to be worse than letting the economy alone. Keynesian stimulus spending rarely works well, because even if it works in one's theory, in practice governments never save during good times, and when spending happens it is inefficient, slow, and corrupt.
This rap video provides one viewpoint along these lines.
Now keeping the banking system intact is a separate issue - although I think it will be many years before we know if saving "too big to fail" banks was better or worse than letting them fail.
In truth, I don't think anyone has truly ensured that Theora is "patent troll proof". Any codec efficient enough to come close to H.264 is probably using patented "tools" whether the programmer recognizes it or not.
Cliff Stoll back then was a net guru and quite active on usenet, so it's not like he wouldn't have imagined how the net connects people...
I hooked up with chicks I met through Usenet back in 1992...
I'll admit that although I was building some of the earlier E-commerce Web sites in the mid-90's that I was totally blown away by the first time I saw a URL on the side of a bus. I thought the Internet would be huge, but even I didn't realize quite how huge.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't hear about the lawsuit?
Vizcaino v. Microsoft was about freelancers (who signed agreements saying that they were independent contractors who were not entitled to participate in any of Microsoft's employee benefits) suing to participate in the employee stock option plan. It isn't like these people were making minimum wage...
The decision has made it more difficult to do work as an independent contractor, because now companies are afraid that if you lose your other clients you might "convert" into being one of their employees.
Surely you don't claim that MS Windows is "worth" $300?
It is to people who pay $300 for it, because it would be silly for them to spend more on an OS than the value that it brings them. XP was worth it to me to buy, because the value of being able to run Windows programs for me (mainly professional video analysis applications that do not exist on Mac or Linux) was higher than the cost of the OS. Note that I do run XP in VMWare on my Mac.
"Worth" is a personal viewpoint. That is one of the wonders of the free market. You can say yes or no.
In my country (Portugal) it's very hard to get an MD degree, and getting one is like a licence to print money.
2005 Portugal General Physician average salary $ 23,808/year PPP or $ 19,092/year USD.
2005 US General Physician average salary $98,268/year. (Data from worldsalaries.org)
THAT is why US health care costs so much. We pay our doctors far more than most European countries. Even more if you account for the fact that US doctors pay for their own medical school.
People who so vastly overcharge for goods and services and brutally underpay their staff,
I've got to admit that no one I know who has worked for Microsoft has argued to me they were "brutally underpaid".
First-contact doctors working directly for the insurance company sounds like a bit of a conflict of interest.
Of course, one could argue that health insurance companies compete with one another to provide the best service, or else they may lose contracts with employers (which I have seen happen).
The problem is that the person choosing your health insurance (in the USA) is not you, but your employer's HR staff, due to WWII-era tax rules.
The danger for misdiagnosis is huge
My experience is that plenty of full-fledged doctors misdiagnosis all the time as well.
Research has shown that expert systems are better than the average doctor at diagnosis.
The new 802.1 "AVB" standards (IEEE 802.1AS:Timing and Synchronization for Time-Sensitive Applications, IEEE 802.1Qat: Stream Reservation Protocol (SRP), and IEEE 802.1Qav: Forwarding and Queuing for Time-Sensitive Streams) are awesome.
This finally will allow for the reliable transmission of high-bandwidth data streams (such as uncompressed HD video at 1.5 Gbps) over Ethernet switched networks.
It couldn't be that everyone had over leveraged themselves...
It is true that the stock market was in an unsustainable bubble in 1929. Make no mistake that the Fed was on record as saying they were purposely bursting the bubble with deflation, and then they continued to deflate the money supply until 1933 when FDR left the hard gold standard and made pay-in-gold clauses in contracts unenforceable.
It is very possible that the 1929 stock crash could have been a bad recession instead of a major depression without the deflation.
you DO have a voice in the government
More like a 1/100 millionth of a voice.
you do NOT have a voice with a private company
Yes, I can say "no, I won't buy your product" to them. I can't say "no" to the government.
You have far more control over what happens with government provided access then you do with private organizations
Honestly, have YOU ever controlled something that government has done? Just you.
I have regularly told cable companies and DSL providers, on my own, that I don't want their service. And I now have AT&T Uverse and 5Mbps down, and I am basically happy :)
Where is it written that corporations which have been getting an (almost) free ride virtually since the dawn of broadcasting are entitled to expect it in perpetuity?
"Free ride" is a bit of a misnomer. Broadcasters will be pretty upset that the $20 billion they just spent on the FCC mandated transition to digital television is to be thrown away (not to mention the >$1 billion taxpayer dollars spent for DTV converter box coupons, and the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars spent on Public Television's DTV transition).
So we live in a free country, where you are free to fail or succeed.
Then I suppose they fail, and will be replaced by illegal immigrants. Or robots.
But are we expected to tolerate the literal invasion of illegal immigrants?
As illegal immigrants are not actually committing real crimes (such as: theft, murder, etc.), a lot of people don't truly care that they stepped over an imaginary line drawn by governments - governments which, in the case of the Americas, were actually invaders (as in: theft of land, murder, etc.).
What is the limit of a fibre cable?
Alcatel-Lucent demonstrated 25.6 Terabit/s in 2007 using 160 Wavelength-Division Multiplexed channels of 160 Gbps each.
But what about a meal at a lunch counter? Guess what. Civil Rights laws depend on this expansive notion of Interstate Commerce.
Really? What about the 14th Amendment ("No State shall...deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.") ?
(that and I'd hope that most states have their own Civil Rights laws as well by now)
Only when our war spending (Keynesian by nature) skyrocketed us to a 120% deficit per GDP did we exit the recession. We borrowed money, gave everyone a job, and virtually created the middle class who paid their debt off with taxes.
You'll also note that during WWII, business was not "the enemy", but was now a partner with FDR. This is a huge change from before Pearl Harbor. There was a change from entrepreneurs being afraid of the government and regulation to one of assured profits.
It is true that many of the long-term unemployed were put to work during WWII (in some cases, at the point of a gun), which may have been beneficial, but during the war few people felt "middle class" because of rations and shortages. And that whole being shipped to the hell holes of the world to be shot at. It was only after WWII that a normal economic situation truly returned. Entrepreneurs now felt safe to invest, and they could expand their markets without competition from destroyed Europe.
During the Vietnam War, the US raised spending again, which only lead to inflation and set the stage for the 1970's stagflation.
Keynesian-style spending did happen during WII, but I'd argue it was not the important part of the story - the important part was a change in the political mood and actions of the government from anti-business to pro-business. Keynesian spending did not work in Japan in the 1990's, and it is not working in the US today.
Fuck illegal immigrants. My wife and I jumped through all the fucking hoops proving she was who she was
I'd be careful. The only difference between your wife and an illegal immigrant is a law. Law can change at any time. In Israel, citizens who marry Arabs from the occupied territories can't bring them into the country like you can. All it took is one change in a law. I'm sure some political group in the US feels your wife should not have come into the country.
Personally, I think it is stupid that you and your wife had to jump through any hoops. How did that help the economy? How did that help humanity?
Who cleaned toilets in Maine before illegals came?
The same kind of people who now learn English as their first language, get 12 years of free education, have access to grants or loans for college, and should have gone to college to become a computer programmer or doctor or lawyer in 2010.
If you are worried about competing with someone regarding cleaning toilets, it is you who should go to Mexico. Besides, a robot will take the job soon anyway.
How come its OK for capital to transfer across borders but labor can't move freely?
Indeed, arguments by economists show that the potential benefits to the economy as a whole from labor migration is far higher than potential benefits due to reduction of trade barriers. Just as capital should be free to move where it is most productive, so should labor.
The greatest enemy of immigration is socialism. Redistributionist policies make native populations wary of immigrants "who come just for the benefits", or at least it provides a logical support to latent racism.
If we reduce socialism at home, we remove this barrier to immigration.
Conversely, the greatest cause of unskilled migration is lack of economic freedom in the home country. If developing countries adopted policies of higher levels of economic freedom, their economies would develop faster, and there would be less need for their workers to migrate.
This takes the wind out of the sails of the anti-Keynesians, since WWII was massively Keynesian and the real end of the Great Depression.
The other issue is that FDR died, and the threat of communism in the US went away (especially as the USSR became our new enemy), and entrepreneurs felt safe to invest again (this is backed up with opinion polls of business leaders at the time). That, and all of our industrial competitors were bombed back into the stone age for 10 years.
But I'm glad you recognize that while FDR may have stabilized the Depression in 1933 by ending deflation (which was awesome), his other efforts lead to 8 years of not much progress and much concern by businessmen.
Then why are all states at the top of GDP per capita Keynesian or sitting on top of valuable natural resources?
You'll have to graph that one for me. What is your metric of "Keynesian"?
something like the Glass-Steagall Act would have keep the markets free from similar crashes.
The Glass-Steagall Act had very little to do with the fact that everyone from bankers to politicians forgot that real estate prices could drop. Banks followed the Basel regulations, and capitalized their accounts with a lot of AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities. It turns out the AAA-rated securities became illiquid when it was unclear how many of the mortgages that backed them were in default, then everyone was afraid/unable to trade them.
Bank capitalization is HIGHLY REGULATED. You have to back it with cash or high rated securities. Banks can offer customers other investments due to Glass-Steagall, but they don't make "risky" investments with standard depositor demand-deposit money. It turns out that the "safe" investments required by Basel regulations might have been just as bad as "risky" ones like stocks.
I'd love to say "oh, the government should have regulated the government-anointed ratings agencies so they didn't put an AAA-rating on mortgage backed securities", but I didn't hear many politicians claiming that housing prices were too high and about to fall. You only get a bubble when even smart people are wrong.
Of course ALMOST EVERY ECONOMIST has been against the mortgage interest rate deduction for years. I believe this contributed to the final size of the bubble, although it certainly wasn't the main cause.
The sound Canadian banking system holds the real answer
Indeed. The Canadian banking industry is more centralized, because it never had state/province level limitations to bank ownership. Also all Canadian mortgages are recourse loans, meaning unlike California, if you default, you are still on the hook for what you owe. Finally, Canadian banks did not have Freddie/Fannie to help securitize their mortgages, so they ended up securitizing less, which meant less illiquidity problems.
Canada does not separate investment banking from commercial banking, i.e., they don't have a Glass-Steagall style regulation.
Don't see China citizens rebelling neither, in fact, there are very vocal supporters of their government.
What was that whole Tiananmen Square thing then?
Or China warns again against Hong Kong democracy push?
And why does China have to jail democracy activists?
The truth is that China is 1.3 billion people with 1.3 billion different political beliefs. A good number of them are pushing for democracy. As to how many, we can't know in a non-democracy that jails people who are "subversive" to the autocracy.
It is easy to be supportive of your government when your whole future life depends on you saying that you support it.
Currently since africa et al are at the bottom of the food chain they have no bargaining chips WTO then allows rich countries to fuck them over.
While clearly Western countries have a lot of agricultural price supports, it is unclear that developing countries are getting "fucked over" by the WTO in terms of any other products.
What we do know is that Sub-Saharan Africa has incredibly low levels of Economic Freedom. Some of the lowest ranked countries in Economic Freedom include: Zimbabwe, Eritrea, D.R. Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Togo, Chad, Burundi, Chad, Lesotho, Angola, C.A.R., Equatorial Guinea. These all fall into the Economically "repressed" category.
For example, look at Angola:
Pervasive corruption and a lack of institutional capacity continue to undermine the implementation of other important reform policies. Angola scores poorly in most of the 10 economic freedoms. Monetary stability remains fragile, regulation chokes private business investment, and the judiciary is politically influenced. Inconsistent and confusing regulations make entrepreneurial activity costly and difficult. Despite the government's plan to diversify its economic base away from oil and diamonds, progress in stimulating the development of the non-oil private sector has been sluggish. Monopolies and quasi-monopolies still dominate the leading sectors of the economy.
and speaking of trade:
Angola's weighted average tariff rate was 7.3 percent in 2008. Despite progress in trade reform, restrictions on some imports, variable and high customs fees and taxes, import licensing, government import authorizations, the regulatory environment, non-transparent government procurement, subsidies, inadequate customs capacity, and issues involving enforcement of intellectual property rights add to the cost of trade.
compare with the USA:
The weighted average U.S. tariff rate was 1.5 percent in 2008. Anti-dumping and countervailing duties, domestic preferences in government procurement, high out-of-quota tariffs, services market access restrictions, import licensing, restrictive labeling and standards, and export-promotion programs and subsidies add to the cost of trade.
Any economist will tell you there needs to be ways of moderating the natural boom-bust cycle of capitalism.
No, some economists would say that government attempts to moderate the boom-bust cycle of capitalism (such as the Fed's action to purposely burst the stock bubble of the late 1920's through deflation) have often proven to be worse than letting the economy alone. Keynesian stimulus spending rarely works well, because even if it works in one's theory, in practice governments never save during good times, and when spending happens it is inefficient, slow, and corrupt.
This rap video provides one viewpoint along these lines.
Now keeping the banking system intact is a separate issue - although I think it will be many years before we know if saving "too big to fail" banks was better or worse than letting them fail.
Theora? Don't hold your breath
In truth, I don't think anyone has truly ensured that Theora is "patent troll proof". Any codec efficient enough to come close to H.264 is probably using patented "tools" whether the programmer recognizes it or not.
Cliff Stoll back then was a net guru and quite active on usenet, so it's not like he wouldn't have imagined how the net connects people...
I hooked up with chicks I met through Usenet back in 1992...
I'll admit that although I was building some of the earlier E-commerce Web sites in the mid-90's that I was totally blown away by the first time I saw a URL on the side of a bus. I thought the Internet would be huge, but even I didn't realize quite how huge.
And even if all of the above holds true, sort term efficiency is easier to gain by underpaying and overworking employees,
If employees are being paid below market wages, they will go to other employers that will pay market wages.