Suppose we raise it to $60 an hour. Better? Would you still have a job?
Funny, they said that sort of thing when they introduced the minimum wage 10 years ago in the UK, currently at about the equivalent of ($10ph).
You know what happened? Well it wasn't massive layoffs and economic collapse... in fact since then the UK has been one of the best performing economies in the world.
No, what actually happened is that people doing menial, low paid work all got a small payrise. No one went bankrupt, there was no leap in unemployment, the sky did not fall on our heads. The jobs that were there still needed doing, just the companies that were employing them had to take a (small) hit. They no doubt passed this on to their clients and it all just got dwarfed by the ceo's salaries.
Re:Soccer is a boring sport that kids play...
on
IT Meets the World Cup
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"A cumulative total of 30 billion viewers tuned into the FIFA World Cup 2002, of which one billion watched the Brazil-Germany final alone."
Nuclear power is only environmentally friendly if you're a member of the Bush or Blair administrations or you work for a nuclear power company. Granted, it doesn't emit carbon, but that is not the only measure of environmental pollution. The overriding problems with Nuclear fission are still 1) what to do with the waste and 2) it's not cost effective. See, your beloved market forces don't work here. That's because every nuke power station in existence has been built with goverment subsidies, dramatically skewing the price of power from them. If you take into account the building cost AND proper waste disposal cost, it's something like on a par with solar power. Yet because the nuclear lobby is very, very influential in government circles it's going to continue receiving its subsidies and getting government backing over other forms of power generation.
I think it's pretty much accepted that the Kyoto treaty and its associated targets are bunk now. It's probably only the Bush administration's opposition to it that has kept it alive. In kind with your sweeping aspersions about scientists and Europeans, Environmentalists are not in it for the money. Some might be, maybe even a lot. But not all. By the same measure it's far more obvious that the current energy policy is designed for a cotire of politicians and oil companies to make even more money. That's not so surprising, but what is truly scary is that this is now the case for US foreign policy too.
I agree that ethanol and bio-diesel are obvious replacements for oil and also that the market will see to that. Solar power at it's finest.
BTW, I heard a black man killed someone the other day; give me one good reason to trust these people!
#1 South Africa 0.719782 per 1,000 people #2 Colombia 0.509801 per 1,000 people #3 Thailand 0.312093 per 1,000 people #4 Zimbabwe 0.0491736 per 1,000 people #5 Mexico 0.0337938 per 1,000 people #6 Belarus 0.0321359 per 1,000 people #7 Costa Rica 0.0313745 per 1,000 people #8 United States 0.0279271 per 1,000 people #9 Uruguay 0.0245902 per 1,000 people #10 Lithuania 0.0230748 per 1,000 people
Numbers 1 thru 4 all allow the carrying of firearms (or are effectively lawless). Don't know about 5,6,7. 8 and 9 do, don't know about 10.
Why does paying helthcare cost for their employees drive business away? The employees still have to pay their healthcare costs, so they either get a higher salary and pay it themselves or a lower one and let the business pay it. For an example of this in action just compare average european salaries with average US ones (Hint: American salaries are much higher). Only the most short sighted businesses cannot see this. Luckily the lawmakers aren't as short sighted as you, who clearly have never been in the position of of not being able to afford your health insurance because your tight-fisted employer only pays you minimum wage and makes you work a 60 hour week. Presumably "workers" in this sentence to you means "trailer park scum who milk the system for all its worth" or some other social group to which you do not belong? Can you not understand that your parents/neighbours/you are all "workers"? You're privileged to even be able to think about this stuff. Take your $100k pa, buy your ipod/mopar/hdtv, accept that you're going to have to pay some tax and shut the fuck up.
Anyway, drive business away from where? America? Everything you're wearing right now and 95% of the computer you're looking at was made in china or SE asia by american owned megacorps. The business that can go away has already gone. The car dealer down the street isn't going anywere, the local kwikemart isn't going anywhere (unless walmart undercuts them out of business), people will still need to buy things and as long as that is the case businesses will survive and prosper.
Why should business assume that it has a god given right to only take from society and not be expected to return something? You pay taxes to keep your neighbourhood clean and get your trash taken away, is it not reasonable to expect that a business should pay taxes to help maintain the neighbourhood that allows it to make a living? That $9bn profit that Mega Corp made last year was squeezed out of the pockets of the people in society. They only exist under the sufferance of that society; why should they not be expected to put some of that enormous amount of money back into the society?
A business is part of society, not an isolated entity who's only action is to take money in return for goods or services. Not only is every employee of that company a part of that society with rights and responsibilities towards it, but the company itself is legally an individual with the same rights and responsibilities. It's unfortunate that many businesses don't see this and largely try to avoid their responsibilities while at the same time going to extremes to enforce and extend their rights.
As a business owner myself I'm glad to see that I'm not the only who sees all of this. Under programs such as http://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org/ companies are voluntarily paying extra tax for the benefit of others. OK some are doing it for PR reasons, but most are doing it cos they genuinely feel that their government is not doing enough or they just want to contribute more. Hopefully as the old style business dinosaurs die out, the new breed will appear and take a more rounded view of the world.
Yes. There is plenty of oil, but that doesn't mean there is no problem. As long as we can afford to pay $60 a barrel +$2 for every year from now.
For economies based on cheap (ie
I'm personally happy that it's going away; the sooner the better. The oil industries have a strangle hold on energy policy at the moment (here in the UK tax on bio-diesels is actually higher than on normal diesel, which itself is higher than on petrol. Enviromentally regressive taxation... go figure.), when oil goes away that will hopefully be removed to some extent.
Unfortuately the figures you quote seem to come from the USGS, who are notorious for massively overstating available reserves (the current administration likes optimistic oil figures). Non-governmental bodies have been largley agreeing with this article that the peak will be passed sometime between now and 2010 for a good few years now.
While there are probably quite a few ANWR size fields around, they're only big enough to keep the hummers running for a couple of months. There simply are no new big reservoirs to be found.
There certainly is a lot more oil available in unconvential forms, but the financial and environmental cost of extracting these starts making even hydrogen look cheap. All that new tech can only delay the inevitable by a few years.
If you haven't already, read "The end of oil" by paul roberts. Written by an oil industry journalist, his basic conclusion in the end is that the only way to put back the inevitable is simply by using less of it. No one needs 6mpg autos, expecially not when new production cars now routinely get upwards of 70mpg in europe (without all that hybrid shit). (I'd actually like to see what the author thinks now, it was written before the current price hikes and he said that a price over $30 was unsustainable. It's now been over $50 for a year.)
Just showing how misleading polls are. If you went out and asked a random person whether "Ropeadopeism" should be taught in schools, most would probably say yes, as they wouldn't want to admit that they didn't know what it was.
People in the UK just don't care. There are no christian fundamentalists, no religious right, no moral majority. Even the church (http://www.teal.org.uk/stats/key.htm) says that less than 5% of the population attend church and I would think that it's actually far lower than that. They don't not believe in God, or vehemently advocate Darwinism, they just don't think about it.
It's an irrelevant anachronism, ignore it, it will go away.
Well yes, but the problem is that it's not going to become commonplace. As of now it's just another browser specific extension. Whether mozilla like it or not, IE still dominates the market, and until they decide to implement a feature (or lose their dominance) it's not going to happen.
Yes, of course, if this were a standard browser feature then server admins would be delighted, but each individual user has to decided whether to use this feature or not, not blocks of 10,000 of them. Saving a single occasional extra request is not a huge incentive to find out about a feature and then enable it.
They appear to be spending too much time on adding new and unwanted features and not enough on the core product. If they've got time on their hands down in the firefox labs, why not send a few programmers over to the thunderbird offices; they have plenty ironing out to do.
but they're not expensive to the user. No website can use this as a primary mechanism in a process as less than 1% of their users will have it enabled. So, it can only be used for things that are optional to the website, for example user tracking. And in this case it actually generates more traffic, as now you just parse your logs (or put an image in, wherein we have a mechanism that does exactly the same thing anyway).
I think you misunderstood. I wasn't saying that google is bad for business; of course it's not, it provides 70-80% of the traffic to most web sites (and me with my income). My point was that it is a double edged sword: what the google giveth it can also taketh away.
Furthermore, with their "loose cannon" approach the to wielding of their enormous power, they are no doubt drawing attention to themselves from those with a regulatory interest.
yes, "outside computing" would be better. As far as I know they have never tried to buy any media outlets. Though I guess msnbc might be an borderline case.
In the course of my job I've spoken to quite a few small/medium business owners (all of whom had some online presence) in the last year or so and in the course of conversation quite have few have said that the biggest danger they see to their businesses is not the shop up the road, or even another website, it's Google.
Google has defacto a stranglehold on the internet. Not just advertising, but as by far the largest search engine it also controls the flow of traffic. They also have a history of taking punitive (some would say childish) action against sites (eg CNet) for no reason other than they felt like it. A scary situation when there is no legal recourse and your business relies on web traffic.
Google buying up offline ad businesses is a BAD thing. They sold their "do no evil" spiel to a huge swathe of geeks based on them having no ads for the first two years of their existence and a "kooky" image; now they have advertising coming out of their ears and a squadron of lawyers, but the same people still believe them.
They are scarier than Microsoft as MS has no ambitions outside PCs and Consoles (plus they give a shitload of money away to charity). Google wants to rule the world, pure and simple. They might well cause the first proper regulation of the internet in a few years, when everybody uses it for everything; no government can allow one company to have that much power.
On which subject, the Football Data Company owns and enforces similar rights over all football stats in England, including future fixture dates. This means that you have to buy a licence from them in order to tell someone what games are being played tomorrow!
eg http://www.unitedrant.co.uk/archives/2005/03/footb all_data_c.html
It preyed on Moas, birds about 6ft tall and pretty slow. OK, it's not Africa, but when the Maoris came to NZ there would have been another creature about 6ft tall and pretty slow to prey on...
Slashdot Mirror
No, what actually happened is that people doing menial, low paid work all got a small payrise. No one went bankrupt, there was no leap in unemployment, the sky did not fall on our heads. The jobs that were there still needed doing, just the companies that were employing them had to take a (small) hit. They no doubt passed this on to their clients and it all just got dwarfed by the ceo's salaries.
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=57 4061
The RIAA is now influencing US foreign policy! Scary country...
yep, mine pretty obscure one has been squatted.
I think it's pretty much accepted that the Kyoto treaty and its associated targets are bunk now. It's probably only the Bush administration's opposition to it that has kept it alive. In kind with your sweeping aspersions about scientists and Europeans, Environmentalists are not in it for the money. Some might be, maybe even a lot. But not all. By the same measure it's far more obvious that the current energy policy is designed for a cotire of politicians and oil companies to make even more money. That's not so surprising, but what is truly scary is that this is now the case for US foreign policy too.
I agree that ethanol and bio-diesel are obvious replacements for oil and also that the market will see to that. Solar power at it's finest.
BTW, I heard a black man killed someone the other day; give me one good reason to trust these people!
It's probably just a backlash from the years of mac fanboy articles.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/cri_mur_wit_fi r_percap
Murders with firearms (per capita)
Numbers 1 thru 4 all allow the carrying of firearms (or are effectively lawless). Don't know about 5,6,7. 8 and 9 do, don't know about 10.Anyway, drive business away from where? America? Everything you're wearing right now and 95% of the computer you're looking at was made in china or SE asia by american owned megacorps. The business that can go away has already gone. The car dealer down the street isn't going anywere, the local kwikemart isn't going anywhere (unless walmart undercuts them out of business), people will still need to buy things and as long as that is the case businesses will survive and prosper.
Why should business assume that it has a god given right to only take from society and not be expected to return something? You pay taxes to keep your neighbourhood clean and get your trash taken away, is it not reasonable to expect that a business should pay taxes to help maintain the neighbourhood that allows it to make a living? That $9bn profit that Mega Corp made last year was squeezed out of the pockets of the people in society. They only exist under the sufferance of that society; why should they not be expected to put some of that enormous amount of money back into the society?
A business is part of society, not an isolated entity who's only action is to take money in return for goods or services. Not only is every employee of that company a part of that society with rights and responsibilities towards it, but the company itself is legally an individual with the same rights and responsibilities. It's unfortunate that many businesses don't see this and largely try to avoid their responsibilities while at the same time going to extremes to enforce and extend their rights.
As a business owner myself I'm glad to see that I'm not the only who sees all of this. Under programs such as http://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org/ companies are voluntarily paying extra tax for the benefit of others. OK some are doing it for PR reasons, but most are doing it cos they genuinely feel that their government is not doing enough or they just want to contribute more. Hopefully as the old style business dinosaurs die out, the new breed will appear and take a more rounded view of the world.
Look at the american and european figures near the bottom. See them grow!
For economies based on cheap (ie I'm personally happy that it's going away; the sooner the better. The oil industries have a strangle hold on energy policy at the moment (here in the UK tax on bio-diesels is actually higher than on normal diesel, which itself is higher than on petrol. Enviromentally regressive taxation... go figure.), when oil goes away that will hopefully be removed to some extent.
No, that's e-ink, Oil has always been infinite, at least until the last 15 years.
While there are probably quite a few ANWR size fields around, they're only big enough to keep the hummers running for a couple of months. There simply are no new big reservoirs to be found.
There certainly is a lot more oil available in unconvential forms, but the financial and environmental cost of extracting these starts making even hydrogen look cheap. All that new tech can only delay the inevitable by a few years.
If you haven't already, read "The end of oil" by paul roberts. Written by an oil industry journalist, his basic conclusion in the end is that the only way to put back the inevitable is simply by using less of it. No one needs 6mpg autos, expecially not when new production cars now routinely get upwards of 70mpg in europe (without all that hybrid shit). (I'd actually like to see what the author thinks now, it was written before the current price hikes and he said that a price over $30 was unsustainable. It's now been over $50 for a year.)
People in the UK just don't care. There are no christian fundamentalists, no religious right, no moral majority. Even the church (http://www.teal.org.uk/stats/key.htm) says that less than 5% of the population attend church and I would think that it's actually far lower than that. They don't not believe in God, or vehemently advocate Darwinism, they just don't think about it.
It's an irrelevant anachronism, ignore it, it will go away.
Yes, but there is a cutoff. $2 billion dollars doesn't buy you any more time than $200k, it just buys you a lot more caviar.
Well yes, but the problem is that it's not going to become commonplace. As of now it's just another browser specific extension. Whether mozilla like it or not, IE still dominates the market, and until they decide to implement a feature (or lose their dominance) it's not going to happen.
They appear to be spending too much time on adding new and unwanted features and not enough on the core product. If they've got time on their hands down in the firefox labs, why not send a few programmers over to the thunderbird offices; they have plenty ironing out to do.
but they're not expensive to the user. No website can use this as a primary mechanism in a process as less than 1% of their users will have it enabled. So, it can only be used for things that are optional to the website, for example user tracking. And in this case it actually generates more traffic, as now you just parse your logs (or put an image in, wherein we have a mechanism that does exactly the same thing anyway).
Furthermore, with their "loose cannon" approach the to wielding of their enormous power, they are no doubt drawing attention to themselves from those with a regulatory interest.
yes, "outside computing" would be better. As far as I know they have never tried to buy any media outlets. Though I guess msnbc might be an borderline case.
In the course of my job I've spoken to quite a few small/medium business owners (all of whom had some online presence) in the last year or so and in the course of conversation quite have few have said that the biggest danger they see to their businesses is not the shop up the road, or even another website, it's Google.
Google has defacto a stranglehold on the internet. Not just advertising, but as by far the largest search engine it also controls the flow of traffic. They also have a history of taking punitive (some would say childish) action against sites (eg CNet) for no reason other than they felt like it. A scary situation when there is no legal recourse and your business relies on web traffic.
Google buying up offline ad businesses is a BAD thing. They sold their "do no evil" spiel to a huge swathe of geeks based on them having no ads for the first two years of their existence and a "kooky" image; now they have advertising coming out of their ears and a squadron of lawyers, but the same people still believe them.
They are scarier than Microsoft as MS has no ambitions outside PCs and Consoles (plus they give a shitload of money away to charity). Google wants to rule the world, pure and simple. They might well cause the first proper regulation of the internet in a few years, when everybody uses it for everything; no government can allow one company to have that much power.
Mac users 'too smug' Over Security?
I'd say you confirmed that for us.On which subject, the Football Data Company owns and enforces similar rights over all football stats in England, including future fixture dates. This means that you have to buy a licence from them in order to tell someone what games are being played tomorrow! eg http://www.unitedrant.co.uk/archives/2005/03/footb all_data_c.html
It preyed on Moas, birds about 6ft tall and pretty slow. OK, it's not Africa, but when the Maoris came to NZ there would have been another creature about 6ft tall and pretty slow to prey on...
boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!