Ignoring the overly stiff penalties for a second, he should have ABSOLUTELY been stuck with a felony for putting a laptop in a wiring closet. That is a serious no-no and a felony level crime.
If I walk up to you and punch you in the face that isn't a felony (hitting you with a wrench probably would be). How is sticking a laptop in a wiring closet and causing little actual harm to anybody (besides having to find/remove it) more serious than that.
Handle it the same way as you handle physical trespassing.
You can set up rules for how people behave on your property (within reason - you can't discriminate/etc). If somebody violates the rules you can ask them to leave, and if they refuse they are trespassing.
What you can't do is notice that somebody is violating the rules and just call the police without bothering to ask them to leave.
Oh, and even if you do call the police then most likely the police will just nicely ask them again to leave and do nothing if they comply, unless they had broken in or something.
So, if you violate some online service's TOS they can ask you to leave and lock the doors behind you, and they have no further recourse unless you actually break in.
Store rules are actually a good way of looking at this sort of thing.
If you do something really obnoxious in a store they can ask you to leave. If you refuse to do so they can call the police. You can of course sue the store for discrimination, and the police might not even make you leave if the basis for the removal is so egregious.
Website TOS's should be similar. If somebody doesn't like what you're doing on their website they should ask you to leave, and if you cooperate then no crime has occurred. Unfortunately that isn't what this law was being used for - imagine if you wear a hat in a store that has a "no hats" policy and the owner just called the police, and they showed up, and then charged you with a felony for violating the store rules.
Trespassing is only trespassing if somebody actually asks you to leave. Now, if you walk into a store and set fire to it then you can be arrested on the spot, but not for trespassing.
Frankly I'd get rid of all contracts of adhesion. Contracts should only have the force of law if they are original creative works authored by both parties. For standard transactions like buying homes/etc you can use a form-based contract, but only if it is embedded in a law (ie the government explicitly approves all standard contracts and their terms).
Really this amounts to nothing more than actually enforcing the whole "meeting of the minds" bit which is supposed to be at the center of contract law anyway. There is no meeting of the minds when your boss says "sign this or I will fire you" or whatever.
Again the flippant comparison of a non crime with a crime..
Crimes are nothing more than violations of rules. I can set rules for my house, and the government sets rules for the country. Neither has any real moral authority behind it - just the force necessary to enforce them. If I want to put my kids out on the street I can do so (after jumping through various legal hoops - just as any prosecutor must), and they'd basically be powerless against me. That wouldn't make doing so right - but it WOULD be completely legal.
And frankly Swartz is much more of an adult than most - he had the courage to stand up for something at great personal risk to himself. The way our tax dollars were used to persecute him makes us all guilty of something much worse than a "crime."
As long as there is oxygen the soot is just more fuel. Air is 20% oxygen - that's 200,000 ppm. The soot is 800ppm and if they keep that up for any period of time the whole city will die from black lung. If they could actually put up enough soot to displace oxygen half the country would look like Pompeii after about 15 minutes.
Clogged air filters are a different matter. Soot doesn't inhibit combustion so much as gum up the works, which is basically what it does to your lungs.
Frontline did a show on this years ago. They attributed the biggest sources to the use of coal for home heating, and outdated car emission standards. The coal stoves that are ubiqutous are indeed pretty nasty - belching all kinds of soot into the air and EVERYBODY uses them. It is even dirty by coal standards - but REALLY cheap.
Imagine getting a hopper full of coal dumped at your house for $100 and just shoveling a little into stoves in each room from time to time and having it last all winter. The stacks would look like a locomotive from the 1800s. But, your house would be somewhat warm and it would be quite cheap. Oh, and you'd live to about the age of 50 and die of lung cancer.
So we are going to run a planetary scale experiment and guess what it may not have that great a result.
Disclaimer - I'm not an atmospheric scientist.
However, I suspect that this sort of pollution isn't really a global problem. This is soot - horrible for your lungs if you breathe it in, but it falls out in rain and such and won't just circulate all over the globe (at least not down in the troposphere). The acid rain might make it to California, but will be relatively mild and not nearly as bad as the soot, which will likely destroy lungs all over China.
CO2 is the bigger problem globally. The only fix for that are non-fossil-fuel power sources. However, the soot is just a matter of getting rid of all the coal-fired home furnaces and putting pollution controls on the factories and power plants.
I'd have given him a fine of a few thousand dollars for a first offense (especially since he seems to have means - I'd be easier on some kid with no assets). If he kept it up maybe I'd keep in prison for a week or two.
That's if I really felt it necessary to punish him at all. I'd probably just talk to him and give him a warning to start with.
But hey, I guess I'm soft on crime. When my kids don't clean their bathroom I don't throw them out on the street either. I'm sure they'll grow up to be serial killers.
What are you smoking? Distributing 13 files should be punished more harshly than selling nuclear weapon designs or killing somebody? Apparently a human life is worth about 4 file transfers. I'd hate to have you on my death panel.:)
Committing 13 crimes may (provided the sentences aren't applied concurrently) be punished more harshly than committing only 1 crime? Heavens to Betsy!
Yeah, I guess your argument does make sense in some world where all crimes are punished equally, from jaywalking to mass murder (err, well, single murder - if you kill 24 people in a mall that would be like rolling stops at two dozen intersections).
There is exactly one price that maximizes marginal profit. That maximized profit might be positive, or it might be negative, but there is one price that maximizes it.
Companies do everything they can to determine that price, and sell at it.
If they aren't doing that, then they're losing money whether the ROI is positive or negative. If they are doing that, then changing the price will cause them to lose money, whether the ROI is positive or negative.
Suppose you find out that you make the most money if you sell a widget for $4, but it costs $5 to make. What do you do? Unless you can find a way to reduce the costs or increase demand the best solution is to stop making more widgets and keep selling them at $4, even if every one is a loss. Losing $1 is better than losing $5. Now, there are other factors like fixed costs that cause the costs to change over time, and changing demand that can raise the ideal price. So, companies do need to be in it for the long haul - many products are sold at a loss initially.
What is the ROI on a 787 right now? Zero - every sale fails to reduce the huge initial costs. And yet they do not raise the prices. That is because they're being sold at the optimum price, and somebody has estimated that eventually their sunk costs will be paid off if they continue. You can't just charge more money simply because you want to make more money - charging more or charging less than the ideal price results in losing money.
Oh, and I do agree that companies do focus their activities on whatever yields the highest ROI. That said, it would be quite unusual for a company to scrap a product that actually is profitable, even if it is not their most profitable product. Green is green - and nothing says that a company can only have one factory. The opportunity has to be pretty big to ditch something that works. But, opportunity cost is real, so it can happen.
I would love to see a loser-pays system with equal funds for both sides. Here is how it would work:
1. The stakes of the case are used to set the legal budget for the case. The more at issue, the higher the budget (can apply to both civil and criminal trials). 2. Half the money is allocated for each side. 3. Lawyers are required to bill the court for their services. Everybody can choose their lawyers, but they cannot pay them out-of-pocket. Lawyers face sanctions if they violate this, and I'd go a step further and ban lawyers and their employers doing trial work from engaging in any other type of work (so they don't play cost-shifting games). 4. For civil trials the court awards costs against either party as it sees fit, up to 100% of total costs. Any judgments are paid out by the court immediately to the prevailing party, and the losing party becomes indebted to the state (ie the winner doesn't have to collect). The state handles collecting on costs/judgments as it does any other public debt.
I'm sure this can be refined, but the bottom line is that both parties get equal representation.
Six months for what amounts to a prank in terms of impact to the institutions involved? Oh, and no doubt one of those draconian "don't touch a computer for 5 years" paroles as well.
Sorry, that data should be in the public domain to begin with. The punishment doesn't fit the crime.
Kids talk in class too, and we don't stick them in prison for six months. And you know, just as you fear everybody does it as a result. Next thing you know kids will call each other names as well.
This was originally posted on ThinkProgress but I will post it here to put that 35 years into perspective for those who don't quite get it.
... But you won't bother to clear up the misleading implication that this was over one charge. How many counts was he facing? 13. If we apply the same number to the various "comparisons" you listed, they'd all be in the range of 100-400 years. 35 looks a lot more reasonable when it's *actually* in perspective, no?
What are you smoking? Distributing 13 files should be punished more harshly than selling nuclear weapon designs or killing somebody? Apparently a human life is worth about 4 file transfers. I'd hate to have you on my death panel.:)
This is how the justice system should work. To be exact : the prosecutor doesn't assume the defendant is guilty, they only assume the police is right, and build the legal case to prove it. That does mean that they assume everyone else is wrong.
I don't think this is appropriate at all. If a prosecutor has reason to believe that somebody is innocent, they should drop the charges at once. Why make an innocent person bankrupt themselves to try to prove their innocence?
Excellent points. I've seen the same thing at work.
Usually the people promoting the outsourcing of some process aren't the customers of that process. They don't care about good service - they just care about metrics, because that is what they show to their managers. So, the outsourcing company delivers the goods, which are metrics. The final customers are of course unhappy, but whatever metrics are collected are properly gamed so that everybody smells like roses.
The executive who outsources their janitorial service probably has different expectations than when he goes home and hires a maid. Oh, and I'm sure the janitorial service is certain to make sure the executive's trash can gets the royal treatment.
most corporations require a certain ROI (return on investment) so a product outsourced tends to have a lower consumer cost than if it is not
Any large corporation certainly requires a certain ROI, but that ROI has NO impact on either cost or pricing.
A product's cost is however low a company can get it. They'll make it lower even if they're making a killing on profit. There is no incentive to NOT lower costs.
A product's price is whatever the market will bear. If it is lower they'll sell more units at a lower marginal profit, and if it is higher they'll sell fewer units at a greater marginal profit. The price gets set at whatever maximizes the total profit (profit per item times volume).
If the resulting profit vs cost is greater than the ROI, then the product is sold. If the profit vs cost is lower than the ROI than the product is discontinued (unless sold at a loss for strategic reasons).
Now, competition might create pressure to lower prices, and the higher a product is priced relative to its costs the more likely there is to be competition. So, if a product really can be made for $3 and the company is selling it for $10 over the long term competitors will arise until the price gets close to the minimum ROI and then things tend to level off.
But, no company says "gee, that product isn't making an ROI, so let's lower costs or raise prices." Any well-run company is constantly evaluating both cost and price and always optimizing both, whether the product has good ROI or not. If a product is optimally priced, then raising the price LOWERS the total profit (because of a loss of volume).
The delivering what he was paid to approach only applies if he was a contractor, not an employee. There is no question that he was in fact an employee, so delivering what he was paid to approach does not apply.
What's the difference? If he didn't deliver more value for less money he'd be fired in a heartbeat like any contractor. If the company needed less of his services and more of somebody else's he'd be fired in a heartbeat like any contractor. If the company just wanted to pay him less they'd give him a take-it-or-leave deal like any contractor.
In the US there really is no such thing as an "employee" any longer. You're just somebody who does a job, and you'll do the job for as long as the job needs doing and there isn't anybody who can do it for a fraction of a penny less.
Yeah, the kinds of rates for healthcare you just quoted are the kinds of rates many Americans pay for healthcare even if they are full-time employees with employer-provided coverage.
If you have to pay your own way, add at least one zero. Most people who do contracting/consulting tend to go through big firms as a result - they're really just employees of somebody else.
When I hire a contractor it means no benefits and generally short term (at a higher rate per hour and generally higher than total hourly cost of having an employee). With an employee it's long term relationship (I can't ditch them whenever I want like a contractor.. at least not in my jurisdiction) and I'm expected to provide benefits etc (though apparent hourly rate is lower).
If things really worked that way then I'd be much more sympathetic to the company. Modern companies hire and fire on a whim, and they do stuff like reduce pension plans mid-career (or even post-career in some cases - via bankruptcy). Many companies don't pay benefits at all.
If employees really had "jobs for life" as long as they performed reasonably well then I'd be much more sympathetic to the employer. In such an arrangement the employee is trading security for profit - the company is the one taking the risks, but they also get the rewards, and the employee just gets a steady paycheck. However, the modern corporation puts quite a bit of pay at-risk, and the job as well. If your product doesn't pan out they just fire everybody working on it. If the product does do well then the corporation keeps the 400% profit margin for itself. The days of keeping you around and paying you until they can find another task to train you to work on are over. If they need less of A and more of B they don't retrain, they just fire a bunch of A-workers and hire a bunch of B-workers.
No, but you can do it honestly where the company is aware they're hiring a contractor or dishonestly where they're not.
Is it dishonest of a company to not list on the box of their product the names of everybody who worked on it? Is it dishonest for you to buy a device from Apple only to find out that it was really made by Foxconn?
They paid him to do a job. He did the job. There was always the risk that he could have stolen their code and sold it to the highest bidder, and that didn't change when he subcontracted the work.
The only reason that people have a problem with what was done is that we basically treat employees as slaves.
He didn't suggest that he would just watch youtube all day.
As far as not finding the right job/career goes, well, duh. The problem is that people don't pay you to do what YOU want to do. They pay you to do what THEY want you to do. If somebody really wants to paint and have a family that lives in their own house, then unless they're in the top ~50-100 artists globally they simply aren't going to be happy with that as a career.
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Ignoring the overly stiff penalties for a second, he should have ABSOLUTELY been stuck with a felony for putting a laptop in a wiring closet. That is a serious no-no and a felony level crime.
If I walk up to you and punch you in the face that isn't a felony (hitting you with a wrench probably would be). How is sticking a laptop in a wiring closet and causing little actual harm to anybody (besides having to find/remove it) more serious than that.
Handle it the same way as you handle physical trespassing.
You can set up rules for how people behave on your property (within reason - you can't discriminate/etc). If somebody violates the rules you can ask them to leave, and if they refuse they are trespassing.
What you can't do is notice that somebody is violating the rules and just call the police without bothering to ask them to leave.
Oh, and even if you do call the police then most likely the police will just nicely ask them again to leave and do nothing if they comply, unless they had broken in or something.
So, if you violate some online service's TOS they can ask you to leave and lock the doors behind you, and they have no further recourse unless you actually break in.
AC said "can't fix stupid." Stupid isn't the problem.
More like:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! -- Upton Sinclair
Store rules are actually a good way of looking at this sort of thing.
If you do something really obnoxious in a store they can ask you to leave. If you refuse to do so they can call the police. You can of course sue the store for discrimination, and the police might not even make you leave if the basis for the removal is so egregious.
Website TOS's should be similar. If somebody doesn't like what you're doing on their website they should ask you to leave, and if you cooperate then no crime has occurred. Unfortunately that isn't what this law was being used for - imagine if you wear a hat in a store that has a "no hats" policy and the owner just called the police, and they showed up, and then charged you with a felony for violating the store rules.
Trespassing is only trespassing if somebody actually asks you to leave. Now, if you walk into a store and set fire to it then you can be arrested on the spot, but not for trespassing.
Frankly I'd get rid of all contracts of adhesion. Contracts should only have the force of law if they are original creative works authored by both parties. For standard transactions like buying homes/etc you can use a form-based contract, but only if it is embedded in a law (ie the government explicitly approves all standard contracts and their terms).
Really this amounts to nothing more than actually enforcing the whole "meeting of the minds" bit which is supposed to be at the center of contract law anyway. There is no meeting of the minds when your boss says "sign this or I will fire you" or whatever.
Again the flippant comparison of a non crime with a crime..
Crimes are nothing more than violations of rules. I can set rules for my house, and the government sets rules for the country. Neither has any real moral authority behind it - just the force necessary to enforce them. If I want to put my kids out on the street I can do so (after jumping through various legal hoops - just as any prosecutor must), and they'd basically be powerless against me. That wouldn't make doing so right - but it WOULD be completely legal.
And frankly Swartz is much more of an adult than most - he had the courage to stand up for something at great personal risk to himself. The way our tax dollars were used to persecute him makes us all guilty of something much worse than a "crime."
As long as there is oxygen the soot is just more fuel. Air is 20% oxygen - that's 200,000 ppm. The soot is 800ppm and if they keep that up for any period of time the whole city will die from black lung. If they could actually put up enough soot to displace oxygen half the country would look like Pompeii after about 15 minutes.
Clogged air filters are a different matter. Soot doesn't inhibit combustion so much as gum up the works, which is basically what it does to your lungs.
Frontline did a show on this years ago. They attributed the biggest sources to the use of coal for home heating, and outdated car emission standards. The coal stoves that are ubiqutous are indeed pretty nasty - belching all kinds of soot into the air and EVERYBODY uses them. It is even dirty by coal standards - but REALLY cheap.
Imagine getting a hopper full of coal dumped at your house for $100 and just shoveling a little into stoves in each room from time to time and having it last all winter. The stacks would look like a locomotive from the 1800s. But, your house would be somewhat warm and it would be quite cheap. Oh, and you'd live to about the age of 50 and die of lung cancer.
So we are going to run a planetary scale experiment and guess what it may not have that great a result.
Disclaimer - I'm not an atmospheric scientist.
However, I suspect that this sort of pollution isn't really a global problem. This is soot - horrible for your lungs if you breathe it in, but it falls out in rain and such and won't just circulate all over the globe (at least not down in the troposphere). The acid rain might make it to California, but will be relatively mild and not nearly as bad as the soot, which will likely destroy lungs all over China.
CO2 is the bigger problem globally. The only fix for that are non-fossil-fuel power sources. However, the soot is just a matter of getting rid of all the coal-fired home furnaces and putting pollution controls on the factories and power plants.
I'd have given him a fine of a few thousand dollars for a first offense (especially since he seems to have means - I'd be easier on some kid with no assets). If he kept it up maybe I'd keep in prison for a week or two.
That's if I really felt it necessary to punish him at all. I'd probably just talk to him and give him a warning to start with.
But hey, I guess I'm soft on crime. When my kids don't clean their bathroom I don't throw them out on the street either. I'm sure they'll grow up to be serial killers.
What are you smoking? Distributing 13 files should be punished more harshly than selling nuclear weapon designs or killing somebody? Apparently a human life is worth about 4 file transfers. I'd hate to have you on my death panel. :)
Committing 13 crimes may (provided the sentences aren't applied concurrently) be punished more harshly than committing only 1 crime? Heavens to Betsy!
Yeah, I guess your argument does make sense in some world where all crimes are punished equally, from jaywalking to mass murder (err, well, single murder - if you kill 24 people in a mall that would be like rolling stops at two dozen intersections).
I don't think you get pricing theory.
There is exactly one price that maximizes marginal profit. That maximized profit might be positive, or it might be negative, but there is one price that maximizes it.
Companies do everything they can to determine that price, and sell at it.
If they aren't doing that, then they're losing money whether the ROI is positive or negative. If they are doing that, then changing the price will cause them to lose money, whether the ROI is positive or negative.
Suppose you find out that you make the most money if you sell a widget for $4, but it costs $5 to make. What do you do? Unless you can find a way to reduce the costs or increase demand the best solution is to stop making more widgets and keep selling them at $4, even if every one is a loss. Losing $1 is better than losing $5. Now, there are other factors like fixed costs that cause the costs to change over time, and changing demand that can raise the ideal price. So, companies do need to be in it for the long haul - many products are sold at a loss initially.
What is the ROI on a 787 right now? Zero - every sale fails to reduce the huge initial costs. And yet they do not raise the prices. That is because they're being sold at the optimum price, and somebody has estimated that eventually their sunk costs will be paid off if they continue. You can't just charge more money simply because you want to make more money - charging more or charging less than the ideal price results in losing money.
Oh, and I do agree that companies do focus their activities on whatever yields the highest ROI. That said, it would be quite unusual for a company to scrap a product that actually is profitable, even if it is not their most profitable product. Green is green - and nothing says that a company can only have one factory. The opportunity has to be pretty big to ditch something that works. But, opportunity cost is real, so it can happen.
I would love to see a loser-pays system with equal funds for both sides. Here is how it would work:
1. The stakes of the case are used to set the legal budget for the case. The more at issue, the higher the budget (can apply to both civil and criminal trials).
2. Half the money is allocated for each side.
3. Lawyers are required to bill the court for their services. Everybody can choose their lawyers, but they cannot pay them out-of-pocket. Lawyers face sanctions if they violate this, and I'd go a step further and ban lawyers and their employers doing trial work from engaging in any other type of work (so they don't play cost-shifting games).
4. For civil trials the court awards costs against either party as it sees fit, up to 100% of total costs. Any judgments are paid out by the court immediately to the prevailing party, and the losing party becomes indebted to the state (ie the winner doesn't have to collect). The state handles collecting on costs/judgments as it does any other public debt.
I'm sure this can be refined, but the bottom line is that both parties get equal representation.
Six months for what amounts to a prank in terms of impact to the institutions involved? Oh, and no doubt one of those draconian "don't touch a computer for 5 years" paroles as well.
Sorry, that data should be in the public domain to begin with. The punishment doesn't fit the crime.
Kids talk in class too, and we don't stick them in prison for six months. And you know, just as you fear everybody does it as a result. Next thing you know kids will call each other names as well.
This was originally posted on ThinkProgress but I will post it here to put that 35 years into perspective for those who don't quite get it.
... But you won't bother to clear up the misleading implication that this was over one charge. How many counts was he facing? 13. If we apply the same number to the various "comparisons" you listed, they'd all be in the range of 100-400 years. 35 looks a lot more reasonable when it's *actually* in perspective, no?
What are you smoking? Distributing 13 files should be punished more harshly than selling nuclear weapon designs or killing somebody? Apparently a human life is worth about 4 file transfers. I'd hate to have you on my death panel. :)
This is how the justice system should work. To be exact : the prosecutor doesn't assume the defendant is guilty, they only assume the police is right, and build the legal case to prove it. That does mean that they assume everyone else is wrong.
I don't think this is appropriate at all. If a prosecutor has reason to believe that somebody is innocent, they should drop the charges at once. Why make an innocent person bankrupt themselves to try to prove their innocence?
Excellent points. I've seen the same thing at work.
Usually the people promoting the outsourcing of some process aren't the customers of that process. They don't care about good service - they just care about metrics, because that is what they show to their managers. So, the outsourcing company delivers the goods, which are metrics. The final customers are of course unhappy, but whatever metrics are collected are properly gamed so that everybody smells like roses.
The executive who outsources their janitorial service probably has different expectations than when he goes home and hires a maid. Oh, and I'm sure the janitorial service is certain to make sure the executive's trash can gets the royal treatment.
You'll get no argument from me. The only thing that is outrageous about this incident was that a lowly employee behaved like an executive.
You're missing my point. So, just add knives, sticks, and clubs to the list.
My whole point is that we don't live in some utopia free of violence, which was basically your point.
most corporations require a certain ROI (return on investment) so a product outsourced tends to have a lower consumer cost than if it is not
Any large corporation certainly requires a certain ROI, but that ROI has NO impact on either cost or pricing.
A product's cost is however low a company can get it. They'll make it lower even if they're making a killing on profit. There is no incentive to NOT lower costs.
A product's price is whatever the market will bear. If it is lower they'll sell more units at a lower marginal profit, and if it is higher they'll sell fewer units at a greater marginal profit. The price gets set at whatever maximizes the total profit (profit per item times volume).
If the resulting profit vs cost is greater than the ROI, then the product is sold. If the profit vs cost is lower than the ROI than the product is discontinued (unless sold at a loss for strategic reasons).
Now, competition might create pressure to lower prices, and the higher a product is priced relative to its costs the more likely there is to be competition. So, if a product really can be made for $3 and the company is selling it for $10 over the long term competitors will arise until the price gets close to the minimum ROI and then things tend to level off.
But, no company says "gee, that product isn't making an ROI, so let's lower costs or raise prices." Any well-run company is constantly evaluating both cost and price and always optimizing both, whether the product has good ROI or not. If a product is optimally priced, then raising the price LOWERS the total profit (because of a loss of volume).
The delivering what he was paid to approach only applies if he was a contractor, not an employee. There is no question that he was in fact an employee, so delivering what he was paid to approach does not apply.
What's the difference? If he didn't deliver more value for less money he'd be fired in a heartbeat like any contractor. If the company needed less of his services and more of somebody else's he'd be fired in a heartbeat like any contractor. If the company just wanted to pay him less they'd give him a take-it-or-leave deal like any contractor.
In the US there really is no such thing as an "employee" any longer. You're just somebody who does a job, and you'll do the job for as long as the job needs doing and there isn't anybody who can do it for a fraction of a penny less.
Yeah, the kinds of rates for healthcare you just quoted are the kinds of rates many Americans pay for healthcare even if they are full-time employees with employer-provided coverage.
If you have to pay your own way, add at least one zero. Most people who do contracting/consulting tend to go through big firms as a result - they're really just employees of somebody else.
When I hire a contractor it means no benefits and generally short term (at a higher rate per hour and generally higher than total hourly cost of having an employee). With an employee it's long term relationship (I can't ditch them whenever I want like a contractor.. at least not in my jurisdiction) and I'm expected to provide benefits etc (though apparent hourly rate is lower).
If things really worked that way then I'd be much more sympathetic to the company. Modern companies hire and fire on a whim, and they do stuff like reduce pension plans mid-career (or even post-career in some cases - via bankruptcy). Many companies don't pay benefits at all.
If employees really had "jobs for life" as long as they performed reasonably well then I'd be much more sympathetic to the employer. In such an arrangement the employee is trading security for profit - the company is the one taking the risks, but they also get the rewards, and the employee just gets a steady paycheck. However, the modern corporation puts quite a bit of pay at-risk, and the job as well. If your product doesn't pan out they just fire everybody working on it. If the product does do well then the corporation keeps the 400% profit margin for itself. The days of keeping you around and paying you until they can find another task to train you to work on are over. If they need less of A and more of B they don't retrain, they just fire a bunch of A-workers and hire a bunch of B-workers.
No, but you can do it honestly where the company is aware they're hiring a contractor or dishonestly where they're not.
Is it dishonest of a company to not list on the box of their product the names of everybody who worked on it? Is it dishonest for you to buy a device from Apple only to find out that it was really made by Foxconn?
They paid him to do a job. He did the job. There was always the risk that he could have stolen their code and sold it to the highest bidder, and that didn't change when he subcontracted the work.
The only reason that people have a problem with what was done is that we basically treat employees as slaves.
He didn't suggest that he would just watch youtube all day.
As far as not finding the right job/career goes, well, duh. The problem is that people don't pay you to do what YOU want to do. They pay you to do what THEY want you to do. If somebody really wants to paint and have a family that lives in their own house, then unless they're in the top ~50-100 artists globally they simply aren't going to be happy with that as a career.