You give the government license to weigh in on a contract as soon as you rely on the courts to help you enforce it.
Frankly, I don't see, how the two things are related in the slightest. A judge may think a contract was unfair (or stupid), but it is still valid — as long as entered into willingly and in good faith by both sides...
Oh, so you do think the courts should be able to weigh in on a contract.
Either way, be it the warlords of the dark ages or armed enforcers of the modernity, the distinct attribute is violence. And Uber manifestly does not use it — nor is it even alleged to use it.
You think the only type of violence is physical? Uber recently increased their percentage of each ride while dropping the price. I'm not saying that's violence necessarily. But it's kind of a crappy thing to do, and the drivers have no say about it.
No, it is not, actually. What is illegal is to hold anyone as slave (except as punishment for a crime) — contract or not. But Uber is not doing anything of the kind, the contracts are "at will", breakable by either side.
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges.
The law does not deserve any respect, why shouldn't it be broken? The law stopped deserving respect once the law became compromised. The law is not based on a set of strict rules (the Constitution), instead it is open to interpretation to the benefit of those currently in power and those buying the said power.
The law today does not warrant respect.
The law is so much more than the Constitution. The Constitution provides a framework for the delegation and separation of powers between the branches of the Federal government and between the Federal and State governments. There are no regulations in the Constitution. Most laws and regulations have nothing to do with Constitutionality.
I think you're missing something important, which is the value of being able to work whenever you damn-well feel like it and take a vacation whenever you damn-well feel like it and not be accountable to anyone else's schedule.
Let's do an experiment, take a worker in any other sector: retail/food/engineering/medicine, you name it. Now tell that person that they are going to move to a system where they can chose when to go to work and when to leave, with 15-minute granularity and no advance notice whatsoever. Of course, their wages will scale only with the time they actually spend working. Now ask them what that sort of flexibility would be worth to them.
Want to take the afternoon off to watch your nephew's baseball game -- it costs you exactly one afternoon of wages.
Want to take the weekend to attend your college friend's wedding -- it costs you exactly one weekend of wages.
Want to sign out of your job for 3 months while you backpack SE Asia and then come back and continue like nothing happened -- it costs you exactly 3 months of wages.
I'm quite fortunate that my boss is understanding, and I could probably do the above if we weren't swamped with work and if it wasn't too overlapped with my teammates (6-person team, so 2 of us leaving for the same week would be bad but not fatal). Most workers, especially in retail/food sectors closest in wage level to Uber can't dream of it. If your boss at Starbucks says you work on Saturday, your sister's birthday party will just have to wait (or you can swap).
Hell, even with my understanding boss and cushy job, I would absolutely love an arrangement where I make my pro-rated salary for every week (!) I want to work and can take unlimited pro-rated vacation without a single thought.
The difference is right here in your post. A job that you can walk away from with little consequence or inconvenience is a job in which you have little value or responsibility. You personally can't just do that because you are on a team, with responsibilities and deliverables. You are skilled and are probably well paid. I would like to have more flexibility too. But I can, with some notice, take time off without giving up any money. I don't have to choose between watching my son's baseball game and making money. And I make enough money that I can go do fun things in my spare time.
In short, any job that you can walk away from at a moment's notice is a job in which you are easily replaceable. Those jobs tend to not pay very well. Considering the way America is set up, I'd rather have a higher paying job with less flexibility.
I am happy for the people who found a way to avoid oppression by moving their businesses somewhere far away from those who want to oppress them.
You think it's business being oppressed? They move their manufacturing to third world countries with lax labor and environmental protection laws, so they can make an extra billion on top of their 10 billion in revenue (note: numbers pulled right from my ass, but you get the idea), while buying off, I mean lobbying congress people to enact business friendly trade deals, and you think they're oppressed. Got it.
You are saying "greedy fucks" while talking about people that produce but you are not saying "greedy fucks" while talking about people who want to take away from those who produce. This shows a certain... level of agenda that has nothing to do with the word or concept of greed, it has to do with the concept of entitlement to other people's productive life.
I'm sorry, who's doing the producing here? Are the top level managers, owners and stock holders doing the producing? Or is it the ground level workers who are doing the producing? You know, the ones whose wages are under constant downward pressure due the greedy fucks needing a bigger bonus and higher stock price.
Look, I know not all business is like that; not even every multinational. But the fact is that almost all of the economic gains of the past decade have gone to those who are already the richest. They are not being oppressed, nor strangled by regulation. They are doing quite well. It is the people at the bottom, like Uber drivers, who are getting the shaft. They are the ones who are to be protected by those pesky regulations. One of the functions of government should be to protect the weak from the powerful. We seem to have forgotten that.
Part of the issue here is that people have become aware of the manipulation of public opinion by intelligence agencies. We have things like Operation Gladio, in which the CIA teamed up with people on post-war Europe to clandestinely fight the Soviets, which included bombings and assassinations which were blamed on the communists. We have the revelation of Operation Northwoods, approved by the then Joint Chiefs of Staff, that would have blown up dummy airplanes and blamed it on Cuba. The plan was squashed by Kennedy and McNamara, but the fact that it existed and was approved is concerning. We have the revelations of the Church Committee, which among other things revealed that the CIA had operatives working at all major news networks. They claim to have ceased that type of thing. But does anyone really believe we have effective and complete oversight of the CIA?
None of this justifies thinking that any given event, like the Boston Marathon bombing, or the Sandy Hook shootings are false flag operations, or anything other than what they seem. But once you realize that it is possible that there is a plan in place to manipulate public opinion, it can be hard to know what to believe anymore. And once you don't really trust the mainstream news sources, you start to look for alternatives. Many of those alternatives are not very good! But where do you go when you suspect that ABC (for example) might just be telling you what those in power want you to believe? Couple that with that fact that most news organizations rely solely on "official sources" and don't do much actual investigating, and you realize that such manipulation is quite possible. It can be very disconcerting and confusing.
I think there are a number of factors in play with this issue. Part of it is gullibility and paranoia. But it also stems from the fact that covert actors have used trusted news sources for propaganda and manipulation, and in doing so have damaged the reputation and trustworthiness of those outlets.
This guy is 1) A professor, and 2) in Boston - ergo, he's probably extremely liberal (how'd I know???)
Not everyone is losing the information war. Just your side.
It's kind of a shame that you would really think that. Confirmation bias and gullibility are not monopolized by one side of a political divide. Anyone who thinks they are always correct and clear-eyed, is simply wrong.
What does universal healthcare have to do with ethics or morals? We ARE so poor, in fact the majority of Americans have a negative net worth once you divide the current national debt into per-citizen shares. A frighteningly large number of young people have a negative net worth BEFORE taking into account the national debt.
We already siphon off a majority of our tax revenue from a minority of taxpayers. The idea that there is some vast, untapped source of wealth for the American government to draw upon is a sham.
The house of cards will fall apart eventually.
Yeah, but that's an irrelevant analysis. The national debt never has to be paid back. It just gets rolled over. The US borrows in a currency it can print. Debt is irrelevant to a monetary sovereign. The US can just create some Treasury bonds and pay it off. That's right; pay off debt with more debt. That's all money is anyway.
But you're probably right, that the house of cards (debt) will eventually collapse.
Get out of NYC, LA, SF, Chicago, etc and you'll find lots of decent civilized Americans.
This is very fucking accurate. So many people have no fucking clue what the USA is because they've been stuck in overcrowded cities with no humanity their entire lives. The sad part is that they mock anyone who doesn't live in a big city, calling them ignorant, backwards, intolerant etc. when those labels more accurately fit themselves.
Those overcrowded cities are part of what the USA is. It's a big, diverse country. While people in cities can be assholes, people in rural areas can be pretty hostile to anyone considered an outsider. Different places, different problems.
Every time I check the comments, half seem fresh from Breitbart or Infowars. I guess some nerds that visit this site also spend too much time on Reddit and even 4chan and the propaganda being pumped out on those sites has worked on them very effectively. Soros is enemy #1, we all need to go back to the world as it was when every "developed" country was bombing the shit out of each other and trying to conquer the world all because I've been told immigration is keeping us from reaching true utopia and is why I'm not happy with my own life. Fuck that madness.
in the history of mankind. we went from two world wars and massive devastation, potential nuclear annihilation and communist dictatorships, to
a completely changed over world with an internet and free trade, and statistically more peace than ever... so that we can have 400 dollar laptops.
your jobs were taken by robots and AI not by foreigners.
And "globalization" is somehow responsible for all that? We still have wars and massive devastation. There is currently a global refugee crisis, due to powers wanting to control the Middle East. We still live with potential nuclear annihilation. Meanwhile labor in first world economies is being asked to compete with labor from third world countries to benefit multinational corporations. Civil rights are being curtailed, justified by an overblown fear of terrorism (which is exacerbated by the afore-mentioned powers trying to control the Middle East). I don't really see how globalization benefits anyone but the ruling class.
By electing a president of a multinational corporation who staffed his cabinet with globalist billionaires? Yeah, sure, bro.
Trump is Schrodinger's president. He can be both an isolationist hate filled xenophobe and a globalist sellout at the same time, whichever his detractors think is worse in the moment!
Queue the mental gymnastics trying to show the president is a white supremacist yet is selling out his nation.
The superposition only lasts until you open the box. And your last sentence gives you away. You imply that a white supremacist could never sell out the US. That says a lot about how you view the country.
Yes because God forbid we make sure to protect our citizens. And our nation.
We already have, by far, the largest, most powerful military in the world, if not in world history. We are not seriously threatened by any country. We have a huge land mass that would be impossible to occupy militarily, and have oceans separating us from any serious rival. In what way are we not already protected?
Some scientist you are, who can't use independent thinking... You should fucking use your eyes and look at facts, not trust the liberal media lies. All I see so far is Trump over-delivering, 100+% for science.
I just had to quote this. This is gold, right here.
Trump is non-partisan. If you do your job and work for America's interests, Trump is on your side!
Define "job" and "interests". It's all in the details.
In 1993, Clinton fired all Republican attorneys in a single day (93 of 94; one was kept temporarily on Senate's request). In 2009, the snake did the same.
In contrast, Trump replaced less than half. Think about that the next time you watch the mainstream media lies. MAGA!
And George W. Bush did the same. This is standard stuff. Think about that the next time Trump lies to you.
Considering the typical US citizen commits on average 3 felonies a day, 100% enforcement would result in much if not most of the population imprisoned.
That smells like you plucked it out of some place not-so-fresh.
It's an average. Are you really unaware of how over-criminalized our society has become? Do they not have Google on your Internet?
This belief of yours...is it motivating you to seek out legitimate means of making a fortune, and to act on them?
Or is it motivating you to not even bother trying, and hence to remain poor for your entire life?
Our values drive our decisions, which in turn determine our results. Sometimes a little optimism, even if naive, can drive the decisions that get good results.
It's driving me to work a well-paying professional IT job and not think much about raising a fortune. I save for retirement, but that's different. Where I live we still have a decent sized middle class. My choices are not between making a fortune and being poor.
I admire billionaires. I seek to be rich like they are. Why wouldn't you? Do you like being a poor chump?
Personally, it's because I believe that behind every great fortune is a great crime. You can't accumulate money at that scale without fucking people over in some way.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I don't see, how the two things are related in the slightest. A judge may think a contract was unfair (or stupid), but it is still valid — as long as entered into willingly and in good faith by both sides...
Oh, so you do think the courts should be able to weigh in on a contract.
Either way, be it the warlords of the dark ages or armed enforcers of the modernity, the distinct attribute is violence. And Uber manifestly does not use it — nor is it even alleged to use it.
You think the only type of violence is physical? Uber recently increased their percentage of each ride while dropping the price. I'm not saying that's violence necessarily. But it's kind of a crappy thing to do, and the drivers have no say about it.
No, it is not, actually. What is illegal is to hold anyone as slave (except as punishment for a crime) — contract or not. But Uber is not doing anything of the kind, the contracts are "at will", breakable by either side.
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges.
WTF is it any concern of the government, what sort of contract free citizens of able body and sound mind enter into with each other?
Here's a better question: is someone in poverty truly free?
The law does not deserve any respect, why shouldn't it be broken? The law stopped deserving respect once the law became compromised. The law is not based on a set of strict rules (the Constitution), instead it is open to interpretation to the benefit of those currently in power and those buying the said power.
The law today does not warrant respect.
The law is so much more than the Constitution. The Constitution provides a framework for the delegation and separation of powers between the branches of the Federal government and between the Federal and State governments. There are no regulations in the Constitution. Most laws and regulations have nothing to do with Constitutionality.
I think you're missing something important, which is the value of being able to work whenever you damn-well feel like it and take a vacation whenever you damn-well feel like it and not be accountable to anyone else's schedule.
Let's do an experiment, take a worker in any other sector: retail/food/engineering/medicine, you name it. Now tell that person that they are going to move to a system where they can chose when to go to work and when to leave, with 15-minute granularity and no advance notice whatsoever. Of course, their wages will scale only with the time they actually spend working. Now ask them what that sort of flexibility would be worth to them.
Want to take the afternoon off to watch your nephew's baseball game -- it costs you exactly one afternoon of wages. Want to take the weekend to attend your college friend's wedding -- it costs you exactly one weekend of wages. Want to sign out of your job for 3 months while you backpack SE Asia and then come back and continue like nothing happened -- it costs you exactly 3 months of wages.
I'm quite fortunate that my boss is understanding, and I could probably do the above if we weren't swamped with work and if it wasn't too overlapped with my teammates (6-person team, so 2 of us leaving for the same week would be bad but not fatal). Most workers, especially in retail/food sectors closest in wage level to Uber can't dream of it. If your boss at Starbucks says you work on Saturday, your sister's birthday party will just have to wait (or you can swap).
Hell, even with my understanding boss and cushy job, I would absolutely love an arrangement where I make my pro-rated salary for every week (!) I want to work and can take unlimited pro-rated vacation without a single thought.
The difference is right here in your post. A job that you can walk away from with little consequence or inconvenience is a job in which you have little value or responsibility. You personally can't just do that because you are on a team, with responsibilities and deliverables. You are skilled and are probably well paid. I would like to have more flexibility too. But I can, with some notice, take time off without giving up any money. I don't have to choose between watching my son's baseball game and making money. And I make enough money that I can go do fun things in my spare time.
In short, any job that you can walk away from at a moment's notice is a job in which you are easily replaceable. Those jobs tend to not pay very well. Considering the way America is set up, I'd rather have a higher paying job with less flexibility.
I am happy for the people who found a way to avoid oppression by moving their businesses somewhere far away from those who want to oppress them.
You think it's business being oppressed? They move their manufacturing to third world countries with lax labor and environmental protection laws, so they can make an extra billion on top of their 10 billion in revenue (note: numbers pulled right from my ass, but you get the idea), while buying off, I mean lobbying congress people to enact business friendly trade deals, and you think they're oppressed. Got it.
You are saying "greedy fucks" while talking about people that produce but you are not saying "greedy fucks" while talking about people who want to take away from those who produce. This shows a certain ... level of agenda that has nothing to do with the word or concept of greed, it has to do with the concept of entitlement to other people's productive life.
I'm sorry, who's doing the producing here? Are the top level managers, owners and stock holders doing the producing? Or is it the ground level workers who are doing the producing? You know, the ones whose wages are under constant downward pressure due the greedy fucks needing a bigger bonus and higher stock price.
Look, I know not all business is like that; not even every multinational. But the fact is that almost all of the economic gains of the past decade have gone to those who are already the richest. They are not being oppressed, nor strangled by regulation. They are doing quite well. It is the people at the bottom, like Uber drivers, who are getting the shaft. They are the ones who are to be protected by those pesky regulations. One of the functions of government should be to protect the weak from the powerful. We seem to have forgotten that.
"borrowed from us in the first place"
Like you, we all borrow from China now.
We actually borrow from the Federal Reserve System. It's the bank's money, we just get to borrow it for a while.
At least read the first sentence or two in the summary. This 'guy' is named Kate.
Well, yeah, there's that...
Part of the issue here is that people have become aware of the manipulation of public opinion by intelligence agencies. We have things like Operation Gladio, in which the CIA teamed up with people on post-war Europe to clandestinely fight the Soviets, which included bombings and assassinations which were blamed on the communists. We have the revelation of Operation Northwoods, approved by the then Joint Chiefs of Staff, that would have blown up dummy airplanes and blamed it on Cuba. The plan was squashed by Kennedy and McNamara, but the fact that it existed and was approved is concerning. We have the revelations of the Church Committee, which among other things revealed that the CIA had operatives working at all major news networks. They claim to have ceased that type of thing. But does anyone really believe we have effective and complete oversight of the CIA?
None of this justifies thinking that any given event, like the Boston Marathon bombing, or the Sandy Hook shootings are false flag operations, or anything other than what they seem. But once you realize that it is possible that there is a plan in place to manipulate public opinion, it can be hard to know what to believe anymore. And once you don't really trust the mainstream news sources, you start to look for alternatives. Many of those alternatives are not very good! But where do you go when you suspect that ABC (for example) might just be telling you what those in power want you to believe? Couple that with that fact that most news organizations rely solely on "official sources" and don't do much actual investigating, and you realize that such manipulation is quite possible. It can be very disconcerting and confusing.
I think there are a number of factors in play with this issue. Part of it is gullibility and paranoia. But it also stems from the fact that covert actors have used trusted news sources for propaganda and manipulation, and in doing so have damaged the reputation and trustworthiness of those outlets.
This guy is 1) A professor, and 2) in Boston - ergo, he's probably extremely liberal (how'd I know???)
Not everyone is losing the information war. Just your side.
It's kind of a shame that you would really think that. Confirmation bias and gullibility are not monopolized by one side of a political divide. Anyone who thinks they are always correct and clear-eyed, is simply wrong.
You guys realize both sides are calling each other the same thing ... right ?
Like watching 6 year Olds in the back seat.
Yep. Partisan politics is stupid. I'm neither Republican nor Democrat.
What does universal healthcare have to do with ethics or morals? We ARE so poor, in fact the majority of Americans have a negative net worth once you divide the current national debt into per-citizen shares. A frighteningly large number of young people have a negative net worth BEFORE taking into account the national debt.
We already siphon off a majority of our tax revenue from a minority of taxpayers. The idea that there is some vast, untapped source of wealth for the American government to draw upon is a sham.
The house of cards will fall apart eventually.
Yeah, but that's an irrelevant analysis. The national debt never has to be paid back. It just gets rolled over. The US borrows in a currency it can print. Debt is irrelevant to a monetary sovereign. The US can just create some Treasury bonds and pay it off. That's right; pay off debt with more debt. That's all money is anyway.
But you're probably right, that the house of cards (debt) will eventually collapse.
Get out of NYC, LA, SF, Chicago, etc and you'll find lots of decent civilized Americans.
This is very fucking accurate. So many people have no fucking clue what the USA is because they've been stuck in overcrowded cities with no humanity their entire lives. The sad part is that they mock anyone who doesn't live in a big city, calling them ignorant, backwards, intolerant etc. when those labels more accurately fit themselves.
Those overcrowded cities are part of what the USA is. It's a big, diverse country. While people in cities can be assholes, people in rural areas can be pretty hostile to anyone considered an outsider. Different places, different problems.
Every time I check the comments, half seem fresh from Breitbart or Infowars. I guess some nerds that visit this site also spend too much time on Reddit and even 4chan and the propaganda being pumped out on those sites has worked on them very effectively. Soros is enemy #1, we all need to go back to the world as it was when every "developed" country was bombing the shit out of each other and trying to conquer the world all because I've been told immigration is keeping us from reaching true utopia and is why I'm not happy with my own life. Fuck that madness.
Ugh, and you're even your own sock puppet.
in the history of mankind. we went from two world wars and massive devastation, potential nuclear annihilation and communist dictatorships, to a completely changed over world with an internet and free trade, and statistically more peace than ever... so that we can have 400 dollar laptops.
your jobs were taken by robots and AI not by foreigners.
And "globalization" is somehow responsible for all that? We still have wars and massive devastation. There is currently a global refugee crisis, due to powers wanting to control the Middle East. We still live with potential nuclear annihilation. Meanwhile labor in first world economies is being asked to compete with labor from third world countries to benefit multinational corporations. Civil rights are being curtailed, justified by an overblown fear of terrorism (which is exacerbated by the afore-mentioned powers trying to control the Middle East). I don't really see how globalization benefits anyone but the ruling class.
What policies has Russia benefited from so far?
People keep saying Trump sucks Putins dick but how is Russia winning right now?
It's not a huge benefit, but you asked.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-administration-relaxes-u-s-sanctions-on-russia-imposed-under-obama/
By electing a president of a multinational corporation who staffed his cabinet with globalist billionaires? Yeah, sure, bro.
Trump is Schrodinger's president. He can be both an isolationist hate filled xenophobe and a globalist sellout at the same time, whichever his detractors think is worse in the moment!
Queue the mental gymnastics trying to show the president is a white supremacist yet is selling out his nation.
The superposition only lasts until you open the box. And your last sentence gives you away. You imply that a white supremacist could never sell out the US. That says a lot about how you view the country.
Yes because God forbid we make sure to protect our citizens. And our nation.
We already have, by far, the largest, most powerful military in the world, if not in world history. We are not seriously threatened by any country. We have a huge land mass that would be impossible to occupy militarily, and have oceans separating us from any serious rival. In what way are we not already protected?
Some scientist you are, who can't use independent thinking... You should fucking use your eyes and look at facts, not trust the liberal media lies. All I see so far is Trump over-delivering, 100+% for science.
I just had to quote this. This is gold, right here.
We will no longer surrender this country, or its people, to the false song of globalism.
Oh, come on. Sure we will. People generally think whatever their preferred media outlets tell them to think.
Trump is non-partisan. If you do your job and work for America's interests, Trump is on your side!
Define "job" and "interests". It's all in the details.
In 1993, Clinton fired all Republican attorneys in a single day (93 of 94; one was kept temporarily on Senate's request). In 2009, the snake did the same. In contrast, Trump replaced less than half. Think about that the next time you watch the mainstream media lies. MAGA!
And George W. Bush did the same. This is standard stuff. Think about that the next time Trump lies to you.
Considering the typical US citizen commits on average 3 felonies a day, 100% enforcement would result in much if not most of the population imprisoned.
That smells like you plucked it out of some place not-so-fresh.
It's an average. Are you really unaware of how over-criminalized our society has become? Do they not have Google on your Internet?
https://mic.com/articles/86797/8-ways-we-regularly-commit-felonies-without-realizing-it#.pkXOubGx5
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2014/11/04/david-barton-explains-how-you-could-be-committing-three-felonies-a-day/
It's a book, check it out.
This belief of yours...is it motivating you to seek out legitimate means of making a fortune, and to act on them?
Or is it motivating you to not even bother trying, and hence to remain poor for your entire life?
Our values drive our decisions, which in turn determine our results. Sometimes a little optimism, even if naive, can drive the decisions that get good results.
It's driving me to work a well-paying professional IT job and not think much about raising a fortune. I save for retirement, but that's different. Where I live we still have a decent sized middle class. My choices are not between making a fortune and being poor.
I admire billionaires. I seek to be rich like they are. Why wouldn't you? Do you like being a poor chump?
Personally, it's because I believe that behind every great fortune is a great crime. You can't accumulate money at that scale without fucking people over in some way.