Or, if you're part of the group that is getting hired due to the overheated market, just enjoy that nice fat paycheck (which means you're effectively cashing out every 2 weeks) until it ends. Don't spend it all in one place.
There are a couple of ways of doing this: - Include a clause that allows you to change the terms at any time without notifying customers or providing any sort of consideration. If you look for it, you'll find it buried in the fine print of all sorts of consumer contracts. Yes, this is a stupid contract to be signing, but many people don't read the fine print or don't realize what that clause means if they see it. The courts have sometimes ruled those contracts invalid, but for most people it's more expensive to sue than it is to just pay up.
- Set up a trial plan that's very favorable, allow cancellation at any time, but make the costs to cancellation higher than the consumer realizes. For instance, before the law required cell phone providers to transfer phone numbers, they didn't do so, so in order to cancel your cell phone you had to go through all the work to change your phone number and dealing with the people who called your old number. This takes advantage of the fact that the seller knows much more about the way the market works than the buyer does - the seller is working in that market every day, while the buyer just enters the market in order to get something he wants.
For companies in an oligopoly basically offering identical products, there are 3 basic ways they can make more money than they do now: 1. The big box retailer strategy: Lower their price, and hope that the extra volume more than makes up for the reduced margin. 2. The airline strategy: Raise their price, and hope that their competitors follow suit. 3. The cell phone strategy: Lower prices on a loss leader to gain customers, lock them in without them noticing, then raise prices and fees and the like.
I just don't see how this has any importance, whatsoever, because I don't see how it can have any measurable effect on any decision made by anyone on this planet in the foreseeable future.
Here's an interesting way it could have an effect: 1. US Government discovers habitable planets within, say, a century of here. 2. US Government scares the population of Earth by pointing out that this habitable planet might be filled with evil aliens who want to take over Earth. 3. US and foreign governments and UN all scramble to do whatever is necessary to take on the aliens, pouring massive amounts of cash into R&D, engineering projects, construction of defensive tools, space launching capabilities, and even pure research. 4. The economy recovers, because all this stuff has much the same effect on the world economy as WWII had on the US economy, but without the millions of people dying.
Name something that was on TV that was so profound and moving that it was absolutely critical that you see it when it first came out, rather than waiting a few months and spending half the price of one month's cable on DVDs to watch it whenever you like. (And that's assuming only completely legal viewing options) For bonus points, explain why that show was so awesome that you'd rather be watching it than spending that hour conversing with your loved ones.
Your argument rests on two questionable assertions: 1. That those societies that have an absolute moral authority have behavior that more equally matches what that authority considers moral. 2. That those societies without an absolute moral authority lack any sense of morality.
The society with an absolute moral authority has several major problems: First off, the absolute moral authority is either a flawed human being who will not necessarily follow his own rules, or is a deity who's will is interpreted by a flawed human being who will not necessarily follow the rules. Second, the absolute moral authority may not have the ability to enforce their rules (at least in material life - I'm not concerning myself here with any possible afterlife). Third, enforcing the rules may require immoral acts (e.g. killing people is wrong, but we may have to kill somebody who killed somebody in order to enforce the rule that you can't kill people). Fourth, depending on the code of morality involved, a bad guy may use everyone else's morality against them, thus increasing the cost of an immoral act.
Similarly, the assertion that without an absolute moral authority, you have no morality, is also easy to question. If you go around the world and ask whether it's OK to kill people who haven't harmed you and haven't threatened to harm you, even if nobody else will know about it and you'll never get caught, almost everybody will say that that sort of thing qualifies as murder and is immoral. You'll get the same sort of answers from people who treat the Bible or the Koran as an absolute moral authority as you will from atheists. In a society without an absolute morality, you can still get morality - 99.9% of humans think murder is wrong, so they use their government to make it illegal and collectively impose force to ensure the 0.1% who disagree with that don't get away with murder.
In 2003, a program called "Total Information Awareness" was created to intercept all Internet traffic and try to process it looking for phrases the NSA and others in government might find interesting. In 2007, the newly elected Congress defunded it (mostly Democrats, with the support of a few libertarians like Ron Paul). The NSA responded by shifting the efforts into different programs that they didn't have to explain to Congress.
We decided that mail service was such an important part of our national infrastructure that we mandated it even in the poor areas.
Also worth noting here is that the people who negotiated the Constitution thought a public mail service was so important that it's one of the 18 powers specifically granted to Congress. (Article 1, section 8)
You're botching the interpretation of my example here:
Price of a widget W=$300. Price of 1 day's worth of labor: L=$50. Price of materials to make a widget: M=$250.
In our example, if a day's worth of labor is 6 hours, the worker can produce 1 widget per day, so W=L+M. If a day's worth of labor is 12 hours, the same worker can produce a second widget. But because L didn't change when we made the worker make 2 widgets instead of 1, we get 2W > L+2M. Which means that if you sell the 2 widgets for what they're worth, the capitalist collects profit P=2W - 2M - L, which in our example is $50.
That's where you go wrong: compared to southern Africa, where about 1 out of every 5 adults currently infected, the 50,000 per year in the US is almost negligible. And in that population, about 60% of all adults with HIV are women and girls.
The idea was that if you change the incentives around, you make those engineering projects seem more cost-effective, and thus more likely to happen.
It's the difference between getting more efficient gasoline engines by mandating 55 miles per gallon, versus getting more efficient gasoline engines by increasing gasoline taxes to the point where it's cost-effective to pay more for a car that gets 55 miles per gallon, causing car buyers to switch, causing car manufacturers to switch.
Here's the problem in a nutshell: You have a global common resource, in this case the ability to put CO2 into the atmosphere before it heats things up so much that we all die (regardless of whether you think the current warming trend is anthropogenic, there's very little argument that there is some point at which too much CO2 is a problem). But the short-term incentives for each actor using that common resource are to use up as much of the common resource as quickly as possible, because if they don't then somebody else will, and we'll all be dead anyways.
Now, in most cases, commons problems are solved by government action. For instance, when the population of lobsters off the North Carolina coast dropped precipitously due to over-harvesting, the government put severe restrictions on how many lobsters everyone could get, and it sucked for the lobstermen, but saved the commons and allowed the industry to survive. But in the case of a global commons like the atmosphere, there's nobody who has the ability to enforce that kind of rule, so each country has no choice but to use up the common resource as quickly as possible, collectively racing to disaster.
And it doesn't help that both of the worst offenders in this department, the US and China, are firmly committed to the path of destruction.
Of course, Marx was completely absurd in that he never considered labor a capital asset of the worker, and he never considered that the worker will always seek to profit by trying to increase their wages without working any extra. That is, there is a market of labor in addition to a market of goods, and that an employer must compete with other employers on the labor market. And who would pay more than necessary for anything? It would be as irrational to pay the higher of two amounts for the same labor (assuming all else is equal) as it would be for the same good.
If you actually read Marx's Capital, you'll find that he spends 3 chapters on the topic of the labor market. The basic problem is that as long as there's unemployed people, and no government safety net, it will be better for the worker to get $50 a day for 12 hours of work than it is for the worker to get nothing. So the equilibrium price of labor is not the actual productive value of the labor, it's the minimum a worker needs to survive and (in good times) produce 2-3 children on average to be future workers. That minimum doesn't change based on how much work that worker needs to do to earn it, so the employer can do pretty much whatever they want to the worker so long as they pay that minimum.
In your version of the labor market, Wage theft can't exist (because no worker would accept it), but it does because accepting wage theft is not infrequently the least bad option for workers.
... which the worker doesn't accept, as he has quit and gone to another company. This is difficult in a bad economy, but not impossible.
I was intentionally simplifying the situation a bit, but if you introduce the possibility of quitting, then all the employer does is just finds somebody else who's desperate enough that $50 for 12 hours a day of work is better than their current situation. They may find this worker overseas (either outsourced or H1B), they may find the worker among the currently unemployed domestically, they may find the worker among new graduates who are looking for any job they can get, but (absent government intervention) they will find that worker.
Well, if you're an EVIL Republican, then they don't really have that power. On the other hand, if you're a FRIEND OF THE PEOPLE Democrat, then they have the power to do anything they damn well please.
You realize this bill has bipartisan sponsorship, right? When it comes to enriching business at the expense of everyone else, both major parties are in on that game.
His theory of capitalism was, in a nutshell, that an employer's goal was to increase profit by increasing the amount they could make their workers work without paying them anything extra. Which is, of course, exactly what is being codified in this law.
Consider some widget that cost $300 to make $250 in materials and $50 for 1 worker to work 6 hours on it. But our capitalist wants to make more money, so he makes his worker work 12 hours instead of 6 (which the worker accepts, because being unemployed is so much worse), so now he has $600 worth of widgets, which are now $500 in materials, $50 in labor, and $50 in profit.
Regardless of what you think about communism, Marx's theories of capitalism need to be taken seriously, because the guy was predicting, in the 1870's, a lot of the economic behavior we see today.
I'm not sure whether they're raising a stink, but they are slowly but surely stopping spending money on cable. That's why the cable companies are going after people who stream their shows instead.
I know I quit watching cable about 3 years ago and have never looked back. In fact, after cancelling cable, I found that in addition to having some not-insignificant extra cash, I also had a lot more time to read or do charity work or pursue my hobbies.
No, it's not renumbering we're talking about, it's renumeration. That's where the UK government says they'll pay you £80.000 but actually pays you £30.000 due to a typographical error.
The thing is, while there are lots of bad movies out there, there's nothing I'm aware of that's quite so staggeringly bad. There's no redeeming quality whatsoever - little to no plot, nothing resembling acting, a pathetic attempt at musical score, directing and cinematography that's makes Ed Wood look like Ang Lee by comparison, a 'fight' scene that involves people getting massaged to death, and costuming that attempts to make people look menacing while wearing a nightgown.
Slashdot Mirror
Obligatory xkcd explaining the nature of that problem.
Or, if you're part of the group that is getting hired due to the overheated market, just enjoy that nice fat paycheck (which means you're effectively cashing out every 2 weeks) until it ends. Don't spend it all in one place.
There are a couple of ways of doing this:
- Include a clause that allows you to change the terms at any time without notifying customers or providing any sort of consideration. If you look for it, you'll find it buried in the fine print of all sorts of consumer contracts. Yes, this is a stupid contract to be signing, but many people don't read the fine print or don't realize what that clause means if they see it. The courts have sometimes ruled those contracts invalid, but for most people it's more expensive to sue than it is to just pay up.
- Set up a trial plan that's very favorable, allow cancellation at any time, but make the costs to cancellation higher than the consumer realizes. For instance, before the law required cell phone providers to transfer phone numbers, they didn't do so, so in order to cancel your cell phone you had to go through all the work to change your phone number and dealing with the people who called your old number. This takes advantage of the fact that the seller knows much more about the way the market works than the buyer does - the seller is working in that market every day, while the buyer just enters the market in order to get something he wants.
Business as usual.
For companies in an oligopoly basically offering identical products, there are 3 basic ways they can make more money than they do now:
1. The big box retailer strategy: Lower their price, and hope that the extra volume more than makes up for the reduced margin.
2. The airline strategy: Raise their price, and hope that their competitors follow suit.
3. The cell phone strategy: Lower prices on a loss leader to gain customers, lock them in without them noticing, then raise prices and fees and the like.
Somebody needs to let Tasha Yar know about that.
I just don't see how this has any importance, whatsoever, because I don't see how it can have any measurable effect on any decision made by anyone on this planet in the foreseeable future.
Here's an interesting way it could have an effect:
1. US Government discovers habitable planets within, say, a century of here.
2. US Government scares the population of Earth by pointing out that this habitable planet might be filled with evil aliens who want to take over Earth.
3. US and foreign governments and UN all scramble to do whatever is necessary to take on the aliens, pouring massive amounts of cash into R&D, engineering projects, construction of defensive tools, space launching capabilities, and even pure research.
4. The economy recovers, because all this stuff has much the same effect on the world economy as WWII had on the US economy, but without the millions of people dying.
(Note: not entirely my idea)
Name something that was on TV that was so profound and moving that it was absolutely critical that you see it when it first came out, rather than waiting a few months and spending half the price of one month's cable on DVDs to watch it whenever you like. (And that's assuming only completely legal viewing options) For bonus points, explain why that show was so awesome that you'd rather be watching it than spending that hour conversing with your loved ones.
I not only can imagine life without a PVR, I've been living one for some time.
Of course, I also recently tossed out my TV because I wasn't watching it anymore. I gave it up a long time ago, and have never regretted it.
Oh, so they've located Amazonia?
Your argument rests on two questionable assertions:
1. That those societies that have an absolute moral authority have behavior that more equally matches what that authority considers moral.
2. That those societies without an absolute moral authority lack any sense of morality.
The society with an absolute moral authority has several major problems: First off, the absolute moral authority is either a flawed human being who will not necessarily follow his own rules, or is a deity who's will is interpreted by a flawed human being who will not necessarily follow the rules. Second, the absolute moral authority may not have the ability to enforce their rules (at least in material life - I'm not concerning myself here with any possible afterlife). Third, enforcing the rules may require immoral acts (e.g. killing people is wrong, but we may have to kill somebody who killed somebody in order to enforce the rule that you can't kill people). Fourth, depending on the code of morality involved, a bad guy may use everyone else's morality against them, thus increasing the cost of an immoral act.
Similarly, the assertion that without an absolute moral authority, you have no morality, is also easy to question. If you go around the world and ask whether it's OK to kill people who haven't harmed you and haven't threatened to harm you, even if nobody else will know about it and you'll never get caught, almost everybody will say that that sort of thing qualifies as murder and is immoral. You'll get the same sort of answers from people who treat the Bible or the Koran as an absolute moral authority as you will from atheists. In a society without an absolute morality, you can still get morality - 99.9% of humans think murder is wrong, so they use their government to make it illegal and collectively impose force to ensure the 0.1% who disagree with that don't get away with murder.
Actually, no, that's art imitating life.
In 2003, a program called "Total Information Awareness" was created to intercept all Internet traffic and try to process it looking for phrases the NSA and others in government might find interesting. In 2007, the newly elected Congress defunded it (mostly Democrats, with the support of a few libertarians like Ron Paul). The NSA responded by shifting the efforts into different programs that they didn't have to explain to Congress.
We decided that mail service was such an important part of our national infrastructure that we mandated it even in the poor areas.
Also worth noting here is that the people who negotiated the Constitution thought a public mail service was so important that it's one of the 18 powers specifically granted to Congress. (Article 1, section 8)
You're botching the interpretation of my example here:
Price of a widget W=$300.
Price of 1 day's worth of labor: L=$50.
Price of materials to make a widget: M=$250.
In our example, if a day's worth of labor is 6 hours, the worker can produce 1 widget per day, so W=L+M. If a day's worth of labor is 12 hours, the same worker can produce a second widget. But because L didn't change when we made the worker make 2 widgets instead of 1, we get 2W > L+2M. Which means that if you sell the 2 widgets for what they're worth, the capitalist collects profit P=2W - 2M - L, which in our example is $50.
... in the United States.
That's where you go wrong: compared to southern Africa, where about 1 out of every 5 adults currently infected, the 50,000 per year in the US is almost negligible. And in that population, about 60% of all adults with HIV are women and girls.
source.
The idea was that if you change the incentives around, you make those engineering projects seem more cost-effective, and thus more likely to happen.
It's the difference between getting more efficient gasoline engines by mandating 55 miles per gallon, versus getting more efficient gasoline engines by increasing gasoline taxes to the point where it's cost-effective to pay more for a car that gets 55 miles per gallon, causing car buyers to switch, causing car manufacturers to switch.
Here's the problem in a nutshell: You have a global common resource, in this case the ability to put CO2 into the atmosphere before it heats things up so much that we all die (regardless of whether you think the current warming trend is anthropogenic, there's very little argument that there is some point at which too much CO2 is a problem). But the short-term incentives for each actor using that common resource are to use up as much of the common resource as quickly as possible, because if they don't then somebody else will, and we'll all be dead anyways.
Now, in most cases, commons problems are solved by government action. For instance, when the population of lobsters off the North Carolina coast dropped precipitously due to over-harvesting, the government put severe restrictions on how many lobsters everyone could get, and it sucked for the lobstermen, but saved the commons and allowed the industry to survive. But in the case of a global commons like the atmosphere, there's nobody who has the ability to enforce that kind of rule, so each country has no choice but to use up the common resource as quickly as possible, collectively racing to disaster.
And it doesn't help that both of the worst offenders in this department, the US and China, are firmly committed to the path of destruction.
Of course, Marx was completely absurd in that he never considered labor a capital asset of the worker, and he never considered that the worker will always seek to profit by trying to increase their wages without working any extra. That is, there is a market of labor in addition to a market of goods, and that an employer must compete with other employers on the labor market. And who would pay more than necessary for anything? It would be as irrational to pay the higher of two amounts for the same labor (assuming all else is equal) as it would be for the same good.
If you actually read Marx's Capital, you'll find that he spends 3 chapters on the topic of the labor market. The basic problem is that as long as there's unemployed people, and no government safety net, it will be better for the worker to get $50 a day for 12 hours of work than it is for the worker to get nothing. So the equilibrium price of labor is not the actual productive value of the labor, it's the minimum a worker needs to survive and (in good times) produce 2-3 children on average to be future workers. That minimum doesn't change based on how much work that worker needs to do to earn it, so the employer can do pretty much whatever they want to the worker so long as they pay that minimum.
In your version of the labor market, Wage theft can't exist (because no worker would accept it), but it does because accepting wage theft is not infrequently the least bad option for workers.
... which the worker doesn't accept, as he has quit and gone to another company. This is difficult in a bad economy, but not impossible.
I was intentionally simplifying the situation a bit, but if you introduce the possibility of quitting, then all the employer does is just finds somebody else who's desperate enough that $50 for 12 hours a day of work is better than their current situation. They may find this worker overseas (either outsourced or H1B), they may find the worker among the currently unemployed domestically, they may find the worker among new graduates who are looking for any job they can get, but (absent government intervention) they will find that worker.
Well, if you're an EVIL Republican, then they don't really have that power. On the other hand, if you're a FRIEND OF THE PEOPLE Democrat, then they have the power to do anything they damn well please.
You realize this bill has bipartisan sponsorship, right? When it comes to enriching business at the expense of everyone else, both major parties are in on that game.
His theory of capitalism was, in a nutshell, that an employer's goal was to increase profit by increasing the amount they could make their workers work without paying them anything extra. Which is, of course, exactly what is being codified in this law.
Consider some widget that cost $300 to make $250 in materials and $50 for 1 worker to work 6 hours on it. But our capitalist wants to make more money, so he makes his worker work 12 hours instead of 6 (which the worker accepts, because being unemployed is so much worse), so now he has $600 worth of widgets, which are now $500 in materials, $50 in labor, and $50 in profit.
Regardless of what you think about communism, Marx's theories of capitalism need to be taken seriously, because the guy was predicting, in the 1870's, a lot of the economic behavior we see today.
Anyone raise a stink over cable/satellite fees?
I'm not sure whether they're raising a stink, but they are slowly but surely stopping spending money on cable. That's why the cable companies are going after people who stream their shows instead.
I know I quit watching cable about 3 years ago and have never looked back. In fact, after cancelling cable, I found that in addition to having some not-insignificant extra cash, I also had a lot more time to read or do charity work or pursue my hobbies.
No, it's not renumbering we're talking about, it's renumeration. That's where the UK government says they'll pay you £80.000 but actually pays you £30.000 due to a typographical error.
The thing is, while there are lots of bad movies out there, there's nothing I'm aware of that's quite so staggeringly bad. There's no redeeming quality whatsoever - little to no plot, nothing resembling acting, a pathetic attempt at musical score, directing and cinematography that's makes Ed Wood look like Ang Lee by comparison, a 'fight' scene that involves people getting massaged to death, and costuming that attempts to make people look menacing while wearing a nightgown.
Will a contrite Rupert Murdoch make a tearful visit to No. 10? MI5?
If things work out correctly, he should be spending significant amounts of his time in the near future at the Old Bailey.
I don't know how many times I've undone moderations to respond to some facist corporate whore.
That's totally unfair to us facists! All we want to do is discriminate against people who have no face!