I think that's just to keep wages down in general.
Age discrimination is about one thing: companies would rather have a 20-something desperate for work working 60 hours a week at $40K/year than they would a 50-something with some financial security working 40 hours a week at $70K/year. There are also some factors involving health insurance that can make it cheaper to have younger workers as well, but that's the basic story.
It has nothing to do with whether older workers are productive, "get" newer technology, or fit into the company culture. From the point of view of your employer, you are an expense, and their goal is to minimize expenses by hiring the cheapest workers they can capable of doing the job (or at least not failing too badly).
In other words, we know what works well on a desktop. And more to the point, we know what doesn't work on a desktop, which is why we'll probably never see another trackball ever again.
In mobile, we're only collectively beginning to understand what we should be trying to build. There have been some real dead ends too - Palm handwriting, anyone?
There's a very good chance that the reason the route is so boneheaded is not because of some highway engineer's stupidity but rather the stupidity of the eminent domain battles that invariably crop up over any major highway projects.
Another example of that phenomenon in the same region: I490, which was supposed to run from the I71-I90 intersection east to I271, and would in theory provide good access to Case Western Reserve University and most of the eastern inner-ring suburbs. Instead, the locals in the wealthier suburbs put up a fight, and thus I490 provides excellent access to the housing projects and practically nowhere else.
Well, not exactly. The difference between the Peter Principle and the Dilbert Principle is that the Peter Principle has to do with the promotion of people who are competent at their current job, while the Dilbert Principle is concerned with the promotion of people who are incompetent at their current job.
If you actually read "The Peter Principle" (which is quite funny as well as insightful), you'll find out that Lawrence Peter describes this phenomenon as "Percussive Sublimation" (a.k.a. being kicked upstairs). He also describes one case in which the company in question, who's operations were based in LA created a new "Head Office" in New York and promoted all the useless people to the "Head Office". As he describes it, the people in the Head Office are busy drafting memos, scheduling meetings, conferring with each other, etc, while everyone back in LA actually gets the work done without having to worry about all the drones.
When you actually look closely at it, the reason that Social Security is considered bankrupt is not because the Social Security system isn't funded, but because the rest of the federal government isn't funded enough to pay the money owed to Social Security.
The way this happened: Back in the early 1990's, Alan Greenspan went to Congress and told them that Social Security was going to be bankrupt if they didn't do something. Congress did something: They hiked the FICA taxes to build up a surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund, which is kept in T-Bills (because any other investment vehicle would open Social Security up to massive corruption as various private investors attempted to get control over a pile of cash worth hundreds of billions at least). The idea was that by doing so, we'd make sure that the SSA had the cash reserves needed to ensure that they could pay for the baby boomer's retirement.
By refusing to pay the bonds that Social Security has out of the general funds, we would effectively push the tax burden from the progressive income taxes to FICA taxes which hit the highest-income earners the least. The absurdity of the FICA tax structure as it currently stands: a fast-food cook pays more in FICA taxes than an old-money patriarch who doesn't work but earns millions off of investments, because the tax only falls on earned income.
I suggest you go back and read The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, which describes in graphic detail what happens when you have an unregulated food industry, and is generally considered to be a major reason why there's an FDA today.
Could someone explain why some Christians believe that their rules need to apply to non-Christians?
As a point of contrast, many atheists believe that their primary responsibility is to not hurt anybody without a really really good reason. Secondarily is to encourage their fellow atheists to not hurt anybody without a really really good reason; this includes (at the worst) locking people up when they're chronically unwilling to shape up.
So what is it about some Christian theologies that leads them to try to, for example, feel justified and/or compelled to try to kill Yemeni academics and Iraqi journalists?
- You probably eat at least 1000 meals or so over the course of the year (that's a little less than 3 meals a day). A reasonable guess would be about 5% of those meals would be dangerous to eat, and would result in an average medical bill or last pay of $250 (most would be less than that, a few would be a lot more than that), for a total cost of $12,500. - Let's say you drive a vehicle that gets 25 mpg, and drive 10,000 miles per year, and are thus purchasing 400 gallons of fuel for a cost of $1000 (that's about $2.50 per gallon). However, the gas station owner bilks you because there's no inspection, so you end up actually paying $1500, so the government inspection just saved you $500. - For banking, let's say you had a 15% chance of having deposits of $30,000 in one of the banks that failed. That gives you an average loss of $4500. - For securities, let's go with about a 11% chance that you lose your investment to a con man without regulation, and a 1% chance that you'd lose your investment to Bernie Madoff under regulation. If you invest, say, $40,000, your government just saved you on average $4000.
I'm already above $20K, and not even through the list.
I find that difficult to believe especially since I barely use any government services.
I call BS on that one. Chances are extremely good that you've done at least some of these in the last year:
- Purchased food inspected by the government to ensure that it's unlikely to give you food poisoning, and that the nutritional information listed on the side of the container is accurate. Or purchased food from a restaurant which had been inspected to ensure that there weren't cockroaches all over the place (among other things).
- Purchased gasoline from a pump that had been inspected to ensure that 1 gallon of price = 1 gallon of fuel.
- Put money into a bank knowing that the bank was required by law to give it back to you if you asked for it, and would still be yours even if the bank went under (assuming it was less than $100,000).
- Engaged in a transaction on an SEC-regulated market.
- Taken advantage of a 401(k) or IRA.
- Relied on the military and police for protection against any really serious attack (not just one criminal going after your property, but an organized assault with bombs and missiles). You may have also called your emergency services for help with a criminal, a fire, an injury, or other hazards.
- Made use of a government water system (not necessarily at home).
- Taken a walk or ride or swim in a public park of some kind.
- Ridden on or flown an aircraft that had been regulated to ensure that it was extremely unlikely to crash.
- Breathed air that wasn't super-polluted because government regulations prevented companies from just spewing out nasty particulate matter.
I can keep going if you like. The point is, most of the really useful stuff your government does at various levels is not readily visible but affects you every day.
You should at least consider trying to do the immigration thing legally though, because immigrating to Canada looks like it's far easier than immigrating to, say, the United States. Particularly if you're a "skilled worker".
Is that really different from watching coverage of American football?
Running play, gains 4 yards, down at the 46. [1 minutes of ads] Passing play, incomplete, no gain. [1 minutes of ads] Passing play, complete for 15 yards. First down at the 31. [3 minutes of ads]...
At least with World Cup matches for the vast majority of the time something is going on on the field that could reasonably be described as athletic competition.
I doubt you could reasonably build a complex system from trash in a weekend, but it's quite possible to build small-scale wind turbines (a bunch of info here).
Depends on what you mean by "worth". If you mean what it can be sold for, you're absolutely correct. If you mean the benefit to its listener, you're absolutely wrong.
And that's why capitalism doesn't work well when we're talking about ideas and artistic creations - the societal benefits of an idea go up the more people have easy access, while the financial value of that same idea goes down. This is different from, say, a toaster, where selling one toaster has no effect on the financial value of another identical toaster. So in a capitalist system you always have a conflict between the people who want to maximize their financial reward for an idea (who will want to keep it under lock and key) and the people who want to maximize the societal reward for that same idea (who will want to spread it far and wide). Business folks tend to fall into the first camp, folks who are fans of whatever the ideas are about tend to fall into the second camp, and the people who actually come up with the ideas and art tend to be split between those who want to get rich and those who want to pursue fame.
Re:Get the *real* security to do it.
on
Employee Monitoring
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· Score: 4, Informative
After becoming pals with the security guard at my building, the guard related to me a moment when she was watching the parking garage cam, and noticed that the director of marketing was busy going Lewinsky on a member (pun thoroughly intended) of the board of directors. Certainly it explained how she got the job, since skill in marketing clearly had nothing to do with it.
If you want to know what is actually going on in a company, the 3 groups of people you need access to are the admins (who can watch people's computer use), the security guards (who can watch people's physical activities), and the bookkeepers (who know where the money and therefor the power is going).
The real problem with official monitoring duties is that you have to send the results to management instead of the local newspaper, or maybe a television show.
I'm wondering if all this effort in discovering exoplanets is getting us any closer to a better estimate of the fp (fraction of stars that have planets) factor of the Drake Equation. Obviously, a complete survey of the sky isn't practical, and we know that some exoplanets are going to be undetectable, and it might also be skewed by the scientifically minded looking closer at stars likely to have planets rather than stars unlikely to have planets, but at the same time we have a lot more to go on than we once did.
Or maybe some sort of chemical coloring in a pattern on a mesh of dyed wood fibers. Possibly collected together with a lot of other pieces of this mesh and sewn or glued together.
Oh, and most engravings were done on clay rather than stone, because it's a lot faster to write, and once the clay dries out is still quite readable.
Remember that the company that is selling the ad spot sells poorly targeted ads as "targeted marketing", so they aren't exactly heavily motivated to get it right. You might think that the buyers of these ad spots would do some research and figure out that Integrity Marketing's carefully and accurately targeted ads are more effective than Schlock Marketing's inaccurately targeted ads, but in fact Schlock probably does quite well for itself because of the number of buyers who don't do that research and just see that Schlock's prices are somewhat lower than Integrity's.
It's definitely not unheard of for marketing and advertising firms to bullshit their clients as well as their clients' customers.
In regards to Panama, that was a problem of the USA's own making, given that General Noriega, who was the target of the invasion, was a disgruntled CIA asset.
The Afghanis should get rich, but the wealth extraction requires expertise they don't have (killing each other has been more fun down the centuries).
The Afghan's reputation is more one of being able to kill off any invading force, no matter how mighty. In the last couple of centuries they've beaten the British, the Russians (twice), and are in the process of trying to kick out NATO. In the case of the British, the most dramatic incident was the Massacre of Elphinstone's Army, where a force of 13,500 was reduced to 1 survivor. The various Russian attempts led them to tell the USA to avoid invading at all costs after 9/11.
As far as their level of civil war and assassinations, compare the history of Afghanistan to Italy, and tell me why you're probably fine with the Italians running their own affairs but not the Afghan's.
Not necessarily. If I'm a relatively poor parent, I'm taxed considerably less than my rich childless neighbor, so rich childless neighbor is paying for those supplies more than I am.
I can't tell if you're trolling or what, but I'm going to take you seriously since you have strong karma.
Being smart or stupid is a question of the relatively hard-to-change abilities of the student. Being rich or poor is a question of the abilities of the adult(s) who are caring for the student.
Now, let's say you have a smart-and-poor student A and a dumb-and-rich student B. Which student should get the better education, A or B? It sounds an awful lot like you'd pick B (and in point of fact, in the US B generally will get a better education). However, it's quite easy to argue that A should have gotten more education than B, because A is smarter than B.
In New Hampshire, the following occurs: "it shall be the duty of the legislators and magistrates, in all future periods of this government, to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries and public schools, to encourage private and public institutions..."
The state supreme court has interpreted that to mean that the state is responsible for ensuring that each student in New Hampshire has access to a fully funded public education. A measure like this would be in violation of that.
In Ohio, this section: "Provision shall be made by law for the organization, administration and control of the public school system of the state supported by public funds"
Again, this can be easily interpreted to point out that requiring a purchase of a $900 computer would not be supporting the public school system with public funds.
Massachusetts has very similar language to New Hampshire in its constitution.
You're correct that it's not in the plain language of the state constitutions, but case law definitely is on the side of any parent who wants to protest this.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's just to keep wages down in general.
Age discrimination is about one thing: companies would rather have a 20-something desperate for work working 60 hours a week at $40K/year than they would a 50-something with some financial security working 40 hours a week at $70K/year. There are also some factors involving health insurance that can make it cheaper to have younger workers as well, but that's the basic story.
It has nothing to do with whether older workers are productive, "get" newer technology, or fit into the company culture. From the point of view of your employer, you are an expense, and their goal is to minimize expenses by hiring the cheapest workers they can capable of doing the job (or at least not failing too badly).
In other words, we know what works well on a desktop. And more to the point, we know what doesn't work on a desktop, which is why we'll probably never see another trackball ever again.
In mobile, we're only collectively beginning to understand what we should be trying to build. There have been some real dead ends too - Palm handwriting, anyone?
There's a very good chance that the reason the route is so boneheaded is not because of some highway engineer's stupidity but rather the stupidity of the eminent domain battles that invariably crop up over any major highway projects.
Another example of that phenomenon in the same region: I490, which was supposed to run from the I71-I90 intersection east to I271, and would in theory provide good access to Case Western Reserve University and most of the eastern inner-ring suburbs. Instead, the locals in the wealthier suburbs put up a fight, and thus I490 provides excellent access to the housing projects and practically nowhere else.
Really, though, this seams more like something that would interest the astrophysicist Brian May.
Well, not exactly. The difference between the Peter Principle and the Dilbert Principle is that the Peter Principle has to do with the promotion of people who are competent at their current job, while the Dilbert Principle is concerned with the promotion of people who are incompetent at their current job.
If you actually read "The Peter Principle" (which is quite funny as well as insightful), you'll find out that Lawrence Peter describes this phenomenon as "Percussive Sublimation" (a.k.a. being kicked upstairs). He also describes one case in which the company in question, who's operations were based in LA created a new "Head Office" in New York and promoted all the useless people to the "Head Office". As he describes it, the people in the Head Office are busy drafting memos, scheduling meetings, conferring with each other, etc, while everyone back in LA actually gets the work done without having to worry about all the drones.
You're right about the lock box.
When you actually look closely at it, the reason that Social Security is considered bankrupt is not because the Social Security system isn't funded, but because the rest of the federal government isn't funded enough to pay the money owed to Social Security.
The way this happened: Back in the early 1990's, Alan Greenspan went to Congress and told them that Social Security was going to be bankrupt if they didn't do something. Congress did something: They hiked the FICA taxes to build up a surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund, which is kept in T-Bills (because any other investment vehicle would open Social Security up to massive corruption as various private investors attempted to get control over a pile of cash worth hundreds of billions at least). The idea was that by doing so, we'd make sure that the SSA had the cash reserves needed to ensure that they could pay for the baby boomer's retirement.
By refusing to pay the bonds that Social Security has out of the general funds, we would effectively push the tax burden from the progressive income taxes to FICA taxes which hit the highest-income earners the least. The absurdity of the FICA tax structure as it currently stands: a fast-food cook pays more in FICA taxes than an old-money patriarch who doesn't work but earns millions off of investments, because the tax only falls on earned income.
I suggest you go back and read The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, which describes in graphic detail what happens when you have an unregulated food industry, and is generally considered to be a major reason why there's an FDA today.
Could someone explain why some Christians believe that their rules need to apply to non-Christians?
As a point of contrast, many atheists believe that their primary responsibility is to not hurt anybody without a really really good reason. Secondarily is to encourage their fellow atheists to not hurt anybody without a really really good reason; this includes (at the worst) locking people up when they're chronically unwilling to shape up.
So what is it about some Christian theologies that leads them to try to, for example, feel justified and/or compelled to try to kill Yemeni academics and Iraqi journalists?
Sure it does.
- You probably eat at least 1000 meals or so over the course of the year (that's a little less than 3 meals a day). A reasonable guess would be about 5% of those meals would be dangerous to eat, and would result in an average medical bill or last pay of $250 (most would be less than that, a few would be a lot more than that), for a total cost of $12,500.
- Let's say you drive a vehicle that gets 25 mpg, and drive 10,000 miles per year, and are thus purchasing 400 gallons of fuel for a cost of $1000 (that's about $2.50 per gallon). However, the gas station owner bilks you because there's no inspection, so you end up actually paying $1500, so the government inspection just saved you $500.
- For banking, let's say you had a 15% chance of having deposits of $30,000 in one of the banks that failed. That gives you an average loss of $4500.
- For securities, let's go with about a 11% chance that you lose your investment to a con man without regulation, and a 1% chance that you'd lose your investment to Bernie Madoff under regulation. If you invest, say, $40,000, your government just saved you on average $4000.
I'm already above $20K, and not even through the list.
I find that difficult to believe especially since I barely use any government services.
I call BS on that one. Chances are extremely good that you've done at least some of these in the last year:
- Purchased food inspected by the government to ensure that it's unlikely to give you food poisoning, and that the nutritional information listed on the side of the container is accurate. Or purchased food from a restaurant which had been inspected to ensure that there weren't cockroaches all over the place (among other things).
- Purchased gasoline from a pump that had been inspected to ensure that 1 gallon of price = 1 gallon of fuel.
- Put money into a bank knowing that the bank was required by law to give it back to you if you asked for it, and would still be yours even if the bank went under (assuming it was less than $100,000).
- Engaged in a transaction on an SEC-regulated market.
- Taken advantage of a 401(k) or IRA.
- Relied on the military and police for protection against any really serious attack (not just one criminal going after your property, but an organized assault with bombs and missiles). You may have also called your emergency services for help with a criminal, a fire, an injury, or other hazards.
- Made use of a government water system (not necessarily at home).
- Taken a walk or ride or swim in a public park of some kind.
- Ridden on or flown an aircraft that had been regulated to ensure that it was extremely unlikely to crash.
- Breathed air that wasn't super-polluted because government regulations prevented companies from just spewing out nasty particulate matter.
I can keep going if you like. The point is, most of the really useful stuff your government does at various levels is not readily visible but affects you every day.
You should at least consider trying to do the immigration thing legally though, because immigrating to Canada looks like it's far easier than immigrating to, say, the United States. Particularly if you're a "skilled worker".
Read all about it: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/index.asp
Is that really different from watching coverage of American football?
Running play, gains 4 yards, down at the 46. [1 minutes of ads] Passing play, incomplete, no gain. [1 minutes of ads] Passing play, complete for 15 yards. First down at the 31. [3 minutes of ads] ...
At least with World Cup matches for the vast majority of the time something is going on on the field that could reasonably be described as athletic competition.
I doubt you could reasonably build a complex system from trash in a weekend, but it's quite possible to build small-scale wind turbines (a bunch of info here).
Depends on what you mean by "worth". If you mean what it can be sold for, you're absolutely correct. If you mean the benefit to its listener, you're absolutely wrong.
And that's why capitalism doesn't work well when we're talking about ideas and artistic creations - the societal benefits of an idea go up the more people have easy access, while the financial value of that same idea goes down. This is different from, say, a toaster, where selling one toaster has no effect on the financial value of another identical toaster. So in a capitalist system you always have a conflict between the people who want to maximize their financial reward for an idea (who will want to keep it under lock and key) and the people who want to maximize the societal reward for that same idea (who will want to spread it far and wide). Business folks tend to fall into the first camp, folks who are fans of whatever the ideas are about tend to fall into the second camp, and the people who actually come up with the ideas and art tend to be split between those who want to get rich and those who want to pursue fame.
After becoming pals with the security guard at my building, the guard related to me a moment when she was watching the parking garage cam, and noticed that the director of marketing was busy going Lewinsky on a member (pun thoroughly intended) of the board of directors. Certainly it explained how she got the job, since skill in marketing clearly had nothing to do with it.
If you want to know what is actually going on in a company, the 3 groups of people you need access to are the admins (who can watch people's computer use), the security guards (who can watch people's physical activities), and the bookkeepers (who know where the money and therefor the power is going).
The real problem with official monitoring duties is that you have to send the results to management instead of the local newspaper, or maybe a television show.
I'm wondering if all this effort in discovering exoplanets is getting us any closer to a better estimate of the fp (fraction of stars that have planets) factor of the Drake Equation. Obviously, a complete survey of the sky isn't practical, and we know that some exoplanets are going to be undetectable, and it might also be skewed by the scientifically minded looking closer at stars likely to have planets rather than stars unlikely to have planets, but at the same time we have a lot more to go on than we once did.
Or maybe some sort of chemical coloring in a pattern on a mesh of dyed wood fibers. Possibly collected together with a lot of other pieces of this mesh and sewn or glued together.
Oh, and most engravings were done on clay rather than stone, because it's a lot faster to write, and once the clay dries out is still quite readable.
Remember that the company that is selling the ad spot sells poorly targeted ads as "targeted marketing", so they aren't exactly heavily motivated to get it right. You might think that the buyers of these ad spots would do some research and figure out that Integrity Marketing's carefully and accurately targeted ads are more effective than Schlock Marketing's inaccurately targeted ads, but in fact Schlock probably does quite well for itself because of the number of buyers who don't do that research and just see that Schlock's prices are somewhat lower than Integrity's.
It's definitely not unheard of for marketing and advertising firms to bullshit their clients as well as their clients' customers.
Actually, better in the irony department would have been forcibly erasing everyone's copy of Farenheit 451.
In regards to Panama, that was a problem of the USA's own making, given that General Noriega, who was the target of the invasion, was a disgruntled CIA asset.
The Afghanis should get rich, but the wealth extraction requires expertise they don't have (killing each other has been more fun down the centuries).
The Afghan's reputation is more one of being able to kill off any invading force, no matter how mighty. In the last couple of centuries they've beaten the British, the Russians (twice), and are in the process of trying to kick out NATO. In the case of the British, the most dramatic incident was the Massacre of Elphinstone's Army, where a force of 13,500 was reduced to 1 survivor. The various Russian attempts led them to tell the USA to avoid invading at all costs after 9/11.
As far as their level of civil war and assassinations, compare the history of Afghanistan to Italy, and tell me why you're probably fine with the Italians running their own affairs but not the Afghan's.
Not necessarily. If I'm a relatively poor parent, I'm taxed considerably less than my rich childless neighbor, so rich childless neighbor is paying for those supplies more than I am.
I can't tell if you're trolling or what, but I'm going to take you seriously since you have strong karma.
Being smart or stupid is a question of the relatively hard-to-change abilities of the student. Being rich or poor is a question of the abilities of the adult(s) who are caring for the student.
Now, let's say you have a smart-and-poor student A and a dumb-and-rich student B. Which student should get the better education, A or B? It sounds an awful lot like you'd pick B (and in point of fact, in the US B generally will get a better education). However, it's quite easy to argue that A should have gotten more education than B, because A is smarter than B.
I'll pick the two states I've resided in.
In New Hampshire, the following occurs: ..."
"it shall be the duty of the legislators and magistrates, in all future periods of this government, to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries and public schools, to encourage private and public institutions
The state supreme court has interpreted that to mean that the state is responsible for ensuring that each student in New Hampshire has access to a fully funded public education. A measure like this would be in violation of that.
In Ohio, this section:
"Provision shall be made by law for the organization, administration and control of the public school system of the state supported by public funds"
Again, this can be easily interpreted to point out that requiring a purchase of a $900 computer would not be supporting the public school system with public funds.
Massachusetts has very similar language to New Hampshire in its constitution.
You're correct that it's not in the plain language of the state constitutions, but case law definitely is on the side of any parent who wants to protest this.