... or cost $10 max. Don't piss me off by putting ads in a game that I paid $40-$50 for. Any in-game ad in an expensive game will make me want to avoid the product they're advertising.
"Except for all of the scammers, everything that BMI, etc. are doing is perfectly legal."
That's part of the problem... the law is so stupid that this extortion is legal. Bands or customers singing a song in a small venue like a bar aren't going to deter anybody from buying the real album or going to the original artist's concert. If anything, it helps generate interest in the song and the original artist. Live performances in small venues should be free of licensing fees. It's just another money grab, and this sort of extortion being legal does nothing to promote the creation of music.
"That's not a minor mistake: H1Bs are temporary visas, green cards are immigrant visas. Green cards can't lead to salary depression for American workers because people hired on green cards are American workers, with all the same labor rights and mobility."
Actually, the length of the green card process brings the opposite effect. Until a very late stage in the process, the worker is dependent on the sponsoring employer to keep the process going. If the employer discontinues the process before that late milestone, the employee gets no green card unless they restart the whole thing with a new employer.
It can take anywhere from a year to 5 years (depending on the specifics of the case and other factors like luck) to reach the stage where the employee can complete the process independently. So by offering a green card, on average a company has the employee stuck for about 3 years. Some employers will stretch that out by deliberately slowing down their side of the process.
On the other hand, if an foreign worker arrives here with an H1B visa and has no intention of pursuing a green card, their purpose will be to make as much money as they can during the few years while they are here, then take their savings and go back home. In those cases they will change jobs very often (which involves some hassle when on an H1B, but is doable), always looking for a bigger and better salary.
"That's really dishonest. You completely ignore the possibility of a person paying his medical expenses without insurance."
Then those who want to self-insure should be allowed to do so by showing that they have a sufficiently large amount in a bond (at least a million dollars) that can be used to pay for their care and will be used for no other purpose. Many states allow a similar measure for those who want self-insure for car insurance; they show a bond for at least the minimum required insurance amount.
The rest of society pays for the care of those who don't have insurance. Either with direct programs like Medicare/Medicaid, or via increased health premiums and costs of procedures.
OK, so you'll say let's only treat the insured, let the rest die in the street. But then somebody who IS insured gets robbed and beaten by thugs, and is taken to the hospital. They can't prove they're insured because the thugs took their ID and insurance card, and they can't even talk as a result of the beating. So you're going to let the insured person die or become crippled from their injuries, simply because they can't prove it on the spot? Why get insurance then, if you're not going to be able to use it when you need it most?
Or consider the case of a guy infected with tuberculosis. You want to NOT treat him if he doesn't have insurance? And so he continues to spread the disease with every breath until he eventually dies months or years later?
Mandatory insurance is just about making you take responsibility for the costs and risks that you impose on society by having a body susceptible to injury and carrying diseases. If you or your employer doesn't pay for your health care, the rest of us will end up paying for it.
If the diverse ecosystem of the Galapagos is seriously damaged, tourists won't want to go there at all. If the fishermen there don't reduce their fishing, eventually there won't be enough fish and big enough fish left there for them to sustain a living.
Those who live there and depend on the tourists for income need to wake up and realize that if they don't minimize the damage they do while living there, and do their best to stop the damage from poachers and too much tourists, the Galapagos islands will become just like any other ordinary pieces of rock in the middle of the ocean, and neither fishermen nor the tourist industry there will be able to make money.
"That used to be the case when I was applying, but I think that's not true anymore either. Nowadays, I think there are just some shorter periods during which you shouldn't change jobs."
It varies with the employment category and other factors, but it generally still takes at least a year, and as many as 5 years for some people to reach that point where they can safely change jobs.
"Even if you have to restart the process for some reason, that's hardly "being chained" (as I know from personal experience)."
It may not be an unbreakable chain, but having to redo a multi-year process is a very big deterrent to changing jobs.
"In any case, I think we can agree that the best way of fixing the process then is to make the green card process more efficient and less bureaucratic. And just maybe that would include dropping the "job advertising" requirement:-)"
Most definitely. The advertising/recruitment thing is a farce. And the inefficiency of the process should not have been allowed to become a way for employers to take advantage.
"In principle, the argument that enforced loyalty can lead to depressed wages is correct; the problem with the argument is simply that most legal foreign labor in the US actually has high mobility."
Not if they want a green card. Until they pass a certain milestone late in the green card process, which may take anywhere from 1 to 5 years to get there, they can't change jobs without restarting the green card process.
Those who come here with plans to leave the country at the end of their visa will change jobs often and try to make as much money as possible during the few years they are here. But those who want a green card are chained to their employers for years.
In a free market, companies are free to sell what they what at whatever price.
The problem is that it is illegal for you buy an artificially dumbed-down software product and tweak, patch, or hack it to make it perform like the fully functional version. Doing that would not be illegal in a free market.
"I'm guessing that in China, as is the case anywhere else that humans occupy, people rank themselves using whatever criteria they can find (however small) and then stick to it. But China has always interested me in this regard, because of the 40 years of attempted (and forced) equality. Do you think there are more opportunities to change your life there because there are fewer distinctions?"
If you are born into a family that is poor, but isn't so poor that they have to worry about their next meal and can't send you to school, then maybe you'll have decent opportunities to move up. But when people make just enough for bare survival, and have to work 70-100 hours a week at it, they have no time or money or energy to dedicate to improving skills or starting a business or doing something else to move up. When they do get the occasional bit of extra cash, they are afraid to invest it in something that would help them move up, because investing it in something risky or long-term could mean starvation (or death or disability from a simple illness because they can't afford medical care) in the short- to medium term.
"Let me guess. The mpaa gets a chunk of everything I rent? I actually thought of that right after I pushed the submit button."
In some cases, the video rental shop gets deeply discounted discs and tapes in exchange for giving the MPAA a percentage of the rental revenue.
In other cases, the mere fact that you rent a title increases the observed demand for the title at the video shop. The more customers choose to rent a given title is the more copies the shop will buy of it.
The HDCP copy protection crap is what causes HDMI devices to have trouble communicating with each other, especially if there is anything between the source and display devices, like an A/V receiver or HDMI switch box.
They are too stupid to realize that pirates aren't going to copy shows and movies by capturing uncompressed frames coming through the cables; they're going to make copies of the discs. But they insist on making the honest customers suffer through the slow cryptographic handshake that occurs any time you switch on an HDMI device or even switch sources on a TV.
"If someone develops a truly novel business model, why shouldn't they be able to patent it and profit from it, just as if they had developed a new machine?"
A "truly novel" business model is its own reward. It will attract customers, improve time to market, reduce inventory costs, or provide some other benefit that increases profits. Therefore a patent is not needed as an incentive.
A better approach would be an exponentially increasing annual fee. Don't pay the fee and it expires.
Say the first year is $1000, then $2000, $4000, $8000, $16000,...
That way the small inventor gets the chance to get started, while BigCorps can't afford to keep 10,000 patents that sit around for years doing nothing except waiting for somebody to accidentally infringe.
The GPL is in place because without it, somebody would take some open source code, make a derivative work of it, copyright the derivative work, and charging for it or place other tight restrictions of it. For example, look what Apple did with BSD.
Without copyright, somebody could make and distribute derivative works of open source code, but they wouldn't be able to copyright the derivative work or impose restrictions on its distribution or modification.
"Actually, you've got it all backwards. Take a look around - have you noticed that the condition of the poor is directly proportional to the amount of Capitalism in a country. American poor are tremendously better off than Ethiopian poor, and any poor of today are better off then the poor of 500 years ago."
But Western European poor are better off than American poor, with Europe's lower degree of capitalism and greater degree of socialism.
And most third world countries without communism or dictators are even more capitalistic than the US, with a few families owning all the wealth and very few regulations to control the market because the government simply doesn't have the resources to enforce such regulations.
"I realize that it does indeed violate their copyright, but as a student, wouldn't you want your paper in their catalog so that some lazy student can't make it through school by plagiarizing YOUR work?"
When I was in college I gave my paper to the professor, and the professor gave it back. Nobody got a chance to plagiarize my paper because I DIDN'T GIVE LET THEM SEE IT.
"Am I the only person who thinks this action isn't all that horrendous? The executives that make these hard decisions are accountable to their stockholders."
If I was a CC shareholder, I'd be pissed. This action shows that management screwed up, either because:
(1) the higher pay of the terminated employees was in line with performance, and they just cut the best-performing employees at that level while giving the remaining employees a deterrent to performing well or (2) there generally was no difference in performance between the highest and lowest paid, which means for years you were overpaying several of them for no good reason.
Either way, it means management is incompetent, and as a shareholder I'd start with getting rid of the highest paid employee -- the CEO.
"Let's assume that they validly need to cut costs. Doesn't it make sense to cut the highest paid people?"
It doesn't make sense if the higher paid people are providing more additional value than their wage differential. It's not a stretch to think that an experienced employee with years of good performance who is earning $25K/year is going to bring in more than an extra $7K compared to a minimally competent newbie earning $18K. After all, that's why people get raises and promotions in the first place, if they're not in a union with a seniority-based pay scale.
Now not only have they gotten rid of many of the better performers, they have also discouraged the remaining employees from performing well enough to get a raise or promotion.
Slashdot Mirror
... or cost $10 max. Don't piss me off by putting ads in a game that I paid $40-$50 for. Any in-game ad in an expensive game will make me want to avoid the product they're advertising.
"Except for all of the scammers, everything that BMI, etc. are doing is perfectly legal."
... the law is so stupid that this extortion is legal. Bands or customers singing a song in a small venue like a bar aren't going to deter anybody from buying the real album or going to the original artist's concert. If anything, it helps generate interest in the song and the original artist. Live performances in small venues should be free of licensing fees. It's just another money grab, and this sort of extortion being legal does nothing to promote the creation of music.
That's part of the problem
"Theoretically the U.S. economy has grown quite a bit since then. Where did it go?"
7 /03/29/income_inequality_gulf_widens_in_2005/
Mostly to people in the top 1%.
http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/200
"That's not a minor mistake: H1Bs are temporary visas, green cards are immigrant visas. Green cards can't lead to salary depression for American workers because people hired on green cards are American workers, with all the same labor rights and mobility."
Actually, the length of the green card process brings the opposite effect. Until a very late stage in the process, the worker is dependent on the sponsoring employer to keep the process going. If the employer discontinues the process before that late milestone, the employee gets no green card unless they restart the whole thing with a new employer.
It can take anywhere from a year to 5 years (depending on the specifics of the case and other factors like luck) to reach the stage where the employee can complete the process independently. So by offering a green card, on average a company has the employee stuck for about 3 years. Some employers will stretch that out by deliberately slowing down their side of the process.
On the other hand, if an foreign worker arrives here with an H1B visa and has no intention of pursuing a green card, their purpose will be to make as much money as they can during the few years while they are here, then take their savings and go back home. In those cases they will change jobs very often (which involves some hassle when on an H1B, but is doable), always looking for a bigger and better salary.
"That's really dishonest. You completely ignore the possibility of a person paying his medical expenses without insurance."
Then those who want to self-insure should be allowed to do so by showing that they have a sufficiently large amount in a bond (at least a million dollars) that can be used to pay for their care and will be used for no other purpose. Many states allow a similar measure for those who want self-insure for car insurance; they show a bond for at least the minimum required insurance amount.
The rest of society pays for the care of those who don't have insurance. Either with direct programs like Medicare/Medicaid, or via increased health premiums and costs of procedures.
OK, so you'll say let's only treat the insured, let the rest die in the street. But then somebody who IS insured gets robbed and beaten by thugs, and is taken to the hospital. They can't prove they're insured because the thugs took their ID and insurance card, and they can't even talk as a result of the beating. So you're going to let the insured person die or become crippled from their injuries, simply because they can't prove it on the spot? Why get insurance then, if you're not going to be able to use it when you need it most?
Or consider the case of a guy infected with tuberculosis. You want to NOT treat him if he doesn't have insurance? And so he continues to spread the disease with every breath until he eventually dies months or years later?
Mandatory insurance is just about making you take responsibility for the costs and risks that you impose on society by having a body susceptible to injury and carrying diseases. If you or your employer doesn't pay for your health care, the rest of us will end up paying for it.
If the diverse ecosystem of the Galapagos is seriously damaged, tourists won't want to go there at all. If the fishermen there don't reduce their fishing, eventually there won't be enough fish and big enough fish left there for them to sustain a living.
Those who live there and depend on the tourists for income need to wake up and realize that if they don't minimize the damage they do while living there, and do their best to stop the damage from poachers and too much tourists, the Galapagos islands will become just like any other ordinary pieces of rock in the middle of the ocean, and neither fishermen nor the tourist industry there will be able to make money.
"That used to be the case when I was applying, but I think that's not true anymore either. Nowadays, I think there are just some shorter periods during which you shouldn't change jobs."
:-)"
It varies with the employment category and other factors, but it generally still takes at least a year, and as many as 5 years for some people to reach that point where they can safely change jobs.
"Even if you have to restart the process for some reason, that's hardly "being chained" (as I know from personal experience)."
It may not be an unbreakable chain, but having to redo a multi-year process is a very big deterrent to changing jobs.
"In any case, I think we can agree that the best way of fixing the process then is to make the green card process more efficient and less bureaucratic. And just maybe that would include dropping the "job advertising" requirement
Most definitely. The advertising/recruitment thing is a farce. And the inefficiency of the process should not have been allowed to become a way for employers to take advantage.
"In principle, the argument that enforced loyalty can lead to depressed wages is correct; the problem with the argument is simply that most legal foreign labor in the US actually has high mobility."
Not if they want a green card. Until they pass a certain milestone late in the green card process, which may take anywhere from 1 to 5 years to get there, they can't change jobs without restarting the green card process.
Those who come here with plans to leave the country at the end of their visa will change jobs often and try to make as much money as possible during the few years they are here. But those who want a green card are chained to their employers for years.
In a free market, companies are free to sell what they what at whatever price.
The problem is that it is illegal for you buy an artificially dumbed-down software product and tweak, patch, or hack it to make it perform like the fully functional version. Doing that would not be illegal in a free market.
"Everyone who doesn't die young becomes an old fogey."
No. There is a difference between being old, and being an old fogey.
"I'm guessing that in China, as is the case anywhere else that humans occupy, people rank themselves using whatever criteria they can find (however small) and then stick to it. But China has always interested me in this regard, because of the 40 years of attempted (and forced) equality. Do you think there are more opportunities to change your life there because there are fewer distinctions?"
If you are born into a family that is poor, but isn't so poor that they have to worry about their next meal and can't send you to school, then maybe you'll have decent opportunities to move up. But when people make just enough for bare survival, and have to work 70-100 hours a week at it, they have no time or money or energy to dedicate to improving skills or starting a business or doing something else to move up. When they do get the occasional bit of extra cash, they are afraid to invest it in something that would help them move up, because investing it in something risky or long-term could mean starvation (or death or disability from a simple illness because they can't afford medical care) in the short- to medium term.
"Let me guess. The mpaa gets a chunk of everything I rent? I actually thought of that right after I pushed the submit button."
In some cases, the video rental shop gets deeply discounted discs and tapes in exchange for giving the MPAA a percentage of the rental revenue.
In other cases, the mere fact that you rent a title increases the observed demand for the title at the video shop. The more customers choose to rent a given title is the more copies the shop will buy of it.
The HDCP copy protection crap is what causes HDMI devices to have trouble communicating with each other, especially if there is anything between the source and display devices, like an A/V receiver or HDMI switch box.
They are too stupid to realize that pirates aren't going to copy shows and movies by capturing uncompressed frames coming through the cables; they're going to make copies of the discs. But they insist on making the honest customers suffer through the slow cryptographic handshake that occurs any time you switch on an HDMI device or even switch sources on a TV.
"If someone develops a truly novel business model, why shouldn't they be able to patent it and profit from it, just as if they had developed a new machine?"
A "truly novel" business model is its own reward. It will attract customers, improve time to market, reduce inventory costs, or provide some other benefit that increases profits. Therefore a patent is not needed as an incentive.
The recent Supreme Court ruling against the patentability of simple combinations of prior art should render this patent invalid if challenged.
People use Microsoft products because they have to.
People use Apple and Linux because they want to.
A better approach would be an exponentially increasing annual fee. Don't pay the fee and it expires.
...
Say the first year is $1000, then $2000, $4000, $8000, $16000,
That way the small inventor gets the chance to get started, while BigCorps can't afford to keep 10,000 patents that sit around for years doing nothing except waiting for somebody to accidentally infringe.
The GPL is in place because without it, somebody would take some open source code, make a derivative work of it, copyright the derivative work, and charging for it or place other tight restrictions of it. For example, look what Apple did with BSD.
Without copyright, somebody could make and distribute derivative works of open source code, but they wouldn't be able to copyright the derivative work or impose restrictions on its distribution or modification.
"Correction: there's no one available at the PRICE YOU ARE WILLING TO PAY. I'm sure if you doubled your salaries you would get some takers."
Probably true, but at that higher salary level it no longer saves money to hire in Bangalore.
"Because guys don't get called nerdy?"
No. Because women are more averse to nerdiness than guys. Few women want to date a nerd, and fewer want to be one or be thought of as being one.
"Actually, you've got it all backwards. Take a look around - have you noticed that the condition of the poor is directly proportional to the amount of Capitalism in a country. American poor are tremendously better off than Ethiopian poor, and any poor of today are better off then the poor of 500 years ago."
But Western European poor are better off than American poor, with Europe's lower degree of capitalism and greater degree of socialism.
And most third world countries without communism or dictators are even more capitalistic than the US, with a few families owning all the wealth and very few regulations to control the market because the government simply doesn't have the resources to enforce such regulations.
"I realize that it does indeed violate their copyright, but as a student, wouldn't you want your paper in their catalog so that some lazy student can't make it through school by plagiarizing YOUR work?"
When I was in college I gave my paper to the professor, and the professor gave it back. Nobody got a chance to plagiarize my paper because I DIDN'T GIVE LET THEM SEE IT.
"Am I the only person who thinks this action isn't all that horrendous? The executives that make these hard decisions are accountable to their stockholders."
If I was a CC shareholder, I'd be pissed. This action shows that management screwed up, either because:
(1) the higher pay of the terminated employees was in line with performance, and they just cut the best-performing employees at that level while giving the remaining employees a deterrent to performing well
or
(2) there generally was no difference in performance between the highest and lowest paid, which means for years you were overpaying several of them for no good reason.
Either way, it means management is incompetent, and as a shareholder I'd start with getting rid of the highest paid employee -- the CEO.
"Let's assume that they validly need to cut costs. Doesn't it make sense to cut the highest paid people?"
It doesn't make sense if the higher paid people are providing more additional value than their wage differential. It's not a stretch to think that an experienced employee with years of good performance who is earning $25K/year is going to bring in more than an extra $7K compared to a minimally competent newbie earning $18K. After all, that's why people get raises and promotions in the first place, if they're not in a union with a seniority-based pay scale.
Now not only have they gotten rid of many of the better performers, they have also discouraged the remaining employees from performing well enough to get a raise or promotion.