Let's pretend after taxes, salaries, etc. you make a profit of 50 million bucks a year. You keep 40 million for yourself, you invest 8 million back in the business, and you split up the last 2 million as a bonus between your 9 workers.
So... who thought it was worth it to pay you 40 million bucks? Each employee at the 1 million businesses you serve? The employees you hired? Or yourself? If you are deciding 90% on your own... then... yeah.
Well, if it is your businesses..then sure, you decide...what's wrong with that?
And those 9 employees? They wouldn't have had jobs there to begin with, if the owner hadn't invested and started the company.
He might be more generous, but that's his choice...not yours, not mine, not the workers...not the government.
One of the problems our social programs face is if we simply give many individuals cash they will spend it in a manner that does not meet these fundamental needs.
Well, at some point then, you have to just say fuck'em...I mean at some point, you have to make people be adults, and live with and deal with the consequences of their choices.
Assuming UBI of ~$1000 per month (which would be a lot), 1 million dollars divided by $1000 per month equals 1000 months, divided by 12 months equals 83 years and 4 months.
Who can live on a measly $1K a month?
Ok, one might could barely 'survive' on $1K a month...living below starving college student level of life....but really, that's not much living, that is just barely getting by at best, if at all.
Setting your rate to include enough to pay for your own health care, etc. works provided that someone who doesn't budget for that doesn't come and undercut you, creating also an expectation that such services should be cheaper.
People, when it matters *will* pay for quality.
And at some point you may have to tell yourself a company that does that...."is not my customer", and move on to greener pastures.
While I haven't seen firearms used yet. I have seen job markets that amounted to "work as a fake 1099 or die of starvation..."
And what markets, exactly are those....?
The Feds have already made it hard enough to be a 1099 contractor, that it is harder and harder to find people or companies that are willing to let your work 1099 with them, for fear someone will try to sue them later (ala MS) or the govt will try to reclassify you, even if you are legit.
I've never seen an industry really even enthusiastically try to work on a 1099 basis.
The flaw, of course, is that "gig workers" are paid shit. It looks OK on the surface because they're comparing their income to one that has already had a good portion removed before they see it to pay for benefits, but it's shit.
That simply is NOT true...you only hear about gig workers (aka 1099 contractors) in the news recently for things like uber...but for MANY years, there is a majority of contract workers that make incredibly good livings. You have to put on your big boy pants and know how to negotiate your bill rate so that you can pay your own insurance, invest in your own retirement, and take vacations, etc....even quit working for a few months out of the year.
Sadly, this is the type of move to lump in "real" contractors with this new low bill rate gig worker...and ruin the party for everyone.
If you are working uber, you have to understand, at that bill rate, it is NOT a means of primary income...it is a SIDE gig...extra money on the side.
But don't do shit like this that can kill legitimate 1099 contract workers that DO know how to make a very good living at it, and enjoy the independence of working for yourself, you own hours, your own call on benefits, investments and the write offs on taxes you get.
If I'm spending my time doing things we can employ someone on a third of my salary to do, I'm going to suggest we do exactly that.
If this is actually true...I never never met a person as altruistic as yourself.
It's a free country, live like you wanna live, but to me, I view work in a much more mercenary fashion. I want to get paid as much as possible, period...if they have me peeling potatoes for $100K+ a year, I'm happy to do it, and hope then never find anyone willing to do it cheaper.
The *only* reason i work..is to make enough money to allow me to live the lifestyle that makes me happy. If I won the lottery tomorrow, I dunno if I'd even bother telling them I wasn't coming back....ok maybe I would, I'm not that cold...but I certainly would never "work" again.
"The bill asks the federal government to set aside $20 million in funding for organizations to use to look at the types of benefits programs individual workers could take with them from job to job."
There already IS benefits 1099 contractors can take with them from job to job (gig to gig)...it's called learning to negotiate your bill rate so that you can pay (and be free to choose) your own health insurance, set up a nice HSA to sock away pre-tax money for routine medical needs, to pick and choose your own retirement, set up a SEP, sock away and invest your money as you wish...no, we can't have the vast majority of contractors be depended upon to put on their "big boy" pants and make their own choices in life, negotiate their gigs, have the freedom to move from job to job and be able to write of actual expenses of doing business (mileage, etc).
No...we throw the baby out with the bathwater, on something that has worked for a LONG time, now that there are some new twists on it out there.
No one holds a fucking gun to your head to work 1099. You have to either be a responsible (and talented enough to be in demand) adult, and know what jobs to take and how to negotiate, do paperwork and budget to be a contractor, OR...have it be something part time to add money to your regular "day job".
I"m sorry, but being an uber driver has never been about making a living at it full time, it is a part time job to make some side money.
But, here we go, likely ruining people that do "real" 1099 contracting, and balance the risks vs the rewards of this form of employment, and independence.
If you are a real 1099 contractor, you already budget your bill rate to pay you own benefits and vacation/sick time...and it is portable wherever you wish to work next....it already works without the Feds intruding even more into our work lives.
Oh hell yeah between that and Obama and the IRS destroying 1099 workers it would have been great but not now. Fucking IRS wants to get paid today not each quarter.
This was my first thought too...
They're trying to drive the death knell into the 1099 contract circuit, and make everyone a fucking wage slave.....
So much for giving people like myself, a choice....and be independent.
While I understand fully the thoughts behind doing something like this....I just think "Wow...what could possibly go wrong here...?"
I'm guessing that large businesses could get in on this too? If not now, just wait....
And, we've seen how well just take down notices work....often not even justified, but still...the party acted upon is now guilty till proven innocent.
What constitutes a valid victimization? Telling someone you don't like them? They small bad? That allows them to infiltrate your computer, destroy information...etc?
This sounds like a real pandora's box being opened here.
Well, then your in luck! Soon you won't be able to get on a plane even for domestic flights without either a RealID-enabled driver's license or official US Passport.
Yeah..that's going to be interesting...as that LA didn't do RealID drivers licenses.
I think a couple of other states refused to do that too...was it NH maybe one of them?
anyway, will be interesting to see if they really don't let residents from states with no RealID on planes or not...
I guess it means the US finally has a "national ID".
*sigh*
Sadly, you may be right that sooner rather than later we'll be hearing "papers please" just to even drive between states. What has happened to my country....?
Hmm....a significant drop in people visiting here in the US from the middle east.
Yeah..we're really gonna miss those guys....
[rolls eyes]
But frankly, I have no real inclination to leave the US to visit internationally either.
I mean, I used to like to go to mexico, Cabo was one of my favorite places, but with all the drug crime down there, I have no inclination to go anywhere in MX anymore.
I might do the caribbean, and even Cuba if they finally open it up more freely.
But the US is so large and so diverse in its land and environments, I really don't have that much a reason to need to leave the country. I have a lot to explore here.
That and I"m not really thrilled about the hassle of having to go get a passport.
How does one go about and make sure Google doesn't get access to one's location history on their phone?
I've never given google my phone number before...they ask but I never give them one. I'm sure this is a stupid question, but when I set up a gmail account on the mail app on my phone, does that some how give them my phone number?
It seems too many people these days see shaming and the system against them at every corner....
I would guess that MOST of the complaints are of the "Seriously?" type as listed in the article:
though one submission described an instance when, during a large company meeting in late April, Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt allegedly interrupted Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat when she had a question addressed to her, which the post categorized as a "gender-related" complaint. A person who attended the meeting said Schmidt answered the question to make a joke.
I mean really....there *are* real instances of harassment out there, but you have so many people seeing and reporting crap that just isn't worth it and not a real problem and it muddies the water for seeing the few *real* incidents that happen out there, are serious and need to be addressed.
Is this the snowflakes entering the real world, finding out everyone doesn't get a trophy, doesn't have to give a shit about their 'self esteem', only expecting you to get your job done and do what your told and on time.....and seeing and reporting crap that no one in past generations saw as a problem but just the way life is....?
Really, you don't see where ethics comes in to it? So you see no problem with the people who write various types of malware?
I was answering under the assumption of legal activity, not things that are codified as criminal by law.
What Google and Facebook do, they have enormous amounts of data about their users. There's all sorts of ethical concerns with that. Literally every time you write something to a persistent log file, there should be an ethical question asked. It may be trivial to say there aren't any ethical concerns for logging how long it took for an algorithm to run, but what if the log has a memory snapshot?
That would just be part of the job working at Google or FB.
Gathering data is not inherently a bad thing as you seem to allude.
What is done with it, is another thing, but that's a human/business decision....not "coding ethics".
For the people that code, it is just a job, the decisions on what the company does which possibly could have ethical or moral connotations, is already done at management levels, not at a coding level.
Hell, in cases, the coder may not even know what the whole program does, they only code parts of it per specs given to them, maybe only a module, so they don't even know what the whole program does....no ethics or morals there.
But I posit...coding itself has not ethics or morality....decision making at management level on what a company does may have those type questions...but a person decides if they want to work for a company or not...that's not ethics or morals at the level of coding, but on the level of what type employment you seek or hold.
Personally, if it ain't illegal, and they pay me enough, I"m good to go with just about anything.
Not every programming job is either technically or ethically complex.
I"m still trying to wrap my head around the tern "ethically" and coding/programming in the same sentence...?!?!
I mean you code for 1 or 2 reasons:
1. Interest/Fun
2. You get paid for it.
WTF does "ethically" come into play here?
Geez, I see more and more people try to interject morals or ethics into things that have never had that connotation before. I see people equate paying taxes to morality....really?
And now, you have supreme ethical decisions to make before writing a piece of code? Seriously? How does this apply.
I mean, most things in your life, your fun, how you act, making a living, etc...do not warrant great time and deep thinking devoted to the morality of it, your ethics behind the decisions, and how it affect mankind....it is simply LIFE.
It's been done before for ages, and it didn't need to be analyzed....just do it for goodness sakes....
Starship Troopers is a major disappointment, but it was intended to be Starship Troopers from Heinlein from very early on - I followed its development, it wasnt shot or even pitched as a different film.
People have been in living in New Orleans for centuries without AC.
And I honestly do not know HOW they did it....
I mean, I see old images of people in days before AC, wearing a LOT of clothes...heavy clothes and I just don't know how they'd that, much less do physical labor that way.
I wonder if it was cooler then or what...? Where they just that much tougher in that they didn't know it could be 'cooler'?
Nothing wrong with that. It's a matter of the definition of close. I don't understand the concept of "non-personal friend" though. I probably have 3 close friends, and by close I mean I'm going to do whatever it takes to help them out and I know they're going to do the same for me. Then there's a few other people that are welcome to stay home if they need a place for any reason, and I would give them keys. But they are level below the former.
Right now I can readily think of 9-10 people I put in the category of very close, personal friends that I would do whatever it takes to help them....
These are friends that I consider siblings really....
The situation reminds me very much of the more extreme environmentalists in the 60s, and we survived that and even came out of it with a much cleaner country.
I dunno..I think it is more than one more or less "single issue" that you recount here....
I think it is fundamental shifting in US values and thinking that has generally been common across the country till only a very few decades, and really exposing on the scene in recent years.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if it is your businesses..then sure, you decide...what's wrong with that?
And those 9 employees? They wouldn't have had jobs there to begin with, if the owner hadn't invested and started the company.
He might be more generous, but that's his choice...not yours, not mine, not the workers...not the government.
I see nothing wrong with this....
Well, at some point then, you have to just say fuck'em...I mean at some point, you have to make people be adults, and live with and deal with the consequences of their choices.
A persons job is worth exactly what someone will pay for it.
I don't myself see athletes that make multi-millions a year being worth it, really, but then again, who am I to judge?
Who are you to judge?
Who shall we place in power to place judgement on a persons worth?
Who can live on a measly $1K a month?
Ok, one might could barely 'survive' on $1K a month...living below starving college student level of life....but really, that's not much living, that is just barely getting by at best, if at all.
People, when it matters *will* pay for quality.
And at some point you may have to tell yourself a company that does that...."is not my customer", and move on to greener pastures.
And what markets, exactly are those....?
The Feds have already made it hard enough to be a 1099 contractor, that it is harder and harder to find people or companies that are willing to let your work 1099 with them, for fear someone will try to sue them later (ala MS) or the govt will try to reclassify you, even if you are legit.
I've never seen an industry really even enthusiastically try to work on a 1099 basis.
That simply is NOT true...you only hear about gig workers (aka 1099 contractors) in the news recently for things like uber...but for MANY years, there is a majority of contract workers that make incredibly good livings. You have to put on your big boy pants and know how to negotiate your bill rate so that you can pay your own insurance, invest in your own retirement, and take vacations, etc....even quit working for a few months out of the year.
Sadly, this is the type of move to lump in "real" contractors with this new low bill rate gig worker...and ruin the party for everyone.
If you are working uber, you have to understand, at that bill rate, it is NOT a means of primary income...it is a SIDE gig...extra money on the side.
But don't do shit like this that can kill legitimate 1099 contract workers that DO know how to make a very good living at it, and enjoy the independence of working for yourself, you own hours, your own call on benefits, investments and the write offs on taxes you get.
If this is actually true...I never never met a person as altruistic as yourself.
It's a free country, live like you wanna live, but to me, I view work in a much more mercenary fashion. I want to get paid as much as possible, period...if they have me peeling potatoes for $100K+ a year, I'm happy to do it, and hope then never find anyone willing to do it cheaper.
The *only* reason i work..is to make enough money to allow me to live the lifestyle that makes me happy. If I won the lottery tomorrow, I dunno if I'd even bother telling them I wasn't coming back....ok maybe I would, I'm not that cold...but I certainly would never "work" again.
There already IS benefits 1099 contractors can take with them from job to job (gig to gig)...it's called learning to negotiate your bill rate so that you can pay (and be free to choose) your own health insurance, set up a nice HSA to sock away pre-tax money for routine medical needs, to pick and choose your own retirement, set up a SEP, sock away and invest your money as you wish...no, we can't have the vast majority of contractors be depended upon to put on their "big boy" pants and make their own choices in life, negotiate their gigs, have the freedom to move from job to job and be able to write of actual expenses of doing business (mileage, etc).
No...we throw the baby out with the bathwater, on something that has worked for a LONG time, now that there are some new twists on it out there.
No one holds a fucking gun to your head to work 1099. You have to either be a responsible (and talented enough to be in demand) adult, and know what jobs to take and how to negotiate, do paperwork and budget to be a contractor, OR...have it be something part time to add money to your regular "day job".
I"m sorry, but being an uber driver has never been about making a living at it full time, it is a part time job to make some side money.
But, here we go, likely ruining people that do "real" 1099 contracting, and balance the risks vs the rewards of this form of employment, and independence.
If you are a real 1099 contractor, you already budget your bill rate to pay you own benefits and vacation/sick time...and it is portable wherever you wish to work next....it already works without the Feds intruding even more into our work lives.
This was my first thought too...
They're trying to drive the death knell into the 1099 contract circuit, and make everyone a fucking wage slave.....
So much for giving people like myself, a choice....and be independent.
(as long as it is legal).
When you say "dodge taxes", you are implying that they are doing something illegal not paying taxes.
If that were the case, then I'd think they'd be under many a lawsuit.
If they are following the law to keep their money from the tax man (like any sane person or company would do)....then there's not problem.
If you don't like the tax laws, change them...but don't blame an entity from saving as much as legally possible via the current tax laws.
I'm guessing that large businesses could get in on this too? If not now, just wait....
And, we've seen how well just take down notices work....often not even justified, but still...the party acted upon is now guilty till proven innocent.
What constitutes a valid victimization? Telling someone you don't like them? They small bad? That allows them to infiltrate your computer, destroy information...etc?
This sounds like a real pandora's box being opened here.
Err....."unwanted flowers"? I mean, you know those flowers are the parts of the tomato plants that turn INTO tomato fruits, eh???
If they get rid of the flowers in addition to the excess branches...you'll just have leaves left....no tomatoes.
Yeah..that's going to be interesting...as that LA didn't do RealID drivers licenses.
I think a couple of other states refused to do that too...was it NH maybe one of them?
anyway, will be interesting to see if they really don't let residents from states with no RealID on planes or not...
I guess it means the US finally has a "national ID".
*sigh*
Sadly, you may be right that sooner rather than later we'll be hearing "papers please" just to even drive between states. What has happened to my country....?
Yeah..we're really gonna miss those guys....
[rolls eyes]
But frankly, I have no real inclination to leave the US to visit internationally either.
I mean, I used to like to go to mexico, Cabo was one of my favorite places, but with all the drug crime down there, I have no inclination to go anywhere in MX anymore.
I might do the caribbean, and even Cuba if they finally open it up more freely.
But the US is so large and so diverse in its land and environments, I really don't have that much a reason to need to leave the country. I have a lot to explore here.
That and I"m not really thrilled about the hassle of having to go get a passport.
I've never given google my phone number before...they ask but I never give them one. I'm sure this is a stupid question, but when I set up a gmail account on the mail app on my phone, does that some how give them my phone number?
I would guess that MOST of the complaints are of the "Seriously?" type as listed in the article:
I mean really....there *are* real instances of harassment out there, but you have so many people seeing and reporting crap that just isn't worth it and not a real problem and it muddies the water for seeing the few *real* incidents that happen out there, are serious and need to be addressed.
Is this the snowflakes entering the real world, finding out everyone doesn't get a trophy, doesn't have to give a shit about their 'self esteem', only expecting you to get your job done and do what your told and on time.....and seeing and reporting crap that no one in past generations saw as a problem but just the way life is....?
I was answering under the assumption of legal activity, not things that are codified as criminal by law.
That would just be part of the job working at Google or FB.
Gathering data is not inherently a bad thing as you seem to allude.
What is done with it, is another thing, but that's a human/business decision....not "coding ethics".
For the people that code, it is just a job, the decisions on what the company does which possibly could have ethical or moral connotations, is already done at management levels, not at a coding level.
Hell, in cases, the coder may not even know what the whole program does, they only code parts of it per specs given to them, maybe only a module, so they don't even know what the whole program does....no ethics or morals there.
But I posit...coding itself has not ethics or morality....decision making at management level on what a company does may have those type questions...but a person decides if they want to work for a company or not...that's not ethics or morals at the level of coding, but on the level of what type employment you seek or hold.
Personally, if it ain't illegal, and they pay me enough, I"m good to go with just about anything.
But, hey, whatever floats your boat.
I"m still trying to wrap my head around the tern "ethically" and coding/programming in the same sentence...?!?!
I mean you code for 1 or 2 reasons:
1. Interest/Fun
2. You get paid for it.
WTF does "ethically" come into play here?
Geez, I see more and more people try to interject morals or ethics into things that have never had that connotation before. I see people equate paying taxes to morality....really?
And now, you have supreme ethical decisions to make before writing a piece of code? Seriously? How does this apply.
I mean, most things in your life, your fun, how you act, making a living, etc...do not warrant great time and deep thinking devoted to the morality of it, your ethics behind the decisions, and how it affect mankind....it is simply LIFE.
It's been done before for ages, and it didn't need to be analyzed....just do it for goodness sakes....
I prefer Starship Trooper by Yes.....
What....Mexican and Chinese....????
And I honestly do not know HOW they did it....
I mean, I see old images of people in days before AC, wearing a LOT of clothes...heavy clothes and I just don't know how they'd that, much less do physical labor that way.
I wonder if it was cooler then or what...? Where they just that much tougher in that they didn't know it could be 'cooler'?
Right now I can readily think of 9-10 people I put in the category of very close, personal friends that I would do whatever it takes to help them....
These are friends that I consider siblings really....
I dunno..I think it is more than one more or less "single issue" that you recount here....
I think it is fundamental shifting in US values and thinking that has generally been common across the country till only a very few decades, and really exposing on the scene in recent years.