...there is one other element in here you and many others seem to disregard. An "in-kind" agreement 99.999% of the time results in a tax-write off. If he is so loudly trumpeting this $300k figure, which most on here agree is pretty astromonical, you better believe what he's really dealing with is a tax audit. The three year timeframe hints at this. That the police came in to retrieve what they felt was their property, the item given "in kind" and as such WAS their property, that being the content of the website that this schmuck was holding for ransom, is just the cherry on the top. This guy is in deep shit and he's trying to make the figures look more substantiated than they are.
116,666 hits per day for the MACOMB COUNTY SHERIFF? Macomb county has 700,000 people. He's stating that he spent $300,000 in "time, resources and money." It sounds like he is claiming that he spent 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year for three years--on one website, yet he does not go on to claim that he was developing anything but "a website." I would buy his argument if it was framed in "I built them web-based applications for accounting, HRIS, facilities management etc." He hasn't said anything even remotely approaching that. By focusing on "3.5 million hits per month" -- even on his own self-advocacy site -- he's implying rather directly that the real cost was NOT his time, but his bandwidth. Ok, at 50k per hit, that's 5.8GB per day, 241MB per hour, 4MB per minute, 67KB/s or 537Kb/s. Now, hosting providers generally will give 500GB/month for about $130--including all of the hardware. So, over 33 months, that's $4,290.
Now, that leaves $295,710 or about $8,960 per month, which comes out to $107,530 per year. The kicker here if you read the exact statement on his offer to provide the service for free:
"Richard, a former reserve deputy in the sheriff's marine division, more than three years ago offered to provide the Web site at no cost to the county as an in-kind contribution. Hackel, who enthusiastically supported it, said Richard agreed to operate it in exchange for publicity for his company."
"IN-KIND" means "TAX WRITE-OFF." Since he was doing this under the auspices of a business and the in-kind agreement was for publicity, you bet your ass this guy has claimed a $107,530 write-off each year for this.
I have no doubt that he has gotten a friendly call from the IRS and has been playing K.Y.A. with that write-off. That he can no longer afford to provide the service for free is probably more an indication that his write-offs related to that account were suspiciously large compared to his total revenue and he can no longer afford to evade his tax bill and the mounting penalties, not the $130 per month this site was costing him.
The extortion charge is no doubt related to this little snipped:
"Simmons said the Web site included a disclaimer that said it was owned by Running Wolf Inc."
Now, that's just crass. He's talking about "People for the Ethical Treatment of Web Designers" and he pulls an "I own all of your content" bait and switch. Guess what, buddy, if you own it all, you didn't give shit "in-kind." The fact that you chose to retain ownership of something you can't sell to anyone but the original "customer" is your own damn fault.
Remeber when phones had lines? Did anyone squack that it was a massive invasion of privacy that it was possible to trace the call or witness you standing there at the booth?
Geezuz. It's not like the Swiss sat down in a room and said, hey, in 2002 it will be reaaly useful to the Americans if we do this. Now, in 2004, they're not going to sit down and say, "right, mission accomplished, shut it down."..and anyone who complains about "showing their papers" while travelling clearly hasn't done much of it anyway. If you can't rent a fscking Toyota without ID, why the hell do you think you should board a 747 without it?
Those who desire a total lack of accoutability must live with a total lack of trust.
Preferably, people wouldn't be snooping around examining every conceivable utterance to begin with. However, if they are trying to build a profile, it is far less threatening to know that the profile is being based on reasonably sound science and not some random piece of tripe off some relatively anonymous blog. If you have to start censoring every word that comes out of your mouth as if you are running for President in order to be a mundance cubicle dweller, yes, that is very chilling.
A relatively objective evaluation of what most of us agree passes as "sanity" is nowhere near as upsetting. However, given the choice between a paranoid MBA or a psychologist establishing my mental fitness, I'll take the latter any day not least because then there is the hope that said MBA will also be subject to the same screening.
Actually recommending that people be screened based on online personas that are not only dissociated from the company the person is working for but also the person's real-world identity is rather chilling. You might as well bug your employee's houses to determine if they are privately thrashing on their co-workers at home. That's a perfectly healthy human thing to do that I doubt you could find many psychologists to contradict.
The forum for anonymous venting that places like/. provide probably makes people more tolerant and tolerable in environments where they must squelch their reactions. If there is no reasonable connection to their employment, piercing that anonymity is playing spymaster, not business manager. You might as well start demanding copies of all personal email. It's a frightfully irresponsible suggestion.
Just because someone is risk-averse does not mean their unfounded means of determining risk are either justified or rational. Outright encouraging the invasive use of completely baseless indicators of risk is reprehensible. If someone is that freaked out about the personalities of their potential employees, they should get a qualified psychologist to provide an educated analysis and profile. I have a position coming up that will require exactly that for _very_ justified security reasons. It's perfectly appropriate in that context, so I have no reservations. If it was some schmuck wanting me to code an address book, I'd laugh and walk out. If someone even hinted that they were doing some clandestine hack job of a profile on me like digging up my/. posts, I wouldn't remotely consider working for them for any amount of money.
The people that are screaming about the sky falling clearly cannot read, or choose not to, have no concept of how horrendously expensive it is to design, build and maintain large database collections, and have no concept of how many "collections of facts" are out there that are already protected because they take more tangible physical forms, are prohibitively expensive to copy, or impossible to access without signing tediously lengthy contracts, so people just buy access to them or go to a library that has purchased access to them.
By insisting that you should have no right to protect your particular system of organizing a collection, the detractors are, knowingly or not, pushing to destroy, hinder the creation of, or make the access to increasingly more difficult, a huge amount of useful products. This is a very good bill and it covers all the caveats people think it does not.
If only they would read and comprehend it this argument would be over.
Sure, but this has been going on for years. You're more than welcome to submit your site again and again for spidering for free, within a reasonable time period. Considering the size of the internet, it is perfectly reasonable to say, "hey, if your content is so dynamic and so changing and so important that once a month isn't enough, you can pay for the service." Since processor time and bandwidth aren't free, it makes perfect sense that those who want more frequent spidering should kick back a few bucks to cover the costs directly associated with the benefit they derive. If you don't agree, you can use DMOZ, which will take weeks to months to return results. That's what free gets you and for most purposes, that's fine. So what if CNN gets spidered ever hour and your homepage gets hit every other month? Will the world be that much for the worse?
...sort of like when you pay the postal service a couple extra bucks to speed up delivery or the newspaper company to give you a more prominent placement on the page? Perhaps it's more akin to a telephone book where you have the option of taking the free record or paying up for something more prominent.
Oh, that's all SO wrong and unheard of. One begins to wonder if certain voices ever occupied this earth prior to the internet. Sheesh. The entire economy is based on the principle of bakhsheesh and France is certainly no exception--paying more to sit down for an espresso than to stand. Talk about freaking bakhsheesh, man...
All currency is just an artificial means of making it easier to transact the mundane activities of life without having to barter for everything. You are more than welcome to exchange all of your paper money for any other store of value you want or never do the reverse. It's not the government behind this, it's the entire population as the grocery store doesn't want to exchange your live chickens for their dead ones.
What's truly amusing is the innumerable bartering communities that pop up on a continuous basis who invariably come up with a brand-new revolutionary means of efficient bartering through some proprietary "barter note" system. Duh, that's the basis of all currency. It doesn't matter if you use sea shells, giant concrete wheels or chickens as your store of value. It's all "money."
Read my post again. Section 331 pertained to coins, which I referenced in the context of, obviously, coins. Section 333 deals with notes. I wasn't about to make a damned graduate thesis out of the issue, but if you (yes, you, I'm not going to put all the references here) look up the relevant US Code, you'll find that the criteria that render a bill "unfit for re-issue" are actually pretty permissive. The examples I gave, that happened to be fraudulent, would meet those criteria. Now, regardless, fraud is fraud is fraud and all of it is illegal regardless of what the law says about defacing currency. You have to do a really good job of severely fscking up the notes in order for it to become a federal crime. Simply writing "George Bush is a big fat idiot" on your $20 note is NOT illegal as it does nothing to prevent that note from being re-issued.
Note the use of the words FRAUDULENTLY and REISSUED, that is to say, the treasury will not be able to replace the bill. Slightly fscking up the currency is not likely to be sufficient to land you in federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison unless by some monumental feat of idiocy you were trying to mutilate a $20 into something passing as a $100 as when people try to turn $20 into $60 by cutting off the corners and taping them to $1s. THAT is the kind of "mutilation" the law speaks of. Flattening a penny is not illegal. Melting it into something resembling a quarter, on the other hand, is quite definitely illegal.
US Code Title 18, Part I, Chapter 17
Section 331 Whoever fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates, impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales, or lightens any of the coins coined at the mints of the United States, or any foreign coins which are by law made current or are in actual use or circulation as money within the United States; or
Whoever fraudulently possesses, passes, utters, publishes, or sells, or attempts to pass, utter, publish, or sell, or brings into the United States, any such coin, knowing the same to be altered, defaced, mutilated, impaired, diminished, falsified, scaled, or lightened -
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both
Section 333
Whoever mutilates, cuts, defaces, disfigures, or perforates, or unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, or Federal Reserve bank, or the Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt unfit to be reissued, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
So Star Wars I/II should be viewed only as inseperable parts of an glorious yet unfinished hexad despite the fact that they're complete pieces of crap with writing and acting that would fail high school drama?
If a 3 1/2 hour movie can't be viewed as a single work, methinks something is wrong...
Of course, how many Fantasy live action flicks has hollywood (or any other location) put out? Since the capitalized form of the term has such a narrow meaning and considering how many nominations there are for dramatic movies as a function of the total number of releases, it's more amazing that one has reached Oscar muster yet than that there has been an absence.
Seriously, did anyone expect the likes of Neverending Story, Willow, Legend or Labyrinth to get Best Picture? I mean, let's face it, the Fantasy genre of motion pictures hasn't exactly been overflowing with monumental feats of film-making and many of the decent examples were up against some pretty hefty competition from drama and comedy when Oscar time came.
Both of the previous LotR installments WERE nominated, but again, they were up against some heavy competition. Moulin Rouge, A Beautiful Mind, and Gosford Park in 2001, and Chicago in 2002. This year, the competition wasn't exactly remarkable and, voila, LotR won.
If you look at the history of the minimum wage and adjust the historical figures for inflation, you will quickly understand why we should (or, IMO, must) continue to raise it. In 1938, when the minimum wage was instituted, it was $0.25 per hour, which is equal to $3.28 today. The reason we periodically increase the minimum wage is purely to keep pace with inflation. Before you jump up and say, hey, we're far ahead of $3.28, well, that was only nine years after the Great Depression and there was a little thing called "WWII" that happened just after that, so by 1950 it had tripled to $0.75 and by 1956 it was raised to $1.00 per hour. That $1.00 per hour is equivalent to $6.81 today. Incidentally, teenagers can be paid less than minimum wage. The minimum wage is NOT "the teenager wage." In fact, over 70% of minimum wage earners are over 20, with the vast majority of those being over 25.
The notion that businesses cannot pay more than some arbitrary point on the minimum wage history is ridiculous. Minimum wage and near-minimum wage, that is sub-20k per year, accounts for only four percent of the total salary and wages--but it accounts for 18% of the workforce.
A ten percent increase in the minimum wage would result in less than a half percent increase in total salaries and wages. If that puts a business out of business, there are greater issues than the minimum wage behind that failure. Even the current OMB, in an administration quite hostile to raising the minimum wage, postulates that such a 10% increase would have less than a 1% upward effect on the natural rate of unemployment. In fact, in the last 40 years, despite numerous adjustments, that rate has remained essentially flat.
Given resources, the system will sort itself out or die.
That, in a nutshell, is the entire point. It is not desirable to just let the system die. Even a free-marketeer like Hayek conceeds that you'd have to be a fool to not have central control of the money supply. Milton Friedman may have come up with such stinging soundbytes like "the minimum wage is the most anti-black law on the books," but as you point out, some statements are more about politics than economics and the obvious implication is that blacks will (or should) be paid less than whites on a slippery slope down to a reinstitution of slavery. On the contrary, Hayek, a fellow monetarist, believed quite strongly in minimum standards of income, despite otherwise being one of the most stalwart defenders of the free market.
For all the criticism of minimum wage laws, take a look at places without them. Sure, people have work, but go spend a week in Burma working in a Disney sweatshop at $192 per year and come back and let us all know how wonderful abolishing the minimum wage laws would be.
No, I get it and I've spent quite some time studying economics in order to "get it."
The problem is sustainability. You cannot sustain an economy where people are paid less than it costs to survive. The result is usually revolution. There's more at stake here than whether or not you spend $1.50 or $5.00 on your hamburger. If you can't see that, there's no argument that will convince you.
If a person worked 65 hours a week at $3 per hour, they'd still be homeless a year later. The reason there is a minimum wage is to ensure that you are paid at least enough to feed, clothe and house yourself. $20 per week? For full time? That's fifty cents per hour. That's not even a McDonald's value meal by the end of the day. Do you honestly think that if we got rid of the minimum wage that suddenly the cost of the necessities of life would go down or that a homeless person who can panhandle $20 per day would work for eight hours to receive less than the price of a hamburger? Please.
There are 25 million Americans are working full time for at or near minimum wage. If you eliminated their wages entirely, it would reduce the wage expenses of the country by 267 billion. That's if they were SLAVES. Total salaries and wages in the United States are roughly 6.5 trillion. Would you institute slavery to get a four percent discount at Taco Bell? No? Then, would you make someone work 80 hours a week just to be able to afford food and shelter so you could get a two percent discount on your McValue meal? 60 hours so you could get one percent? Where do you draw the line?
It IS in the constitution, Article VI to be exact:
"This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."
The definition of "intangible" is "incapable of being realized or defined."
If you are limiting the argument to those "ideas" that cannot be realized or defined, then really, we're not talking about the things people apply patents and copyrights to. So, no, having the commercial rights to mere notions is wrong. You can't buy or sell, directly, "happiness." To imply that all ideas are as intangible as "happiness" is just asinine as, really, every creation is at some point nothing more than an idea.
If you doubt that, go try to get the blueprints for a building from your local city planning department. They won't give them to you. Why? Not because of some security concern, but because the "idea" of that building belongs to someone else. Pretty fscking simple concept.
Copyright IS a property right. In case you haven't done your homework on international law, perhaps you should visit wipo.org.
Oh, my mistake, Americans have neither knowledge nor respect for international law despite the fact that, by American law, all treaties become part of US law once ratified and WIPO HAS been ratified.
Slashdot Mirror
...there is one other element in here you and many others seem to disregard. An "in-kind" agreement 99.999% of the time results in a tax-write off. If he is so loudly trumpeting this $300k figure, which most on here agree is pretty astromonical, you better believe what he's really dealing with is a tax audit. The three year timeframe hints at this. That the police came in to retrieve what they felt was their property, the item given "in kind" and as such WAS their property, that being the content of the website that this schmuck was holding for ransom, is just the cherry on the top. This guy is in deep shit and he's trying to make the figures look more substantiated than they are.
116,666 hits per day for the MACOMB COUNTY SHERIFF? Macomb county has 700,000 people. He's stating that he spent $300,000 in "time, resources and money." It sounds like he is claiming that he spent 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year for three years--on one website, yet he does not go on to claim that he was developing anything but "a website." I would buy his argument if it was framed in "I built them web-based applications for accounting, HRIS, facilities management etc." He hasn't said anything even remotely approaching that. By focusing on "3.5 million hits per month" -- even on his own self-advocacy site -- he's implying rather directly that the real cost was NOT his time, but his bandwidth. Ok, at 50k per hit, that's 5.8GB per day, 241MB per hour, 4MB per minute, 67KB/s or 537Kb/s. Now, hosting providers generally will give 500GB/month for about $130--including all of the hardware. So, over 33 months, that's $4,290.
Now, that leaves $295,710 or about $8,960 per month, which comes out to $107,530 per year. The kicker here if you read the exact statement on his offer to provide the service for free:
"Richard, a former reserve deputy in the sheriff's marine division, more than three years ago offered to provide the Web site at no cost to the county as an in-kind contribution. Hackel, who enthusiastically supported it, said Richard agreed to operate it in exchange for publicity for his company."
"IN-KIND" means "TAX WRITE-OFF." Since he was doing this under the auspices of a business and the in-kind agreement was for publicity, you bet your ass this guy has claimed a $107,530 write-off each year for this.
I have no doubt that he has gotten a friendly call from the IRS and has been playing K.Y.A. with that write-off. That he can no longer afford to provide the service for free is probably more an indication that his write-offs related to that account were suspiciously large compared to his total revenue and he can no longer afford to evade his tax bill and the mounting penalties, not the $130 per month this site was costing him.
The extortion charge is no doubt related to this little snipped:
"Simmons said the Web site included a disclaimer that said it was owned by Running Wolf Inc."
Now, that's just crass. He's talking about "People for the Ethical Treatment of Web Designers" and he pulls an "I own all of your content" bait and switch. Guess what, buddy, if you own it all, you didn't give shit "in-kind." The fact that you chose to retain ownership of something you can't sell to anyone but the original "customer" is your own damn fault.
All of it adds up to this guy is a sleazeball.
Remeber when phones had lines? Did anyone squack that it was a massive invasion of privacy that it was possible to trace the call or witness you standing there at the booth?
..and anyone who complains about "showing their papers" while travelling clearly hasn't done much of it anyway. If you can't rent a fscking Toyota without ID, why the hell do you think you should board a 747 without it?
Geezuz. It's not like the Swiss sat down in a room and said, hey, in 2002 it will be reaaly useful to the Americans if we do this. Now, in 2004, they're not going to sit down and say, "right, mission accomplished, shut it down."
Those who desire a total lack of accoutability must live with a total lack of trust.
BAH.
Preferably, people wouldn't be snooping around examining every conceivable utterance to begin with. However, if they are trying to build a profile, it is far less threatening to know that the profile is being based on reasonably sound science and not some random piece of tripe off some relatively anonymous blog. If you have to start censoring every word that comes out of your mouth as if you are running for President in order to be a mundance cubicle dweller, yes, that is very chilling.
A relatively objective evaluation of what most of us agree passes as "sanity" is nowhere near as upsetting. However, given the choice between a paranoid MBA or a psychologist establishing my mental fitness, I'll take the latter any day not least because then there is the hope that said MBA will also be subject to the same screening.
Actually recommending that people be screened based on online personas that are not only dissociated from the company the person is working for but also the person's real-world identity is rather chilling. You might as well bug your employee's houses to determine if they are privately thrashing on their co-workers at home. That's a perfectly healthy human thing to do that I doubt you could find many psychologists to contradict.
/. provide probably makes people more tolerant and tolerable in environments where they must squelch their reactions. If there is no reasonable connection to their employment, piercing that anonymity is playing spymaster, not business manager. You might as well start demanding copies of all personal email. It's a frightfully irresponsible suggestion.
/. posts, I wouldn't remotely consider working for them for any amount of money.
The forum for anonymous venting that places like
Just because someone is risk-averse does not mean their unfounded means of determining risk are either justified or rational. Outright encouraging the invasive use of completely baseless indicators of risk is reprehensible. If someone is that freaked out about the personalities of their potential employees, they should get a qualified psychologist to provide an educated analysis and profile. I have a position coming up that will require exactly that for _very_ justified security reasons. It's perfectly appropriate in that context, so I have no reservations. If it was some schmuck wanting me to code an address book, I'd laugh and walk out. If someone even hinted that they were doing some clandestine hack job of a profile on me like digging up my
The people that are screaming about the sky falling clearly cannot read, or choose not to, have no concept of how horrendously expensive it is to design, build and maintain large database collections, and have no concept of how many "collections of facts" are out there that are already protected because they take more tangible physical forms, are prohibitively expensive to copy, or impossible to access without signing tediously lengthy contracts, so people just buy access to them or go to a library that has purchased access to them.
By insisting that you should have no right to protect your particular system of organizing a collection, the detractors are, knowingly or not, pushing to destroy, hinder the creation of, or make the access to increasingly more difficult, a huge amount of useful products. This is a very good bill and it covers all the caveats people think it does not.
If only they would read and comprehend it this argument would be over.
...and just then Robert de Niro flew in on a hire-wire with Bob Hoskins in chase demanding that you sign a twenty-seven-b-stroke-six.
Sure, but this has been going on for years. You're more than welcome to submit your site again and again for spidering for free, within a reasonable time period. Considering the size of the internet, it is perfectly reasonable to say, "hey, if your content is so dynamic and so changing and so important that once a month isn't enough, you can pay for the service." Since processor time and bandwidth aren't free, it makes perfect sense that those who want more frequent spidering should kick back a few bucks to cover the costs directly associated with the benefit they derive. If you don't agree, you can use DMOZ, which will take weeks to months to return results. That's what free gets you and for most purposes, that's fine. So what if CNN gets spidered ever hour and your homepage gets hit every other month? Will the world be that much for the worse?
...sort of like when you pay the postal service a couple extra bucks to speed up delivery or the newspaper company to give you a more prominent placement on the page? Perhaps it's more akin to a telephone book where you have the option of taking the free record or paying up for something more prominent.
Oh, that's all SO wrong and unheard of. One begins to wonder if certain voices ever occupied this earth prior to the internet. Sheesh. The entire economy is based on the principle of bakhsheesh and France is certainly no exception--paying more to sit down for an espresso than to stand. Talk about freaking bakhsheesh, man...
The posting is also misleading. "Your rights online?" WTF? You have a RIGHT to equitable search engine placement?
Where the hell is that written?
Actually, not quite.
All currency is just an artificial means of making it easier to transact the mundane activities of life without having to barter for everything. You are more than welcome to exchange all of your paper money for any other store of value you want or never do the reverse. It's not the government behind this, it's the entire population as the grocery store doesn't want to exchange your live chickens for their dead ones.
What's truly amusing is the innumerable bartering communities that pop up on a continuous basis who invariably come up with a brand-new revolutionary means of efficient bartering through some proprietary "barter note" system. Duh, that's the basis of all currency. It doesn't matter if you use sea shells, giant concrete wheels or chickens as your store of value. It's all "money."
No conspiracy here...
Duh.
Read my post again. Section 331 pertained to coins, which I referenced in the context of, obviously, coins. Section 333 deals with notes. I wasn't about to make a damned graduate thesis out of the issue, but if you (yes, you, I'm not going to put all the references here) look up the relevant US Code, you'll find that the criteria that render a bill "unfit for re-issue" are actually pretty permissive. The examples I gave, that happened to be fraudulent, would meet those criteria. Now, regardless, fraud is fraud is fraud and all of it is illegal regardless of what the law says about defacing currency. You have to do a really good job of severely fscking up the notes in order for it to become a federal crime. Simply writing "George Bush is a big fat idiot" on your $20 note is NOT illegal as it does nothing to prevent that note from being re-issued.
Christ, everyone is a damned contrarian.
Note the use of the words FRAUDULENTLY and REISSUED, that is to say, the treasury will not be able to replace the bill. Slightly fscking up the currency is not likely to be sufficient to land you in federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison unless by some monumental feat of idiocy you were trying to mutilate a $20 into something passing as a $100 as when people try to turn $20 into $60 by cutting off the corners and taping them to $1s. THAT is the kind of "mutilation" the law speaks of. Flattening a penny is not illegal. Melting it into something resembling a quarter, on the other hand, is quite definitely illegal.
US Code Title 18, Part I, Chapter 17
Section 331
Whoever fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates, impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales, or lightens any of the coins coined at the mints of the United States, or any foreign coins which are by law made current or are in actual use or circulation as money within the United States; or
Whoever fraudulently possesses, passes, utters, publishes, or sells, or attempts to pass, utter, publish, or sell, or brings into the United States, any such coin, knowing the same to be altered, defaced, mutilated, impaired, diminished, falsified, scaled, or lightened -
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both
Section 333
Whoever mutilates, cuts, defaces, disfigures, or perforates, or unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, or Federal Reserve bank, or the Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt unfit to be reissued, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
...and that's the problem. If "it sucks" if you haven't read the book, then "it sucks" as a film.
So Star Wars I/II should be viewed only as inseperable parts of an glorious yet unfinished hexad despite the fact that they're complete pieces of crap with writing and acting that would fail high school drama?
If a 3 1/2 hour movie can't be viewed as a single work, methinks something is wrong...
Of course, how many Fantasy live action flicks has hollywood (or any other location) put out? Since the capitalized form of the term has such a narrow meaning and considering how many nominations there are for dramatic movies as a function of the total number of releases, it's more amazing that one has reached Oscar muster yet than that there has been an absence.
Seriously, did anyone expect the likes of Neverending Story, Willow, Legend or Labyrinth to get Best Picture? I mean, let's face it, the Fantasy genre of motion pictures hasn't exactly been overflowing with monumental feats of film-making and many of the decent examples were up against some pretty hefty competition from drama and comedy when Oscar time came.
Both of the previous LotR installments WERE nominated, but again, they were up against some heavy competition. Moulin Rouge, A Beautiful Mind, and Gosford Park in 2001, and Chicago in 2002. This year, the competition wasn't exactly remarkable and, voila, LotR won.
If you look at the history of the minimum wage and adjust the historical figures for inflation, you will quickly understand why we should (or, IMO, must) continue to raise it. In 1938, when the minimum wage was instituted, it was $0.25 per hour, which is equal to $3.28 today. The reason we periodically increase the minimum wage is purely to keep pace with inflation. Before you jump up and say, hey, we're far ahead of $3.28, well, that was only nine years after the Great Depression and there was a little thing called "WWII" that happened just after that, so by 1950 it had tripled to $0.75 and by 1956 it was raised to $1.00 per hour. That $1.00 per hour is equivalent to $6.81 today. Incidentally, teenagers can be paid less than minimum wage. The minimum wage is NOT "the teenager wage." In fact, over 70% of minimum wage earners are over 20, with the vast majority of those being over 25.
h tm
l
The notion that businesses cannot pay more than some arbitrary point on the minimum wage history is ridiculous. Minimum wage and near-minimum wage, that is sub-20k per year, accounts for only four percent of the total salary and wages--but it accounts for 18% of the workforce.
A ten percent increase in the minimum wage would result in less than a half percent increase in total salaries and wages. If that puts a business out of business, there are greater issues than the minimum wage behind that failure. Even the current OMB, in an administration quite hostile to raising the minimum wage, postulates that such a 10% increase would have less than a 1% upward effect on the natural rate of unemployment. In fact, in the last 40 years, despite numerous adjustments, that rate has remained essentially flat.
Minimum wage history:
http://www.labor.gov/esa/minwage/chart.
The inflation calculator
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.p
Given resources, the system will sort itself out or die.
That, in a nutshell, is the entire point. It is not desirable to just let the system die. Even a free-marketeer like Hayek conceeds that you'd have to be a fool to not have central control of the money supply. Milton Friedman may have come up with such stinging soundbytes like "the minimum wage is the most anti-black law on the books," but as you point out, some statements are more about politics than economics and the obvious implication is that blacks will (or should) be paid less than whites on a slippery slope down to a reinstitution of slavery. On the contrary, Hayek, a fellow monetarist, believed quite strongly in minimum standards of income, despite otherwise being one of the most stalwart defenders of the free market.
For all the criticism of minimum wage laws, take a look at places without them. Sure, people have work, but go spend a week in Burma working in a Disney sweatshop at $192 per year and come back and let us all know how wonderful abolishing the minimum wage laws would be.
No, I get it and I've spent quite some time studying economics in order to "get it."
The problem is sustainability. You cannot sustain an economy where people are paid less than it costs to survive. The result is usually revolution. There's more at stake here than whether or not you spend $1.50 or $5.00 on your hamburger. If you can't see that, there's no argument that will convince you.
If a person worked 65 hours a week at $3 per hour, they'd still be homeless a year later. The reason there is a minimum wage is to ensure that you are paid at least enough to feed, clothe and house yourself. $20 per week? For full time? That's fifty cents per hour. That's not even a McDonald's value meal by the end of the day. Do you honestly think that if we got rid of the minimum wage that suddenly the cost of the necessities of life would go down or that a homeless person who can panhandle $20 per day would work for eight hours to receive less than the price of a hamburger? Please.
There are 25 million Americans are working full time for at or near minimum wage. If you eliminated their wages entirely, it would reduce the wage expenses of the country by 267 billion. That's if they were SLAVES. Total salaries and wages in the United States are roughly 6.5 trillion. Would you institute slavery to get a four percent discount at Taco Bell? No? Then, would you make someone work 80 hours a week just to be able to afford food and shelter so you could get a two percent discount on your McValue meal? 60 hours so you could get one percent? Where do you draw the line?
It IS in the constitution, Article VI to be exact:
"This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."
Odd, that was modded as "funny," when it's all true. Now that's funny.
I suggest you move to Western Sahara to see what a land without property tax really is like. It ain't Palm Springs, baby.
The definition of "intangible" is "incapable of being realized or defined."
If you are limiting the argument to those "ideas" that cannot be realized or defined, then really, we're not talking about the things people apply patents and copyrights to. So, no, having the commercial rights to mere notions is wrong. You can't buy or sell, directly, "happiness." To imply that all ideas are as intangible as "happiness" is just asinine as, really, every creation is at some point nothing more than an idea.
If you doubt that, go try to get the blueprints for a building from your local city planning department. They won't give them to you. Why? Not because of some security concern, but because the "idea" of that building belongs to someone else. Pretty fscking simple concept.
Copyright IS a property right. In case you haven't done your homework on international law, perhaps you should visit wipo.org.
Oh, my mistake, Americans have neither knowledge nor respect for international law despite the fact that, by American law, all treaties become part of US law once ratified and WIPO HAS been
ratified.