[...] the idea that investors will run to invest in markets they patently dont understand doesnt speak well for the efficiency of the capital markets.
No, this speaks very well for the efficiency of the capital markets. The investors risked their own money, not my money. It was a bad idea and people who invest in bad ideas lose their money. As a result of companies they invest in losing their money, ultimately, they don't have money anymore to invest. The people who end up with money to keep investing are the ones who are better at it.
Posit a theoretical public/government technological investment equiv. What makes you think the members of that board wouldn't have invested just as poorly? All the evidence points to them making worse investment choices, not better ones. After all, it's not their money, it's your money, so they have a different incentive in their investing. A much more political incentive with goals other than simply finding the most useful technology that people will want to pay for. And after this government equiv.'s investment failed? They'd either keep pumping in money to prop it up, or at the very least, the people making the bad investment decisions would just keep making them. After all, the government has more of your money to spend, right?
Please go learn some Public Choice economics. You'll understand the world a lot better.
I've been to Philadelphia. Granted, as I've lived mostly in the western U.S., so for maybe a total of a week of my life, but I have been there. 18% of Philly voters not having ID still seems high to me. Do none of them ever get bank accounts? In most states I've checked, you need an ID to get welfare or cash welfare checks, you need it to qualify for income-restricted public housing, etc... Certainly you need it to buy alcohol or cigarettes. You're trying to tell me that 18% of people in Philly are adults that rely on other people to buy their booze?
The expiration date is easily explained by wanting people to actually be current PA residents, not just "have lived there sometime in the past". Not sure that's much of a smoking gun for your explanation. It does make it harder, but then, they're also offering free ids to compensate.
Just because there is a higher risk of being caught by robbing a bank than by doing online identity theft, doesn't mean there aren't bank robbers and doesn't mean we shouldn't take measures against them.
As for "ignoring" the other instances of voter fraud, why do you suggest I'm doing that?
Quite to the contrary, I'm personally in favor of lots of things to control election fraud. Why would being against fraud across the board mean I shouldn't also be against this specific type of fraud?
Personally, I think they should ban electronic voting as anything other than a way to fill out a machine countable piece of paper that a voter can also easily visually verify themselves. I think the counting should be a separate process and the ballots counted should be totaled and matched to the number of signed-in voters in each precinct to ensure stuffing isn't occurring. The counting should be done by machine and then randomly done by hand for specific precincts to verify the machine counts match. Also, each candidate with either the 2nd highest votes or within 30% of the votes of the winner should be able to challenge for a hand count and/or a machine recount. The ballots should be kept under lock and seal (lock and seal from each candidate who desires to provide a lock and seal) until after all appeals have been exhausted... maybe until at least the next election prep is starting.
As for absentee ballots, I think any request for an absentee ballot should also require verifying that address in a state database with a matching address for the address the ballot is to be sent to. I also think that absentee ballots with more than X going to the same address should be proactively investigated by a fraud unit to validate those people actually living there. Set X to some multiple of the max number of adults you'd reasonably expect to live in a particular location. i.e. a two bedroom apartment isn't going to have 50 adults living in it...
I could go on, but you get the point that I am against all the various forms of voter fraud, don't you?
Because with HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of registered voters in PA who don't have state-issued ID, [...]
Honestly, this makes me suspect fraud much more. There are really hundreds of thousands of legitimate adults registered to vote who don't have an ID?
I'm sure some are real, but it sounds much more like there are people registered who aren't really valid voters. They're maybe real people who actually live elsewhere and have ID elsewhere, but like to also vote in PA, or people who are simply made up completely, but registered to vote.
Most of the voter registration fraud that requiring an ID would catch is people would actually have to prove the name they're voting under exists somewhere other than their imagination and/or that they actually live in the state they're registering in.
Currently, if you have a dozen absentee ballots sent to the same mailing address, someone may notice, but if you register under a fake name using whatever address you want in every district in the state, you'll be able to just walk in and vote as many times as you have the time to travel between the polling places.
You claim that someone is going to notice that "you don't live in the district", but polling place people don't know most of the people they see. If you can walk in and get the Attorney General's ballot as a someone who looks nothing like him, then it's unlikely "people know their neighbors" is a big deterrent.
Polling people are going to be extremely reluctant to challenge anyone's right to vote unless someone else walks in at the same time and claims the same name.
If you have a large enough team, then you have at least one person (and likely more people as your team is larger) on that team with is an architect personality type. Many tend to migrate to IT areas. This will be the people who designs your IT systems, who can tell you how to structure your load balancer and your networks and your firewalls and your servers to get the most out of your applications.
On the development side, they're likely to be a lead developer who always seems to be planning ahead for their team in terms of tools and structure. On the infrastructure/server side they're the guy always automating stuff and creating systems that run themselves.
This is 5% of the population, max. Maybe closer to 1-2%. But even if you only have 50 IT guys, that gives you good odds of one or more. You're looking for the people who are the ones always automating stuff and creating not only new IT systems, but new process systems for how people do stuff and making suggestions on existing systems for how to make them better.
One of those guys in each of the major IT areas of your company is who you want to look for. They'll already have an understanding of how the "people" systems in that IT area works. They haven't told you how to make it better yet because their past experience is that management has their own ideas and typically doesn't care for theirs, or ends up poorly implementing theirs. They may not believe you at first when you tell them you want them to give you a plan on how to improve things. Don't take no for an answer. Tell them you'll most likely do whatever they say, they just have to outline it for you and help create the details.
Tell them you just want them to improve the end results of their IT department, whatever that is. It's typically something like the service the customer receives, or depending on your company, maybe internal customers instead. You don't need to go into different effort levels by people. They know all that. You aren't really looking to improve person X's work ethic with incentives, right? You really just want better overall results. Focus on that goal.
They won't be able to resist. They'll design something for you. If they are less experienced in the workplace, it may take a couple of iterations as they figure out how people respond. Bring up the individualization options so that they don't focus on a one-size-fits-all option. Make sure they understand the option to throw out existing process requirements, not just add new ones. Those might be blind-spots for them otherwise.
Asking for ideas/feedback in a group meeting isn't going to work. These guys will have enough experience to know that they could only at best suggest an incremental improvement to what you already have. Anything more than that and it's going to get screwed up in the implementation details. No, give someone individual responsibility for creating an entire system framework for improving your desired overall goal, then stand back and watch the ultimate results. You'll be surprised at how well they know the business of what their IT department already does and how to improve it. You'll be shocked at how much pointless waste and inefficiency you have that can be gotten rid of.
Or, if you really don't think you have someone who can do that in your group, then feel free to hire someone like me to come in and interview people to get the same answers and put something together for you, but that costs more money than an Ask Slashdot.:)
If he really wants to know what incentive structure would be better for his IT staff, he should ask them to design one for him. Give them a budget limitation, as appropriate.
Seriously, they'll be happy to do it and they'll do a much better job than either his management or someone answering generically who doesn't understand his employees and his business.
If he calls the people he considers his best workers "guns" and so on from the question, he doesn't understand IT well enough to create a good environment on his own anyway. However, I'm sure the experienced folks in his IT department know exactly who is worth their salary in the department and how to measure that for the managers to be able to figure it out also.
You've hired experts in the field, and you're asking on the web for how to manage them? They're supposed to be the experts on the IT needs of your company. Try asking them. Of course, I suppose that's a little too obvious and may produce too much information that reflects poorly on their management. So Caveat Emptor!
Google should still be appealing the rulings, but they should also just "forget" all the official Brazilian government websites, all the political websites of current Brazilian officials, etc... until the appeals go through... add a big blank spot at all their official locations on google maps... and blacklist any brazilian government email addresses for sending and receiving via gmail, registering on any of the google sites, etc...
I mean, if they don't want Google to publish stuff on the internet on their politicians, Google should comply wholeheartedly, like above.
Call it a censorship blacklist and encourage other groups and companies to do the same thing.
One problem is that most existing media was exempted under McCain-Feingold, even though it's really also "paid" speech. It's not like the NY Times wasn't paying it's employees, wasn't paid by advertisers, etc... The bill seemed to imply that the media was unbiased, but someone else who wanted to publish something would be horrible.
Of course, the media was all for that distinction, since it increased their power relative to everyone else who was hobbled by the law. So all the media reports were about how wonderful the "reform" was. The politicians knew that the media would always be biased in favor of the "newsmakers" who could automatically get coverage because of their positions in government, while challengers would be stuck trying to convince the media that they were worth covering.
Fortunately, the USSC rejected most of that and more pieces may fall later as other cases make their way up through circuit splits.
Your figure doesn't include the energy, time and other resources spent to collect, transport and hand sort the used glass.
Consider this... if used glass cost less resources than producing new glass, wouldn't someone pay people for their used glass? When's the last time you had an offer to buy your used glass that didn't involve the government charging you per bottle ahead of time and then using the money to help pay for processing it on the back-end?
If you really want to recycle something that make sense, buy a used house, or a used car, or go to a pawn shop. You'll notice that the people who sell that stuff all pay for what they're recycling to you, because it's clearly less cost to buy used ones than to make a new one. Plenty of reuse, there.
Why do you think NY city canceled their recycling program? It was costing them twice as much to recycle stuff than to throw it away. To the tune of $57 million/year. That's a lot of wasted resources being used. Doesn't sound like the stuff they were recycling was in huge demand from manufacturers because they'd save by using it in place of raw materials, does it?
But don't let basic economics intrude on feeling good about saving sand from extinction by driving trucks all over to collect worthless used glass from people's homes and then paying people to sort it into different colors.:)
Corporations exist to serve their founder's and shareholder's purposes. Those purposes is what "corporate speech" is for. You seem to have a blind spot where you think corporations magically appear and are then controlled by their employees for some sinister motive.
The opinions expressed by corporate speech, in the myriad examples I've given over and over again, completely unrefuted by you and exactly on point to the USSC case in question, are exercising the free speech rights of the people who created the corporation for the purpose of expressing those ideas.
You still haven't made any sort of argument at all against my main point, that the constitution says that congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech and of the press. Not even that of people who form and own corporations. Not even if those people use the corporate form to publish things. Certainly not if the only reason for the laws abridging their freedom is to protect incumbent politicians.
Until you address that, all you're left with is continuing to argue that you personally think that it's ok to deny the rights of people who form corporations on a proposed technicality that the USSC has ruled is incorrect. Not much ground to stand on there.
Clearly, what you're saying is at least partially false. Reporters and editors who work at the NY Times corporation express their own opinions all the time. The people who worked for Citizens United obviously were expressing their own opinions in the movie they made.
Still, that's not the point at all. People who work for a corporation are employed to do their job. Sometimes that job involves expressing their opinions and sometimes that job requires NOT expressing their opinions.
I've been pretty clear and consistent that what I'm talking about are the people who organize and own the corporation. For example, we don't talk about the guy who is hired to paste up a billboard as being the one exercising his first amendment rights, we talk about the people who paid for the billboard to be printed and put up. It's not the guy who runs the printing press whose rights are infringed when the owner of a paper is told he isn't allowed to print what he wants about a candidate. It's not the broadcast engineer whose rights are infringed when a company created for the express purpose of producing a political movie is told they'll be fined if they broadcast it within 30 days of an election. It's not their purposes which are being frustrated, it's obviously the purpose of the owners being frustrated.
A corporation is a tool for the owners to accomplish a particular purpose. Free speech may be incidental to that purpose, but it also may be directly related to that purpose. I'm sorry that you limit people's speech and publishing such that you prefer to ban their use of a corporation to exercise it, but to me that's just thugs in government trying to use their power to shut people up they either disagree with or they don't control, or both.
"Campaign finance" laws are generally about one thing, doing what Congress thinks will help keep them in office and give them more control and an advantage in elections. That's not necessarily why regular people push them, but that's why Congress and President's pass them.
Some people react to free speech they don't approve of by looking for some excuse for the government to stop it using some technicality they think might pass muster in the USSC. Well, in this particular case the USSC finally did the right thing and protected people's rights to publish their political ideas using a corporation.
Just because people create a separate legal entity for the purpose of exercising their rights doesn't mean "Hey, we gotcha, we found a way to protect politicians from your speech!" is going to fly. It's a B.S. argument designed to use an excuse to limit people's speech. Well, guess what, the first amendment says "Congress shall make no law respecting..." and there's no exception in there for corporations or for people working through a corporation, or for FCC broadcast licensees. It just says "... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". Saying you can't broadcast a political movie within 30 days of an election because it's political and might influence the election... that's EXACTLY what the first amendment is supposed to protect against. As it turns out, five Justices of the USSC agree with that.
I've never said that corporations are people. As stated by the USSC decision, they're (among other things) associations of citizens.
Corporations are no more people than a hammer is a person. Corporations are organizational tools created (yes, under governing laws) by people for various purposes.
In the Citizens United case, as in the NY Times, ACLU, etc... the corporation is formed for the purpose of publishing speech. It's not a "whim".
When a nail is driven by a hammer, it's not the hammer doing it. It's the person using the hammer. The hammer is just a tool for focusing force at the point of impact.
What you're saying is similar in logic to "We can ban hammers from being used to hit nails without abridging the right of people to hit nails." That's ridiculous. It's people that use hammers to hit nails and it's people that use corporations to, among other things, speak and publish freely. Prohibiting those people from using corporations to organize those actions abridges those people's speech.
Abridging the people's right to use a tool for free speech is restricting their right to free speech. If there is a compelling state interest with no other solution, like say, preventing people from blowing out your eardrums with a bullhorn, then the government can legally restrict the tool being used the minimal amount to prevent that. If there isn't, like, someone's speech is simply more effective, then the USSC won't let the government restrict it.
The real argument here is that some people want to restrict speech that uses a corporation because they see that as an effective way to spread ideas they disagree with. Preventing effectiveness of speech isn't a legitimate state interest, even if the people who happen to control the government at the time don't agree with that speech.
I think people should stop trying to ban speech and stop trying to ban support from other people for political ideas and politicians and instead compete in the marketplace for ideas by spreading their own ideas. The answer to speech you disagree with is more speech of your own, not banning other people's speech under the excuse they're using a corporation to organize it.
Citizens United was about the government telling a political media corporation that they weren't allowed to air a movie about a politician within 30 days of an election. During the oral argument, the government said they could use the law to ban books if the book mentioned a politician.
It may be a "tired" argument to you that "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.", but that doesn't make it an incorrect argument. The First Amendment was written in "terms of speech, not speakers", to continue quoting the actual USSC decision.
You seem to have a common misunderstanding. The "press" refers to using technology for speech, it's not referring to an occupation or a specific industry. Everyone has freedom of speech and of the press. It's not something that refers to journalists by trade. That's a modern misunderstanding because of how language has changed to call journalists "the press". See this reprinted law review article.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." It seems pretty obvious that a law prohibiting people, no matter how they're organized, from showing a political movie within 30 days of an election _abridges_ their freedom.
Censoring political speech by corporations is NOT censoring political speech by individuals.
So if you and I form a corporation to publish a newspaper, we both supply the money and get stock shares, but we decide you'll be the newspaper editor and I'll run the printing presses, or whatever, then it's legal for the government to censor that newspaper, because it's not censoring our individual speech?
You don't see how ridiculous that sounds? The government is preventing the owner's free speech if it censors the owner's corporation. The corporation is simply a legal entity for a group of individual people to work together toward a common cause.
That cause may be publishing a newspaper (NY Times), or arguing for civil rights (ACLU), or publishing a movie about a politician (Citizens United), or for selling chocolate (Nestle), but the fact that people have organized themselves in a particular way for financial and effectiveness reasons doesn't mean they suddenly forfeit their right to free speech.
You'd think that a Harvard educated adjunct professor would get credit for what he said, rather than for wishful thinking on the part of his supporters.
Exact quote from a transcript: "If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen."
"that" obviously refers to "a business", not something from the previous sentence.
Besides, who do you think created the wealth and paid the taxes for the "roads and bridges" you claim he was referring to? Let me give you a hint, it wasn't a government bureaucrat nor a politician.
Clearly you've never been to Salt Lake City. Utah IS a theocracy. It's a nice place on the surface, but it's entirely controlled by the Mormon Church. They decide who gets to run for office, who gets elected, and what those people do once in office.
Normally I try not to feed the trolls, but I couldn't let this complete and utter bullshit pass.
Let's start with just the first sentence. The two term mayor of Salt Lake City is a long-time Democrat who's official about page has quotes like "He also championed the state’s first municipal protections in the areas of employment and housing for the City’s LGBT community." and "His progressive agenda for Utah’s Capital City centers on increasing livability through initiatives that give choices back to residents including transportation alternatives, green initiatives, equal treatment for all and much, much more."
Sounds like SLC is totally controlled by your supposed Mormon theocracy, doesn't it?
The rest of your statement is just as much bullshit. Yeah, since half the state is Mormon, of course people who are Mormon can vote and have an influence on who gets elected where. The Mormon church itself, nor its prominent leaders, don't choose nor endorse any candidates. They don't decide who gets elected and they don't tell them what to do once in office. At best, they sometimes get a sympathetic ear in zoning committees because everyone knows who they are.
Does the government in Utah tend to reflect the values of Utah's voters? Of course it does, just like it does everywhere else in the U.S. Does the Mormon church itself "control" anything like you've described? Absolutely and totally not.
Improved convenience leads to greater efficiency. Greater efficiency, for a Doctor oriented application, leads to either more time a Doctor can spend working on patients instead of paperwork, or lower cost, leading to more health care consumption, etc... For a patient oriented application, leads to patients doing more with their health care, or able to more reliably record medical measurements, or becoming better informed about their health, or whatever.
Sure, it may not be the "push a magic button and someone's life is instantly saved" application, but improved convenience and medical efficiency does lead to lives being saved, a little bit at a time.
Think of convenient hand sanitizers at the entrance to each hospital room. Sure, it's easy enough for a medical professional to wash their hands in a sink elsewhere instead, but the convenience means they'll do it more often and as a result, save lives. Don't underrate a little convenience and efficiency. Once you add up the hundreds of conveniences, they have a big impact on medical care. Also, if you make it easy to bring something to market, you'll have a larger supply and be more likely to end up with something that is a breakthrough.
Making improvements in marginal efficiencies is a realistic way to make a huge difference. Don't let the process be choked by a regulatory burden that keeps it from getting off the ground. Bureaucrats don't have all the information contained in the minds of all the people who might write a simple app that solves a simple problem as long as it's not too difficult to accomplish.
But we're talking about safety here—in addition to scammers, regulation of medical devices also involves things like verifying code. What happens when a bug in your unregulated-software-that-isn't-a-scam kills someone, just because you didn't want regulation?
But we're talking about safety! What happens when the delays and costs of regulating medical applications causes hundreds of people to die because they didn't get better medical help?
Have you considered that this is the same FDA that causes the death of thousands of people every year because they haven't approved drugs used safely for years elsewhere?
Have you ever been involved with government-approved software before? Mostly it never gets completed because the process kills it.
Don't believe me? Surely some libertarian utopia in Texas or New Hampshire has gotten rid of cable monopolies; show me how great their cable and phone options are.
Here are some examples, from a quick Google search and result: "In the essentially unregulated Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania, two companies have competed successfully with each other for years. Edward Downing, business administrator of Bethlehem, Pa., asserts that the by-products of the region's laissez-faire attitude toward cable include price discounts, superior service, and freedom of choice.[16] The recent introduction of a second cable company in Presque Isle, Me.--a city of only 2,000 residents--induced the sluggish incumbent franchisee to dramatically update its technology and increase service options.[17] In Slidell, La., the city administrator, Reinhart Dearing, explains that the "spirit of free enterprise" that prompted the city to deregulate buses and taxicabs has also led to a thriving competition between two cable companies.[18]"
If cable is a "natural monopoly", then why do cities need laws preventing others from competing? You can't have it both ways. Either it's a "natural monopoly" or it's a government monopoly. Guess which one the government laws saying only one company can do something implies? I'll give you a hint, it's not "natural".
Having done this before for a school a few years ago... this anon comment above is the best way to go. All of the above is cheap to free.
Only thing I would add is to check with your state educational network admins, assuming you're using a state internet connection. They may also have a service available built into their WAN you can use.
I'm actually more interested in what Obama did in College, than high school, but that's still mostly irrelevant.
abolish Medicare and Social Security
It's Obamacare that specified 700B of cuts to Medicare in the baseline budget. Ryan's budgets keep Social Security the same for anyone currently over 55 and rather then let Social Security go bankrupt in the near future, modify it so that it's are able to last for much longer. Of course, having passed more of his budgets through Congress than Obama has (who can't even get Congressional Democrats to vote for his ideas in bill form), Ryan has had to be the adult in the room and actually consider the effects of things on the deficit and future entitlements.
This VP pick shows that Romney is more interested in governing well and taking on serious issues than he is interested in short-term political gain from a couple of poll points in a swing state or two. Ryan was by far the best serious candidate for the VP job.
Lastpass is an RFID issued for toll road payments along the U.S. east coast. Makes it so they can just deduct your toll from an account instead of having to stop at a boothe.
Updating the summary: "This system will be mandatory for all vehicles (cars, trucks, motorcycles, etc) and should cost vehicle owners approximately R$5 (less than US$3) and their privacy."
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No, this speaks very well for the efficiency of the capital markets. The investors risked their own money, not my money. It was a bad idea and people who invest in bad ideas lose their money. As a result of companies they invest in losing their money, ultimately, they don't have money anymore to invest. The people who end up with money to keep investing are the ones who are better at it.
Posit a theoretical public/government technological investment equiv. What makes you think the members of that board wouldn't have invested just as poorly? All the evidence points to them making worse investment choices, not better ones. After all, it's not their money, it's your money, so they have a different incentive in their investing. A much more political incentive with goals other than simply finding the most useful technology that people will want to pay for. And after this government equiv.'s investment failed? They'd either keep pumping in money to prop it up, or at the very least, the people making the bad investment decisions would just keep making them. After all, the government has more of your money to spend, right?
Please go learn some Public Choice economics. You'll understand the world a lot better.
I've been to Philadelphia. Granted, as I've lived mostly in the western U.S., so for maybe a total of a week of my life, but I have been there. 18% of Philly voters not having ID still seems high to me. Do none of them ever get bank accounts? In most states I've checked, you need an ID to get welfare or cash welfare checks, you need it to qualify for income-restricted public housing, etc... Certainly you need it to buy alcohol or cigarettes. You're trying to tell me that 18% of people in Philly are adults that rely on other people to buy their booze?
The expiration date is easily explained by wanting people to actually be current PA residents, not just "have lived there sometime in the past". Not sure that's much of a smoking gun for your explanation. It does make it harder, but then, they're also offering free ids to compensate.
Just because there is a higher risk of being caught by robbing a bank than by doing online identity theft, doesn't mean there aren't bank robbers and doesn't mean we shouldn't take measures against them.
As for "ignoring" the other instances of voter fraud, why do you suggest I'm doing that?
Quite to the contrary, I'm personally in favor of lots of things to control election fraud. Why would being against fraud across the board mean I shouldn't also be against this specific type of fraud?
Personally, I think they should ban electronic voting as anything other than a way to fill out a machine countable piece of paper that a voter can also easily visually verify themselves. I think the counting should be a separate process and the ballots counted should be totaled and matched to the number of signed-in voters in each precinct to ensure stuffing isn't occurring. The counting should be done by machine and then randomly done by hand for specific precincts to verify the machine counts match. Also, each candidate with either the 2nd highest votes or within 30% of the votes of the winner should be able to challenge for a hand count and/or a machine recount. The ballots should be kept under lock and seal (lock and seal from each candidate who desires to provide a lock and seal) until after all appeals have been exhausted... maybe until at least the next election prep is starting.
As for absentee ballots, I think any request for an absentee ballot should also require verifying that address in a state database with a matching address for the address the ballot is to be sent to. I also think that absentee ballots with more than X going to the same address should be proactively investigated by a fraud unit to validate those people actually living there. Set X to some multiple of the max number of adults you'd reasonably expect to live in a particular location. i.e. a two bedroom apartment isn't going to have 50 adults living in it...
I could go on, but you get the point that I am against all the various forms of voter fraud, don't you?
Honestly, this makes me suspect fraud much more. There are really hundreds of thousands of legitimate adults registered to vote who don't have an ID?
I'm sure some are real, but it sounds much more like there are people registered who aren't really valid voters. They're maybe real people who actually live elsewhere and have ID elsewhere, but like to also vote in PA, or people who are simply made up completely, but registered to vote.
Most of the voter registration fraud that requiring an ID would catch is people would actually have to prove the name they're voting under exists somewhere other than their imagination and/or that they actually live in the state they're registering in.
Currently, if you have a dozen absentee ballots sent to the same mailing address, someone may notice, but if you register under a fake name using whatever address you want in every district in the state, you'll be able to just walk in and vote as many times as you have the time to travel between the polling places.
You claim that someone is going to notice that "you don't live in the district", but polling place people don't know most of the people they see. If you can walk in and get the Attorney General's ballot as a someone who looks nothing like him, then it's unlikely "people know their neighbors" is a big deterrent.
Polling people are going to be extremely reluctant to challenge anyone's right to vote unless someone else walks in at the same time and claims the same name.
If you have a large enough team, then you have at least one person (and likely more people as your team is larger) on that team with is an architect personality type. Many tend to migrate to IT areas. This will be the people who designs your IT systems, who can tell you how to structure your load balancer and your networks and your firewalls and your servers to get the most out of your applications.
On the development side, they're likely to be a lead developer who always seems to be planning ahead for their team in terms of tools and structure. On the infrastructure/server side they're the guy always automating stuff and creating systems that run themselves.
This is 5% of the population, max. Maybe closer to 1-2%. But even if you only have 50 IT guys, that gives you good odds of one or more. You're looking for the people who are the ones always automating stuff and creating not only new IT systems, but new process systems for how people do stuff and making suggestions on existing systems for how to make them better.
One of those guys in each of the major IT areas of your company is who you want to look for. They'll already have an understanding of how the "people" systems in that IT area works. They haven't told you how to make it better yet because their past experience is that management has their own ideas and typically doesn't care for theirs, or ends up poorly implementing theirs. They may not believe you at first when you tell them you want them to give you a plan on how to improve things. Don't take no for an answer. Tell them you'll most likely do whatever they say, they just have to outline it for you and help create the details.
Tell them you just want them to improve the end results of their IT department, whatever that is. It's typically something like the service the customer receives, or depending on your company, maybe internal customers instead. You don't need to go into different effort levels by people. They know all that. You aren't really looking to improve person X's work ethic with incentives, right? You really just want better overall results. Focus on that goal.
They won't be able to resist. They'll design something for you. If they are less experienced in the workplace, it may take a couple of iterations as they figure out how people respond. Bring up the individualization options so that they don't focus on a one-size-fits-all option. Make sure they understand the option to throw out existing process requirements, not just add new ones. Those might be blind-spots for them otherwise.
Asking for ideas/feedback in a group meeting isn't going to work. These guys will have enough experience to know that they could only at best suggest an incremental improvement to what you already have. Anything more than that and it's going to get screwed up in the implementation details. No, give someone individual responsibility for creating an entire system framework for improving your desired overall goal, then stand back and watch the ultimate results. You'll be surprised at how well they know the business of what their IT department already does and how to improve it. You'll be shocked at how much pointless waste and inefficiency you have that can be gotten rid of.
Or, if you really don't think you have someone who can do that in your group, then feel free to hire someone like me to come in and interview people to get the same answers and put something together for you, but that costs more money than an Ask Slashdot. :)
"Guru" Jim is asking the wrong people.
If he really wants to know what incentive structure would be better for his IT staff, he should ask them to design one for him. Give them a budget limitation, as appropriate.
Seriously, they'll be happy to do it and they'll do a much better job than either his management or someone answering generically who doesn't understand his employees and his business.
If he calls the people he considers his best workers "guns" and so on from the question, he doesn't understand IT well enough to create a good environment on his own anyway. However, I'm sure the experienced folks in his IT department know exactly who is worth their salary in the department and how to measure that for the managers to be able to figure it out also.
You've hired experts in the field, and you're asking on the web for how to manage them? They're supposed to be the experts on the IT needs of your company. Try asking them. Of course, I suppose that's a little too obvious and may produce too much information that reflects poorly on their management. So Caveat Emptor!
So, to correct the Unknown Lamer's attempted correction of the original submission, Brazilian police have actually arrested the President of Google Brazil.
Just thought that should be noted somewhere in the comment threads, even though it'll likely be lost in oblivion.
Google should still be appealing the rulings, but they should also just "forget" all the official Brazilian government websites, all the political websites of current Brazilian officials, etc... until the appeals go through... add a big blank spot at all their official locations on google maps... and blacklist any brazilian government email addresses for sending and receiving via gmail, registering on any of the google sites, etc...
I mean, if they don't want Google to publish stuff on the internet on their politicians, Google should comply wholeheartedly, like above.
Call it a censorship blacklist and encourage other groups and companies to do the same thing.
One problem is that most existing media was exempted under McCain-Feingold, even though it's really also "paid" speech. It's not like the NY Times wasn't paying it's employees, wasn't paid by advertisers, etc... The bill seemed to imply that the media was unbiased, but someone else who wanted to publish something would be horrible.
Of course, the media was all for that distinction, since it increased their power relative to everyone else who was hobbled by the law. So all the media reports were about how wonderful the "reform" was. The politicians knew that the media would always be biased in favor of the "newsmakers" who could automatically get coverage because of their positions in government, while challengers would be stuck trying to convince the media that they were worth covering.
Fortunately, the USSC rejected most of that and more pieces may fall later as other cases make their way up through circuit splits.
Your figure doesn't include the energy, time and other resources spent to collect, transport and hand sort the used glass.
Consider this... if used glass cost less resources than producing new glass, wouldn't someone pay people for their used glass? When's the last time you had an offer to buy your used glass that didn't involve the government charging you per bottle ahead of time and then using the money to help pay for processing it on the back-end?
If you really want to recycle something that make sense, buy a used house, or a used car, or go to a pawn shop. You'll notice that the people who sell that stuff all pay for what they're recycling to you, because it's clearly less cost to buy used ones than to make a new one. Plenty of reuse, there.
Why do you think NY city canceled their recycling program? It was costing them twice as much to recycle stuff than to throw it away. To the tune of $57 million/year. That's a lot of wasted resources being used. Doesn't sound like the stuff they were recycling was in huge demand from manufacturers because they'd save by using it in place of raw materials, does it?
But don't let basic economics intrude on feeling good about saving sand from extinction by driving trucks all over to collect worthless used glass from people's homes and then paying people to sort it into different colors. :)
Or you could just buy glass containers and throw them away afterwards.
It's not like we're going to be running out of sand any time soon, is it? And biodegrading glass isn't exactly an environmental pollutant.
Recycling consumer glass bottles takes way more total resources than just throwing them away and making new glass bottles from sand.
Or is this about something other than logic and the actual physical environment? If so, carry on...
You can get keyboards for $2+shipping on Amazon. $15 seems high to me.
Something like a $35 laptop would work for this guy.
Corporations exist to serve their founder's and shareholder's purposes. Those purposes is what "corporate speech" is for. You seem to have a blind spot where you think corporations magically appear and are then controlled by their employees for some sinister motive.
The opinions expressed by corporate speech, in the myriad examples I've given over and over again, completely unrefuted by you and exactly on point to the USSC case in question, are exercising the free speech rights of the people who created the corporation for the purpose of expressing those ideas.
You still haven't made any sort of argument at all against my main point, that the constitution says that congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech and of the press. Not even that of people who form and own corporations. Not even if those people use the corporate form to publish things. Certainly not if the only reason for the laws abridging their freedom is to protect incumbent politicians.
Until you address that, all you're left with is continuing to argue that you personally think that it's ok to deny the rights of people who form corporations on a proposed technicality that the USSC has ruled is incorrect. Not much ground to stand on there.
Clearly, what you're saying is at least partially false. Reporters and editors who work at the NY Times corporation express their own opinions all the time. The people who worked for Citizens United obviously were expressing their own opinions in the movie they made.
Still, that's not the point at all. People who work for a corporation are employed to do their job. Sometimes that job involves expressing their opinions and sometimes that job requires NOT expressing their opinions.
I've been pretty clear and consistent that what I'm talking about are the people who organize and own the corporation. For example, we don't talk about the guy who is hired to paste up a billboard as being the one exercising his first amendment rights, we talk about the people who paid for the billboard to be printed and put up. It's not the guy who runs the printing press whose rights are infringed when the owner of a paper is told he isn't allowed to print what he wants about a candidate. It's not the broadcast engineer whose rights are infringed when a company created for the express purpose of producing a political movie is told they'll be fined if they broadcast it within 30 days of an election. It's not their purposes which are being frustrated, it's obviously the purpose of the owners being frustrated.
A corporation is a tool for the owners to accomplish a particular purpose. Free speech may be incidental to that purpose, but it also may be directly related to that purpose. I'm sorry that you limit people's speech and publishing such that you prefer to ban their use of a corporation to exercise it, but to me that's just thugs in government trying to use their power to shut people up they either disagree with or they don't control, or both.
"Campaign finance" laws are generally about one thing, doing what Congress thinks will help keep them in office and give them more control and an advantage in elections. That's not necessarily why regular people push them, but that's why Congress and President's pass them.
Some people react to free speech they don't approve of by looking for some excuse for the government to stop it using some technicality they think might pass muster in the USSC. Well, in this particular case the USSC finally did the right thing and protected people's rights to publish their political ideas using a corporation.
Just because people create a separate legal entity for the purpose of exercising their rights doesn't mean "Hey, we gotcha, we found a way to protect politicians from your speech!" is going to fly. It's a B.S. argument designed to use an excuse to limit people's speech. Well, guess what, the first amendment says "Congress shall make no law respecting ..." and there's no exception in there for corporations or for people working through a corporation, or for FCC broadcast licensees. It just says "... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". Saying you can't broadcast a political movie within 30 days of an election because it's political and might influence the election... that's EXACTLY what the first amendment is supposed to protect against. As it turns out, five Justices of the USSC agree with that.
I've never said that corporations are people. As stated by the USSC decision, they're (among other things) associations of citizens.
Corporations are no more people than a hammer is a person. Corporations are organizational tools created (yes, under governing laws) by people for various purposes.
In the Citizens United case, as in the NY Times, ACLU, etc... the corporation is formed for the purpose of publishing speech. It's not a "whim".
When a nail is driven by a hammer, it's not the hammer doing it. It's the person using the hammer. The hammer is just a tool for focusing force at the point of impact.
What you're saying is similar in logic to "We can ban hammers from being used to hit nails without abridging the right of people to hit nails." That's ridiculous. It's people that use hammers to hit nails and it's people that use corporations to, among other things, speak and publish freely. Prohibiting those people from using corporations to organize those actions abridges those people's speech.
Abridging the people's right to use a tool for free speech is restricting their right to free speech. If there is a compelling state interest with no other solution, like say, preventing people from blowing out your eardrums with a bullhorn, then the government can legally restrict the tool being used the minimal amount to prevent that. If there isn't, like, someone's speech is simply more effective, then the USSC won't let the government restrict it.
The real argument here is that some people want to restrict speech that uses a corporation because they see that as an effective way to spread ideas they disagree with. Preventing effectiveness of speech isn't a legitimate state interest, even if the people who happen to control the government at the time don't agree with that speech.
I think people should stop trying to ban speech and stop trying to ban support from other people for political ideas and politicians and instead compete in the marketplace for ideas by spreading their own ideas. The answer to speech you disagree with is more speech of your own, not banning other people's speech under the excuse they're using a corporation to organize it.
Citizens United was about the government telling a political media corporation that they weren't allowed to air a movie about a politician within 30 days of an election. During the oral argument, the government said they could use the law to ban books if the book mentioned a politician.
It may be a "tired" argument to you that "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.", but that doesn't make it an incorrect argument. The First Amendment was written in "terms of speech, not speakers", to continue quoting the actual USSC decision.
You seem to have a common misunderstanding. The "press" refers to using technology for speech, it's not referring to an occupation or a specific industry. Everyone has freedom of speech and of the press. It's not something that refers to journalists by trade. That's a modern misunderstanding because of how language has changed to call journalists "the press". See this reprinted law review article.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
It seems pretty obvious that a law prohibiting people, no matter how they're organized, from showing a political movie within 30 days of an election _abridges_ their freedom.
Censoring political speech by corporations is NOT censoring political speech by individuals.
So if you and I form a corporation to publish a newspaper, we both supply the money and get stock shares, but we decide you'll be the newspaper editor and I'll run the printing presses, or whatever, then it's legal for the government to censor that newspaper, because it's not censoring our individual speech?
You don't see how ridiculous that sounds? The government is preventing the owner's free speech if it censors the owner's corporation. The corporation is simply a legal entity for a group of individual people to work together toward a common cause.
That cause may be publishing a newspaper (NY Times), or arguing for civil rights (ACLU), or publishing a movie about a politician (Citizens United), or for selling chocolate (Nestle), but the fact that people have organized themselves in a particular way for financial and effectiveness reasons doesn't mean they suddenly forfeit their right to free speech.
You'd think that a Harvard educated adjunct professor would get credit for what he said, rather than for wishful thinking on the part of his supporters.
Exact quote from a transcript:
"If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen."
"that" obviously refers to "a business", not something from the previous sentence.
Besides, who do you think created the wealth and paid the taxes for the "roads and bridges" you claim he was referring to? Let me give you a hint, it wasn't a government bureaucrat nor a politician.
Clearly you've never been to Salt Lake City. Utah IS a theocracy. It's a nice place on the surface, but it's entirely controlled by the Mormon Church. They decide who gets to run for office, who gets elected, and what those people do once in office.
Normally I try not to feed the trolls, but I couldn't let this complete and utter bullshit pass.
Let's start with just the first sentence. The two term mayor of Salt Lake City is a long-time Democrat who's official about page has quotes like "He also championed the state’s first municipal protections in the areas of employment and housing for the City’s LGBT community." and "His progressive agenda for Utah’s Capital City centers on increasing livability through initiatives that give choices back to residents including transportation alternatives, green initiatives, equal treatment for all and much, much more."
Sounds like SLC is totally controlled by your supposed Mormon theocracy, doesn't it?
The rest of your statement is just as much bullshit. Yeah, since half the state is Mormon, of course people who are Mormon can vote and have an influence on who gets elected where. The Mormon church itself, nor its prominent leaders, don't choose nor endorse any candidates. They don't decide who gets elected and they don't tell them what to do once in office. At best, they sometimes get a sympathetic ear in zoning committees because everyone knows who they are.
Does the government in Utah tend to reflect the values of Utah's voters? Of course it does, just like it does everywhere else in the U.S. Does the Mormon church itself "control" anything like you've described? Absolutely and totally not.
I appreciate your serious consideration.
Improved convenience leads to greater efficiency. Greater efficiency, for a Doctor oriented application, leads to either more time a Doctor can spend working on patients instead of paperwork, or lower cost, leading to more health care consumption, etc... For a patient oriented application, leads to patients doing more with their health care, or able to more reliably record medical measurements, or becoming better informed about their health, or whatever.
Sure, it may not be the "push a magic button and someone's life is instantly saved" application, but improved convenience and medical efficiency does lead to lives being saved, a little bit at a time.
Think of convenient hand sanitizers at the entrance to each hospital room. Sure, it's easy enough for a medical professional to wash their hands in a sink elsewhere instead, but the convenience means they'll do it more often and as a result, save lives. Don't underrate a little convenience and efficiency. Once you add up the hundreds of conveniences, they have a big impact on medical care. Also, if you make it easy to bring something to market, you'll have a larger supply and be more likely to end up with something that is a breakthrough.
Making improvements in marginal efficiencies is a realistic way to make a huge difference. Don't let the process be choked by a regulatory burden that keeps it from getting off the ground. Bureaucrats don't have all the information contained in the minds of all the people who might write a simple app that solves a simple problem as long as it's not too difficult to accomplish.
But we're talking about safety here—in addition to scammers, regulation of medical devices also involves things like verifying code. What happens when a bug in your unregulated-software-that-isn't-a-scam kills someone, just because you didn't want regulation?
But we're talking about safety! What happens when the delays and costs of regulating medical applications causes hundreds of people to die because they didn't get better medical help?
Have you considered that this is the same FDA that causes the death of thousands of people every year because they haven't approved drugs used safely for years elsewhere?
Have you ever been involved with government-approved software before? Mostly it never gets completed because the process kills it.
Don't believe me? Surely some libertarian utopia in Texas or New Hampshire has gotten rid of cable monopolies; show me how great their cable and phone options are.
Here are some examples, from a quick Google search and result: "In the essentially unregulated Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania, two companies have competed successfully with each other for years. Edward Downing, business administrator of Bethlehem, Pa., asserts that the by-products of the region's laissez-faire attitude toward cable include price discounts, superior service, and freedom of choice.[16] The recent introduction of a second cable company in Presque Isle, Me.--a city of only 2,000 residents--induced the sluggish incumbent franchisee to dramatically update its technology and increase service options.[17] In Slidell, La., the city administrator, Reinhart Dearing, explains that the "spirit of free enterprise" that prompted the city to deregulate buses and taxicabs has also led to a thriving competition between two cable companies.[18]"
If cable is a "natural monopoly", then why do cities need laws preventing others from competing? You can't have it both ways. Either it's a "natural monopoly" or it's a government monopoly. Guess which one the government laws saying only one company can do something implies? I'll give you a hint, it's not "natural".
Having done this before for a school a few years ago... this anon comment above is the best way to go. All of the above is cheap to free.
Only thing I would add is to check with your state educational network admins, assuming you're using a state internet connection. They may also have a service available built into their WAN you can use.
I'm actually more interested in what Obama did in College, than high school, but that's still mostly irrelevant.
It's Obamacare that specified 700B of cuts to Medicare in the baseline budget. Ryan's budgets keep Social Security the same for anyone currently over 55 and rather then let Social Security go bankrupt in the near future, modify it so that it's are able to last for much longer.
Of course, having passed more of his budgets through Congress than Obama has (who can't even get Congressional Democrats to vote for his ideas in bill form), Ryan has had to be the adult in the room and actually consider the effects of things on the deficit and future entitlements.
This VP pick shows that Romney is more interested in governing well and taking on serious issues than he is interested in short-term political gain from a couple of poll points in a swing state or two. Ryan was by far the best serious candidate for the VP job.
Some day you'll learn to look at the actual effect of policies and laws rather than the stated purpose...
Lastpass is an RFID issued for toll road payments along the U.S. east coast. Makes it so they can just deduct your toll from an account instead of having to stop at a boothe.
Updating the summary: "This system will be mandatory for all vehicles (cars, trucks, motorcycles, etc) and should cost vehicle owners approximately R$5 (less than US$3) and their privacy."