I think Windows 1.0 came out in 1986 or so. I got to play around with it on my dad's work computer. I was only about 8 years old, so I don't remember too much; but I think it probably blew chunks. It's a safe bet, anyway.:-)
But I am steadfast against laissez-faire. I don't hold "capitalism" as being my religion.
I don't either. I wouldn't want you to get that impression. I just believe that it's been demonstrated to work better than any of the alternatives, when it's done right. Attempting to "channel" economic forces productively ends up getting away from you fast. It's just something that can't be effectively controlled.
In smaller societies, organized into trading blocks, so long as the economic forces, whatever they be, develop into not only individual means to prosperity, but maintain social responsibility in the communities where they do business.
The hearts of people have to change for social responsibility to work, whether the profit motive is there or not. I think you could say that profit-motive is a symptom of my proposed depravity of man. I know we don't agree on that, but...
My diatribes started one night, after one really bad day, and, having read someone's post connected to one of your threads.
No problem. It really was nice to talk to you. It sharpens debate skills.:-)
There's no need to turn the TV off when it's not on in the first place. I don't have time for the garbage on television.
no, I don't have it all figured out
It's good to know you're not arrogant.
just getting older and listening to shithead know it all punks. Ad hominenum? "http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=103134&cid=87 89646"
That's a link to *your* post.
Yeah, pay your taxes, compain that about 2% real goes to welfare while 53% goes to "our" adventures.
The job of the national government is described in Article I of the Constitution. *Only* those powers *specifically* granted to Congress are legal. They do not include socialism or corporatism of *any* kind; all so-called "welfare," whether corporate or individual, is *illegal*. How hard is that to understand? It's not the national government's job.
Dude, don't even bother responding, or do, who gives a fuck, YOU guys won! Ok? Happy!
I'll be happy when we actually *have* won: when the national government is returned to the size and scope circa 1791.
And NO the media is NOT liberal. Yeah, Rupert Murdoch is a liberal. Give me a fucking break. NPR is right-wing to me.
Rupert Murdoch doesn't own most media. And he's not a conservative. Have you seen the sensationalist crap on his networks? And you've got NPR, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, and all of Hollywood on your side. You can't get much more leftist than Katie Couric glowing with delight and describing Castro's Cuba as a "paradise." Give *me* a break.
Dude, we live in a 2-party no real "fundamental" difference State! Yeah, Democracy! for the people! by the people!
It is democracy and that's part of the problem. This nation was intended to be a republic. The garbage you see in this nation is a reflection of the desires of the people. That should convince you of the depravity of human nature; but I'm sure it won't. You'll go on believing that humanity is essentially good and can achieve perfection. It's a fool's errand.
Yeah, FUCK you.
Yes, I love you too.
You undoubetdly will have some elequent or some snobby response
You want to see snobbery? Go look at John Kerry or Ted Kennedy. Or anybody else in the Democrat party. Or anybody in Hollywood. Or most of the people in the elitist Northeast or California.
which I'll never read because this is all fuckin bullshit like arguing with Fox News.
Then why did you bother writing it?
Cancel this subscription. Later, Enjoy.
You too. It was nice talking to you. Hope you learn to calm down a bit before you give yourself heart disease or something.
If those jobs are necessary for customer satisfaction, the company will die. That's good: companies that are poorly run should die, leaving the healthy businesses to benefit both society and the shareholders. There are plenty of well-run companies out there to take up the slack.
Oh,yes. That'll be the board of directors (they, I believe, make up a majority of the shareholders) deciding how much the directors should be paid (mostly in share options, so getting more control of the company as they get paid). No conflict of interests, there.
Actually, there aren't. Those options are worthless if the business is poorly run (see above). I don't know the details, but it sounds like they've decided that they *can* cut those jobs and still. Whether they're right or not is yet to be determined. If they are correct, cutting costs while still providing good service is beneficial to the company. If not, they'll die. Again, see above.
There don't seem to be many places that aren't run like this, so not really much of an option.
Sure there are. We've got a great one right here. Something like 750 employees. Good pay, good treatment, nice place to live (with a very low cost-of-living). Where do you live? (You can email me at jhclouse at juno dot com if you can't reply here.)
I wasn't even talking about small businesses first of all
That's your problem. Small and medium businesses drive the economy. Those who argue for extreme government regulation and economic control focus exclusively on large multi-nationals and build ridiculous emotional stereotypes of employers. Then, they argue for government practices that strangle small and medium sized businesses.
Oh, sorry I didn't use the proper corporate gobblydigook to describe my point, sure businesses are fueled by customers, but they are built on employees. You're not going to get good service from a business without well treated employees, it just doesn't happen.
Exactly. That's why companies that don't treat their employees well go out of business. You're getting it after all: you're just not thinking it all the way through.
So basically screw everyone who works entry level jobs and force them to live inevitably in poverty.
Straw man. I never said anything like that. The *vast* majority of people working minimum-wage jobs are doing so for supplemental income (e.g.: teenagers or spouse). They're not living in poverty.
Another data point: illegal immigrants are the quintessential "low-income" wage-earners. A local landscaper here employs illegal immigrants from Mexico for $12 per hour. No joke. Perhaps he's not the evil slave-driving capitalist hyena you suspect him to be? He's not even required to pay minimum-wage but he pays more than minimum-wage. How did a human being with compassion get in the position of an employer, one wonders?
I'm talking about big businesses. Not small businesses.
See above.
The big ones that employ half our population
In other words: how dare they enable half (slightly less than half, actually) of our population to earn a living?
and whose execs account for the vast majority of the money in this country.
So? CEOs are employees as well. They don't set their own pay rate: the board of directors decides how much they're worth. And that's their business.
They can easily afford to pay when minimum wage goes up. Would shaving that 20 cents times x minimum wage employees off the hourly wages of the top level execs really hurt them?
Combined with excessive regulation and unreasonable demands from employees who make much more than minimum wage? You betcha. Additionally, as described above, the minimum wage locks low-end jobs out of the labor market.
Yeah cuz I know all those minimum wage employees need so goddamn much training to know how to make a Taco or use a broom. That must cost employers dearly !!!
It's not about teaching them to do their current job more efficiently. Many minimum wage employers sponsor education for their employees to help them get higher-paying jobs later on.
Also, I didn't know that my local fast food joint (or any other minimum wage employer) was going to help pay my way through college! In your dreams...
Not at all. You may be surprised to know that many minimum-wage employers actually do exactly that. Burger King. Chick-Fil-A. Wendys. Just as examples.
Once again you completely miss the fact that I was talking about large corporations, not small businesses, therefore making this comment completely irrelevent.
Once again, you completely miss the point. Your stereotype is only relevant to 0.3% of American employers. And I imagine that it probably doesn't even reflect reality in most of those cases.
Like my company, that has just announced record profits, but is just about to lay off 20% of the IT dept, as a cost cutting excercise. Last year the CEO got paid over 10 times the amount that this excercise will save the company.
Do they need those people? Evidently not. And it's none of your business how much money someone else makes anyway. It's not like your chief executive sneaks into the vault in the middle of the night and steals your pay. Someone (most likely your board of directors) decided he was worth whatever rate he is paid. I don't know the details of your case. But you can always quit and go somewhere else if you don't like the way things are being run.
Besides, a more relevant figure would be the spread of the dollar value of those jobs. (I don't know those figures.)
The complaint that many jobs are low paying is irrelevent for 4 reasons: 1) A lot of those jobs are supplementary income; 2) People take jobs for pay rates that are satisfying to them; 3) We need to trim down and compete--artificially raising wages aren't going to help; 4) The purpose of a job is to earn income and *not* to pump up the ego--life is tough, stop whining and deal with it. Better yet, work your way out of it. I've seen plenty of people who have very little income work hard to get an education and move up. It works. But only if you're willing to work hard.
Sure they have. And at this point, they've gone far beyond what is necessary and are burdening employers and contributing to the offshoring problem. Which is what this conversation is about anyway.
The fact remains that these same hard-working individuals would have created another fucking huge revolution here if the unions and governments didn't get the wake up call to economically enfranchise more people into what we call a middle class.
The middle class was created by the work of a lot of individuals and continues to be; the government does not create a middle class.
Social security is evil to you to, right? Of course it probably is and so is medicare, universal education, etc etc.
Not in and of itself, no. But, according to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, it's illegeal for the *national* legislature to do these things. Of course, there is a lot of evidence that the attempt to help people through government has a heartbreaking effect on society. But that's an entirely different discussion.
By the way, have you ever actually studied Marx
Yes.
aside from 40 years of corporate media telling you it's like saying you believe in the devil?
That's a laugh. The corporate media has been tilted far to the left for a long time. They spend their time trying to convince people of the validity of human progress and the purity of human nature--bedrocks of Marx's worldview. And the media doesn't believe in the devil.
And no, you can't pigeonhole me for a marxist for asking that simple fucking question you fucking brainwashed I'm tired of this cowboy shit when I pay high fucking taxes, because I do, country...I'm tired of it, the ignorance any "good ol' boys" like you.
That sentence didn't make any sense. Will you please clarify?
NEG KARMA! Sure, bring it on!
You certainly don't have to worry about *that* on Slashdot. Not if you're a socialist.
Seriously, if a bussiness cant survive on 5 people at $5/hr, then it shouldnt be alive any way.
That's for the labor market to decide.
Show me one example where a small business (pizza shop or whatever) is so on the edge, that a 1% increase in wages will break it.
It's not just a 1% increase in wages. It's over-regulation, union pressures, a constant stream of minimum-wage increases (and the minimum-wage system itself, which locks low-worth labor out of the labor market), and employees demanding more than the employer wants to pay. It makes absolute sense that if an employer has a choice between hiring an American employee x at $20/hr (who wants a lot of vacation time, isn't terribly hard-working, and draws a lot of benefits packages) and an Indian employee y at $5/hr (who is dedicated to keeping food on the table) who should that employer hire? I see nothing amiss here, unlike most people in the IT industry.
Thats not what I call a CEO of a corporate , but a MD/Owner). Lots of people that have little companies like to call themselves CEOs when they hardly really are.
It has nothing to do with what someone calls himself. It's about a highly-emotional stereotype used to whip up righteous indignation and envy. Nevertheless, most businesses (which generally *are* legal corporations) are run by perfectly normal people just like you and me. The venomous hatred spewed forth from people here on Slashdot is just ridiculous.
We need regulation, otherwise its back to 16hrs/day slave labour, because no business man cares if people drop dead, there are 250m others to choose from.
No business man cares if people drop dead? Where the hell did you get that idea? It's more of this silly irrational fear and hatred. Besides all that, I never said government should not regulate at all; rather, I said that the current levels of regulation were overly burdensome.
No, what increases cost of living SIR, is inflation generated by the increased M1/M3/M3 money supply (ie central banks making trillions in loans to govt and all). #1 rule in economics, supply/demand, the more cash is flowing in the system, ie supply, the cheaper it is worth, ie ONE DOLLAR will buy you LESS. So if money supply goes up 6%, that is the real inflation rate, not the faked numbers by govt that say its 3%, see price of food/energy/pm going up.
When wages go up, employers must raise prices to compensate for the cost increase. That drives up cost-of-living for *everybody*.
Has it occured to you that workers get "greedy" because their living costs are so fscking unbelieveably high, not because they think their "lazy asses" deserve to sit in a damn mansion and drive a friggin' SUV?
No, it hasn't. American's *are* greedy. They believe that they are *entitled* to a job and *entitled* to be paid a certain amount of money for doing that job. Go listen to the union rhetoric. American workers don't believe it's right that they should have to compete to get a job. The world owes them a living and it's supposedly a travesty of justice that someone else is willing to work harder for less pay. It's high time for us to stop whining and start getting our act together. And if you don't like the cost of living where you are: MOVE, dammit! Stop acting like you deserve to have it easy.
This is exactly why global capitalism cannot work - it's not a level playing field. With the assumption of a level playing field, the theory seems nice and the system beneficial to everyone.
The system isn't supposed to be beneficial to everyone. It's supposed to reward those who get off their collective asses and do something instead of whining like little children who don't get their way.
Usual Marxist fantasy bullsh*t. Hard working individuals created the middle-class. Unions and governments simply get in the way. You can read my response to 'kommakazi' above for details.
That's OK, it's Slashdot. As has been noted by some witty poster or other, a backslash would have been more appropriate: it would lean to the left like most of the posters.
Apropos: I notice that you have been modded down as "Offtopic." Congratulations.:-)
Re:Thanks, unions, government, and greedy employee
on
Train Your Own Replacement
·
· Score: 0, Insightful
Baaaaatter up!
If minimum wage labor is worth so little
Minimum wage employees generally aren't *worth* the lower limit set by the government. Minimum wage laws artificially raise the cost-of-living by raising the cost to produce products and services. They are inflexible impositions from on-high that stagnate the economy. Strike 1.
then explain why the giant corporations
Small business ("evil satan-spawn" is probably the term more familiar to you) makes up 99.7% of American employers and gives jobs to over 50% of the workforce. Strike 2.
that are fueled by minimum wage labor
Businesses are fueled by customers, not labor. Strike 3. Yer ouuuuta there! But let's give ya one more at-bat:
yet their minimum wage employees are still struggling from paycheck to paycheck
Better to struggle from paycheck to paycheck than not to get one at all. When minimum wages go up, employers cannot hire as many employees. (Or afford to stay in business at all. See also: move operations overseas.) And they cannot afford as much training and further education for the employees they already have. Those tend to be the people who really need the help. Whoops! Strike 1!
All while CEOs of such companies are practically swimming in cash. If there's any wage that's inflated, it has to be that of a CEO and other top level management positions.
Ah, you mean like the retired guy down the street in the 3 bedroom ranch-style? He runs his own business but I don't remember seeing any pools of money out back. Strike 2!
Not to mention the benefits these people get....yeah it must be a real killer to offer that dental pla n to your employees when you are holding millions in stock options.
Yes, everybody's just hoarding money so they don't have to give it to their disgusting employees. This isn't a Charles Dickens novel. Believe it or not, between the dental plans, health plans, retirement plans, overly strict worker's comp regulations, overly strict environmental regulations, mandated programs, union pressure, and constantly rising employee demands for wages and benefits, American businesses do find it difficult to employ Americans. Strike 3, hit the showers!
Thanks, unions, for pressuring employers to offer more pay and benefits than labor is worth! Thanks, government, for putting inflationary minimum wage hikes in place and for putting unworkable Worker's Comp and benefit burdens on employers! Thanks greedy lazy American employees for demanding higher and higher wages for less and less productivity! YOU ROCK!
But the Windows taskbar is clearly inferior. But it was better in 1995 than anything equivalent that the Mac had to offer until OS X came out. It took Apple four or five years to catch on to this.
Apple didn't really "catch on" to anything. They acquired the Dock concept from the same place they acquired almost everything else in OS X: OPENSTEP/Mach. Buying NeXT was the best decision anybody at Apple ever made. What's kind of interesting is that the Windows 95 look was heavily based on NeXTSTEP. Microsoft actually paid NeXT to use some of the 3D GUI concepts that had been part of NeXTSTEP since 1989. What a pity they didn't borrow the APIs as well.:-) At least we have GNUstep now for programming with decent APIs on all platforms.
With OSX, I think there is finally room for the technically savvy users to do something more with their Macintosh systems than to just run programs from Apple and other software vendors.
Yes, Cocoa and Objective-C kick ass. (And you can do cross-platform Cocoa with GNUstep.) Unfortunately, there's still a stigma held over from the pre-OS X days. Whenever somebody mentions the Mac around our CS professors, all I hear are jokes.
While this is not racist, it is almost as bad. Do you know any Haitians? Have you been there? Obviously not.
I'm sorry, but a nation DOES NOT end up with the problems Haiti has when the population is full of morally upright people. Governments--even autocratic ones--always reflect the nature of the people. You can take it as axiomatic that a corrupt government stems from a corrupt populace.
Russians have 3 arms too, and all Jews roast Christian babies on the Shabbat.
The claim has always been that Jews roasted Arab girls for passover sacrifices, not Christians. Of course I think that's silly. Don't bother trying to paint me with that brush. BTW, why don't you use a Slashdot account so you can know that there has been a reply to your message?
And if all it takes is guns to solve things, how come the USA didn't stomp the living shit out of Vietnam?
We did. What we didn't do is stomp the living shit out of the Soviet Union and China, who were supplying the north with troops, weapons, supplies, and military advice. LBJ and McNamara tried to micromanage the war against the counsel of the men on the ground (not unlike Hitler in WWII) and totally screwed things up. And getting back to the grandparent's point, he never said that it *only* took guns; he just said that communication is not enough.
Very little good will come of whatever violent revolt happened in Haiti. Very little good would come from some band of revolutionaries getting guns and taking over China. It just starts over. Someone else is in control of a bunch of ignorant people. Some other guys with guns will come along.
That's all true but what happens after a revolution is completely irrelevant to the grandparent's point. The problem in Haiti is that the entire population is corrupt and morally bankrupt. With such a governance talent pool to choose from, what do you expect out of any government?
MPlayer seems to be able to handle the WMA stream just fine for me. But there's nothing going on right now; it just says that there's going to be a press briefing at 4:00 Pacific.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worth noting that the above reduction covers the comments on *all* Slashdot stories. Perhaps this should just be posted at the top of each page?
I think Windows 1.0 came out in 1986 or so. I got to play around with it on my dad's work computer. I was only about 8 years old, so I don't remember too much; but I think it probably blew chunks. It's a safe bet, anyway. :-)
I stream WMA and WMV with MPlayer and that seems to work fine too, unless I'm missing something.
Yeah, there's even a song about it: Charlie and the VTA.
I don't either. I wouldn't want you to get that impression. I just believe that it's been demonstrated to work better than any of the alternatives, when it's done right. Attempting to "channel" economic forces productively ends up getting away from you fast. It's just something that can't be effectively controlled.
In smaller societies, organized into trading blocks, so long as the economic forces, whatever they be, develop into not only individual means to prosperity, but maintain social responsibility in the communities where they do business.
The hearts of people have to change for social responsibility to work, whether the profit motive is there or not. I think you could say that profit-motive is a symptom of my proposed depravity of man. I know we don't agree on that, but...
My diatribes started one night, after one really bad day, and, having read someone's post connected to one of your threads.
No problem. It really was nice to talk to you. It sharpens debate skills. :-)
Take care...
There's no need to turn the TV off when it's not on in the first place. I don't have time for the garbage on television.
no, I don't have it all figured out
It's good to know you're not arrogant.
just getting older and listening to shithead know it all punks. Ad hominenum? "http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=103134&cid=87 89646"
That's a link to *your* post.
Yeah, pay your taxes, compain that about 2% real goes to welfare while 53% goes to "our" adventures.
The job of the national government is described in Article I of the Constitution. *Only* those powers *specifically* granted to Congress are legal. They do not include socialism or corporatism of *any* kind; all so-called "welfare," whether corporate or individual, is *illegal*. How hard is that to understand? It's not the national government's job.
Dude, don't even bother responding, or do, who gives a fuck, YOU guys won! Ok? Happy!
I'll be happy when we actually *have* won: when the national government is returned to the size and scope circa 1791.
And NO the media is NOT liberal. Yeah, Rupert Murdoch is a liberal. Give me a fucking break. NPR is right-wing to me.
Rupert Murdoch doesn't own most media. And he's not a conservative. Have you seen the sensationalist crap on his networks? And you've got NPR, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, and all of Hollywood on your side. You can't get much more leftist than Katie Couric glowing with delight and describing Castro's Cuba as a "paradise." Give *me* a break.
Dude, we live in a 2-party no real "fundamental" difference State! Yeah, Democracy! for the people! by the people!
It is democracy and that's part of the problem. This nation was intended to be a republic. The garbage you see in this nation is a reflection of the desires of the people. That should convince you of the depravity of human nature; but I'm sure it won't. You'll go on believing that humanity is essentially good and can achieve perfection. It's a fool's errand.
Yeah, FUCK you.
Yes, I love you too.
You undoubetdly will have some elequent or some snobby response
You want to see snobbery? Go look at John Kerry or Ted Kennedy. Or anybody else in the Democrat party. Or anybody in Hollywood. Or most of the people in the elitist Northeast or California.
which I'll never read because this is all fuckin bullshit like arguing with Fox News.
Then why did you bother writing it?
Cancel this subscription. Later, Enjoy.
You too. It was nice talking to you. Hope you learn to calm down a bit before you give yourself heart disease or something.
Oh,yes. That'll be the board of directors (they, I believe, make up a majority of the shareholders) deciding how much the directors should be paid (mostly in share options, so getting more control of the company as they get paid). No conflict of interests, there.
Actually, there aren't. Those options are worthless if the business is poorly run (see above). I don't know the details, but it sounds like they've decided that they *can* cut those jobs and still. Whether they're right or not is yet to be determined. If they are correct, cutting costs while still providing good service is beneficial to the company. If not, they'll die. Again, see above.
There don't seem to be many places that aren't run like this, so not really much of an option.
Sure there are. We've got a great one right here. Something like 750 employees. Good pay, good treatment, nice place to live (with a very low cost-of-living). Where do you live? (You can email me at jhclouse at juno dot com if you can't reply here.)
That's your problem. Small and medium businesses drive the economy. Those who argue for extreme government regulation and economic control focus exclusively on large multi-nationals and build ridiculous emotional stereotypes of employers. Then, they argue for government practices that strangle small and medium sized businesses.
Oh, sorry I didn't use the proper corporate gobblydigook to describe my point, sure businesses are fueled by customers, but they are built on employees. You're not going to get good service from a business without well treated employees, it just doesn't happen.
Exactly. That's why companies that don't treat their employees well go out of business. You're getting it after all: you're just not thinking it all the way through.
So basically screw everyone who works entry level jobs and force them to live inevitably in poverty.
Straw man. I never said anything like that. The *vast* majority of people working minimum-wage jobs are doing so for supplemental income (e.g.: teenagers or spouse). They're not living in poverty.
Another data point: illegal immigrants are the quintessential "low-income" wage-earners. A local landscaper here employs illegal immigrants from Mexico for $12 per hour. No joke. Perhaps he's not the evil slave-driving capitalist hyena you suspect him to be? He's not even required to pay minimum-wage but he pays more than minimum-wage. How did a human being with compassion get in the position of an employer, one wonders?
I'm talking about big businesses. Not small businesses.
See above.
The big ones that employ half our population
In other words: how dare they enable half (slightly less than half, actually) of our population to earn a living?
and whose execs account for the vast majority of the money in this country.
So? CEOs are employees as well. They don't set their own pay rate: the board of directors decides how much they're worth. And that's their business.
Even so, the number of CEOs in America who are rich is miniscule. As I noted earlier, 99.7% of American employers are small businesses, each run by people like you and me.
They can easily afford to pay when minimum wage goes up. Would shaving that 20 cents times x minimum wage employees off the hourly wages of the top level execs really hurt them?
Combined with excessive regulation and unreasonable demands from employees who make much more than minimum wage? You betcha. Additionally, as described above, the minimum wage locks low-end jobs out of the labor market.
Yeah cuz I know all those minimum wage employees need so goddamn much training to know how to make a Taco or use a broom. That must cost employers dearly !!!
It's not about teaching them to do their current job more efficiently. Many minimum wage employers sponsor education for their employees to help them get higher-paying jobs later on.
Also, I didn't know that my local fast food joint (or any other minimum wage employer) was going to help pay my way through college! In your dreams...
Not at all. You may be surprised to know that many minimum-wage employers actually do exactly that. Burger King. Chick-Fil-A. Wendys. Just as examples.
Once again you completely miss the fact that I was talking about large corporations, not small businesses, therefore making this comment completely irrelevent.
Once again, you completely miss the point. Your stereotype is only relevant to 0.3% of American employers. And I imagine that it probably doesn't even reflect reality in most of those cases.
Perhaps if they received decent
I'll respond if you can turn that into something that makes sense.
Do they need those people? Evidently not. And it's none of your business how much money someone else makes anyway. It's not like your chief executive sneaks into the vault in the middle of the night and steals your pay. Someone (most likely your board of directors) decided he was worth whatever rate he is paid. I don't know the details of your case. But you can always quit and go somewhere else if you don't like the way things are being run.
The numbers came from this page
Besides, a more relevant figure would be the spread of the dollar value of those jobs. (I don't know those figures.)
The complaint that many jobs are low paying is irrelevent for 4 reasons: 1) A lot of those jobs are supplementary income; 2) People take jobs for pay rates that are satisfying to them; 3) We need to trim down and compete--artificially raising wages aren't going to help; 4) The purpose of a job is to earn income and *not* to pump up the ego--life is tough, stop whining and deal with it. Better yet, work your way out of it. I've seen plenty of people who have very little income work hard to get an education and move up. It works. But only if you're willing to work hard.
I don't have a bubble, thank you very much.
but unions and governments helped a great deal.
Sure they have. And at this point, they've gone far beyond what is necessary and are burdening employers and contributing to the offshoring problem. Which is what this conversation is about anyway.
The fact remains that these same hard-working individuals would have created another fucking huge revolution here if the unions and governments didn't get the wake up call to economically enfranchise more people into what we call a middle class.
The middle class was created by the work of a lot of individuals and continues to be; the government does not create a middle class.
Social security is evil to you to, right? Of course it probably is and so is medicare, universal education, etc etc.
Not in and of itself, no. But, according to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, it's illegeal for the *national* legislature to do these things. Of course, there is a lot of evidence that the attempt to help people through government has a heartbreaking effect on society. But that's an entirely different discussion.
By the way, have you ever actually studied Marx
Yes.
aside from 40 years of corporate media telling you it's like saying you believe in the devil?
That's a laugh. The corporate media has been tilted far to the left for a long time. They spend their time trying to convince people of the validity of human progress and the purity of human nature--bedrocks of Marx's worldview. And the media doesn't believe in the devil.
And no, you can't pigeonhole me for a marxist for asking that simple fucking question you fucking brainwashed I'm tired of this cowboy shit when I pay high fucking taxes, because I do, country...I'm tired of it, the ignorance any "good ol' boys" like you.
That sentence didn't make any sense. Will you please clarify?
NEG KARMA! Sure, bring it on!
You certainly don't have to worry about *that* on Slashdot. Not if you're a socialist.
That's for the labor market to decide.
Show me one example where a small business (pizza shop or whatever) is so on the edge, that a 1% increase in wages will break it.
It's not just a 1% increase in wages. It's over-regulation, union pressures, a constant stream of minimum-wage increases (and the minimum-wage system itself, which locks low-worth labor out of the labor market), and employees demanding more than the employer wants to pay. It makes absolute sense that if an employer has a choice between hiring an American employee x at $20/hr (who wants a lot of vacation time, isn't terribly hard-working, and draws a lot of benefits packages) and an Indian employee y at $5/hr (who is dedicated to keeping food on the table) who should that employer hire? I see nothing amiss here, unlike most people in the IT industry.
Thats not what I call a CEO of a corporate , but a MD/Owner). Lots of people that have little companies like to call themselves CEOs when they hardly really are.
It has nothing to do with what someone calls himself. It's about a highly-emotional stereotype used to whip up righteous indignation and envy. Nevertheless, most businesses (which generally *are* legal corporations) are run by perfectly normal people just like you and me. The venomous hatred spewed forth from people here on Slashdot is just ridiculous.
We need regulation, otherwise its back to 16hrs/day slave labour, because no business man cares if people drop dead, there are 250m others to choose from.
No business man cares if people drop dead? Where the hell did you get that idea? It's more of this silly irrational fear and hatred. Besides all that, I never said government should not regulate at all; rather, I said that the current levels of regulation were overly burdensome.
No, what increases cost of living SIR, is inflation generated by the increased M1/M3/M3 money supply (ie central banks making trillions in loans to govt and all). #1 rule in economics, supply/demand, the more cash is flowing in the system, ie supply, the cheaper it is worth, ie ONE DOLLAR will buy you LESS. So if money supply goes up 6%, that is the real inflation rate, not the faked numbers by govt that say its 3%, see price of food/energy/pm going up.
When wages go up, employers must raise prices to compensate for the cost increase. That drives up cost-of-living for *everybody*.
No, it hasn't. American's *are* greedy. They believe that they are *entitled* to a job and *entitled* to be paid a certain amount of money for doing that job. Go listen to the union rhetoric. American workers don't believe it's right that they should have to compete to get a job. The world owes them a living and it's supposedly a travesty of justice that someone else is willing to work harder for less pay. It's high time for us to stop whining and start getting our act together. And if you don't like the cost of living where you are: MOVE, dammit! Stop acting like you deserve to have it easy.
This is exactly why global capitalism cannot work - it's not a level playing field. With the assumption of a level playing field, the theory seems nice and the system beneficial to everyone.
The system isn't supposed to be beneficial to everyone. It's supposed to reward those who get off their collective asses and do something instead of whining like little children who don't get their way.
Usual Marxist fantasy bullsh*t. Hard working individuals created the middle-class. Unions and governments simply get in the way. You can read my response to 'kommakazi' above for details.
Apropos: I notice that you have been modded down as "Offtopic." Congratulations. :-)
If minimum wage labor is worth so little
Minimum wage employees generally aren't *worth* the lower limit set by the government. Minimum wage laws artificially raise the cost-of-living by raising the cost to produce products and services. They are inflexible impositions from on-high that stagnate the economy. Strike 1.
then explain why the giant corporations
Small business ("evil satan-spawn" is probably the term more familiar to you) makes up 99.7% of American employers and gives jobs to over 50% of the workforce. Strike 2.
that are fueled by minimum wage labor
Businesses are fueled by customers, not labor. Strike 3. Yer ouuuuta there! But let's give ya one more at-bat:
yet their minimum wage employees are still struggling from paycheck to paycheck
Better to struggle from paycheck to paycheck than not to get one at all. When minimum wages go up, employers cannot hire as many employees. (Or afford to stay in business at all. See also: move operations overseas.) And they cannot afford as much training and further education for the employees they already have. Those tend to be the people who really need the help. Whoops! Strike 1!
All while CEOs of such companies are practically swimming in cash. If there's any wage that's inflated, it has to be that of a CEO and other top level management positions.
Ah, you mean like the retired guy down the street in the 3 bedroom ranch-style? He runs his own business but I don't remember seeing any pools of money out back. Strike 2!
Not to mention the benefits these people get....yeah it must be a real killer to offer that dental pla n to your employees when you are holding millions in stock options.
Yes, everybody's just hoarding money so they don't have to give it to their disgusting employees. This isn't a Charles Dickens novel. Believe it or not, between the dental plans, health plans, retirement plans, overly strict worker's comp regulations, overly strict environmental regulations, mandated programs, union pressure, and constantly rising employee demands for wages and benefits, American businesses do find it difficult to employ Americans. Strike 3, hit the showers!
Thanks, unions, for pressuring employers to offer more pay and benefits than labor is worth! Thanks, government, for putting inflationary minimum wage hikes in place and for putting unworkable Worker's Comp and benefit burdens on employers! Thanks greedy lazy American employees for demanding higher and higher wages for less and less productivity! YOU ROCK!
Yes, but if they had bought Be, we'd all be subjected to the godawful monstrosity that is C++. /me loves Objective-C. :-)
I'm with you on that. Being a poor college student, it's just not in the cards.
Apple didn't really "catch on" to anything. They acquired the Dock concept from the same place they acquired almost everything else in OS X: OPENSTEP/Mach. Buying NeXT was the best decision anybody at Apple ever made. What's kind of interesting is that the Windows 95 look was heavily based on NeXTSTEP. Microsoft actually paid NeXT to use some of the 3D GUI concepts that had been part of NeXTSTEP since 1989. What a pity they didn't borrow the APIs as well. :-) At least we have GNUstep now for programming with decent APIs on all platforms.
Yes, Cocoa and Objective-C kick ass. (And you can do cross-platform Cocoa with GNUstep.) Unfortunately, there's still a stigma held over from the pre-OS X days. Whenever somebody mentions the Mac around our CS professors, all I hear are jokes.
I'm sorry, but a nation DOES NOT end up with the problems Haiti has when the population is full of morally upright people. Governments--even autocratic ones--always reflect the nature of the people. You can take it as axiomatic that a corrupt government stems from a corrupt populace.
Russians have 3 arms too, and all Jews roast Christian babies on the Shabbat.
The claim has always been that Jews roasted Arab girls for passover sacrifices, not Christians. Of course I think that's silly. Don't bother trying to paint me with that brush. BTW, why don't you use a Slashdot account so you can know that there has been a reply to your message?
We did. What we didn't do is stomp the living shit out of the Soviet Union and China, who were supplying the north with troops, weapons, supplies, and military advice. LBJ and McNamara tried to micromanage the war against the counsel of the men on the ground (not unlike Hitler in WWII) and totally screwed things up. And getting back to the grandparent's point, he never said that it *only* took guns; he just said that communication is not enough.
Very little good will come of whatever violent revolt happened in Haiti. Very little good would come from some band of revolutionaries getting guns and taking over China. It just starts over. Someone else is in control of a bunch of ignorant people. Some other guys with guns will come along.
That's all true but what happens after a revolution is completely irrelevant to the grandparent's point. The problem in Haiti is that the entire population is corrupt and morally bankrupt. With such a governance talent pool to choose from, what do you expect out of any government?
MPlayer seems to be able to handle the WMA stream just fine for me. But there's nothing going on right now; it just says that there's going to be a press briefing at 4:00 Pacific.