UI is funded through payroll taxes - the employer pays the tax.
I'm betting he's self-employed. The self-employed are the ones who get truly screwed by our tax system--they pay both the employer and employee halves of all payroll related taxes, and as a result are taxed double. His anger at the situation--particularly about being forced to pay 3x the allowable benefit for his insurance--is quite understandable, and completely justified.
seriously, whatare the odd you would have stashed that 10 K away abd had it available?
Instead of the government collecting a tax, set up a situation where the money that would be taxed goes into an interest bearing fund owned by the individual and only accessible when you're unemployed. See, that way when you retire you can access the funds you've never used. If you die before retirement, your money can be passed on to your heirs.
In the context of social security, everyone seems to be against this idea. To me, it just makes perfect sense, and unemployment insurance is another good niche for it.
Don't get me wrong--I'm in full agreement with you on this issue. I was simply correcting the assertion that eminent domain only goes back to the railroads of the 19th century.
Another point that has become somewhat of a sore spot that companies like HP and Dell are going to have to learn quickly is support. When I call IBM, I get someone with a brain who isn't just reading from a script. All too often when you call a company like HP/Dell you get some foreigner who is reading form a script, and hangs up on you when you deviate from that script.
I can't think of a single admin that wants to be treated like some idiot user when their shiny new $15,000 server just decided to put its fingers in its ears.
Thankfully, Dell's server line doesn't get treated like its laptop or desktop lines. Last time I had to call for support, I got a competant professional who wasn't working from a script, did NOT suggest absurd remedies (oh, your display adapter isn't working? have you tried removing all floppy disks from the drive?) The guy actually listened to what my problem was and what steps I'd already taken, and we went from there.
Given that we have standardized on Dell as corporate policy (which, unfortunately, I have no say in) I was reassured by this.
But this is more than sufficient that if there were intelligent life (fabulously unlikely) then they would quickly notice that things were a few percent lighter at night than during the day.
Sounds like a good premise for a sci-fi story: a civilization where all major construction is performed at night, because it's cheaper.
I work(ed) at a "school" photography studio for the past year, and that $40 you pay for the package doesn't even provide enough cash (amortized, as you say, over the student population) to pay enough to keep the studio staffed full time through the year.
I'm amazed at this attitude (the other guy above you had the same one) that "there's really not enough work in this particular segment to make this a year round career, therefore you need to subsidize me." Bullshit. I'm NOT disagreeing that you guys are talented in and skilled at your choice of career, but for god's sake FIND OTHER WORK DURING THE OFF SEASON. It's like a landscaper (bad comparison, I know--creative/skilled vs. unskilled labor--but bear with me) demanding that he needs to be paid $20/hr because he only works six months out of the year.
The backend to "shoot a school photo" as you put it, just in the equipment is something to the effect of 7-10k per photo station (the way we shoot which is perhap a bit forward tech wise)
I recognize your fixed costs are quite high, but you depreciate those costs over 3-5 years, not one job. I was actually expecting your equipment costs to be more while I was ranting--last time I looked at that sort of thing, it totalled out alot higher.
So the 30 seconds you are talking about is NOTHING near the actual reality.
You referenced my "amortized over the student population" comment, but think I'm dumb enough to think that you're JUST spending 30 seconds per kid? No, I understand the reality even though I'm not in your industry.
You don't have an idea of the equipment, training and cost involved. Photography is a VERY hard industry to make a living in and you folks have no idea. The idea of a wedding photog being one of the top-ten overpaid careers is laughable. It is a hard job, that doesn't pay well, and people think, "Hey I'll just put disposable cameras on the table, that will do the job better anyway"
Once upon a time, I worked on advertising and albumn covers. I have a decent grasp of the equipment, training, and costs involved (or at least what they were ten years ago.:) However, as the customer what I expect to be paying for is your time and actual expenses. As far as I'm concerned "+30%, because there are no weddings between september and march" isn't an expense you need to be passing on to me.
Several meetings before the wedding (no fee for those) An engagement session (maybe no fee for that) Selecting the engagement session meeting (not charging hourly for that) Printing the engagement session (maybe an album, maybe souvenirs at the wedding, this can vary) The actual wedding shoot (the shortest part of all this in all likelyhood) Go through the photos (not charging that nominal hourly here either) Make the proof set (See Nominal Hourly) Meeting about what photos are going to be selected (See that hourly again) Procuring the album(s) and making the prints for them (this maybe broken out, but just as often is in the "overall price")
So charge for it! Other than an initial meeting (personally, I liken this to a job interview) a professional should be getting paid for the hours they're putting into a project. You missed something else I said: I have nothing against paying talented people what they're worth. And your list above misses the very point we're talking about: after you do the above, and I pay you for it, you retain the copyright to the images.
So for a "5 hour" wedding, as a photog how many hours have I put in? 20? 50? none of those are billed at "$200 an hour" last I checked.
25 hours @ $200/hr = $5k, and I've seen people pay even more than that. I'm sorry; while you do raise some good points, you have not changed my opinion that your industry basically consists of "lowball the quote, then hold the images hostage."
How does something like a wedding photo not fall under the category of "work for hire?"
When people tell me how much they pay for wedding photos, I'm always stunned--if you were paying a nominal rate of $200/hr, things would be significantly less expensive! School photos are even worse, when the amount of time spent per child is less than a minute and the setup time amortizes across an entire student body... and the package of 20 wallet sized photos (that sometimes come on a single sheet you get to cut out yourself) costs $40.
I have nothing against paying people what they're worth for good results, but cases like the above are absurd.
As for being "difficult, if not impossible" to move? No, it's not. I've had to do it several times over the years for various reasons. It's a pain in the butt sometimes, but it's not a good reason for continuing to pay money to a spammer-supporting operation.
Since you're contributing to this discussion in a meaningful way (and you mention leasing half a rack at a colo) I'm going to take it for granted that you have at least a moderate amount of IT experience. Moving, for you, would be a pain in the ass but not something particularly strenuous and would probably take you little more time or cost much more than is involved with moving the equipment from one colo to another.
However: say you're in a position where you lease your CPE from the provider. Say you're locked into a multi-year agreement with the ISP. Imagine going through such a move when you have no in-house IT support (say you're a four or five person garage operation?) Now moving is not so easy, nor is it inexpensive. Your business is esentially being held hostage by the RBL with the intent of forcing a third party whom you do business with to change its policies.
I'm as anti-spam as the next guy who has to admin mail servers (not to mention getting massive amounts of spam in my personal mailboxes) but somewhere along the line we've forgotten that the purpose of an email server is to deliver mail to users. Anti-spam is a tool that is supposed to make delivering mail easier (by reducing cost and overhead caused by spam) but turning it into a political statement by which we refuse to deliver legitimate mail misses the point entirely.
Imagine if you will if the US Post Office decided it was no longer going to accept mail from entire zip codes, because bulk mailers lived there. The idea is absurd!
When I found out, I raised royal heck with my ISP, and told them in no uncertain circumstances that I would pull my service if they didn't clean up. They kicked the spammer, the Spamhaus listings were gone the next day, and within a week, the SPEWS listing covering me had been reduced so that I was no longer affected.
This is great--IF you have the leverage to do it. If you're a large (six figures a year in spending and up) customer, you can get the ISP to jump at your command. Likewise, if you're dealing with a small local ISP, you have a significant amount of leverage even if your spending is low.
On the other hand, if you're someone with a single DS1 being provided by someone like Verio, you have NO power to negotiate or threaten. Sure, you CAN leave, but for a small organization (perhaps one with minimal or even no IT support) this kind of move is difficult, if not impossible--and in any case, is going to be really expensive. And what happens when the next time (and there will be a next time) comes around? You get to go through it all again.
RBLs (when used exclusively, instead of in some kind of weighted average ala spamassassin) are like a bad action movie--you know the ones, where the cops walk into a crowded theater and open up on the bad guys, while ignoring anyone else in the line of fire. It doesn't matter who gets taken out as long as we get our man--right?
The tinfoiled, myself among them, will point out that even if there is a paper trail, it may never be seen if an election is not close enough. In a lot of places, manual recounts are triggered by elections being too close; if elections are decided by electronic tabulation first, we will never see a paper ballot.
Personally, I like the precision that electronic voting has the potential to deliver--and the instant results are definitely a plus. The solution to your problem is, of course, to count the paper record of a random sampling of machines and compare them to the electrionic records of those machines, in every election. This verifies that everything is on the up and up.
Now, what tinfoil hatted folk like me are wondering is "where the fuck was the new york times these last few election cycles when both conservatives and liberals were pointing out how easy it was to defraud the machines and asking 'why dont these things have paper records?'"
It seems strange to justify your nation's problems by simply pointing and saying, "Well we're not there yet".
I'm not attempting to justify anything--in fact, I'm disgusted by the current state of affairs--and there was a reason my "yet" was a question, not a statement.
It's still quite possible for the US to avert the police state that appears to be coming. China, on the other hand, already is a brutal totalitarian police state. See the difference?
That's because you're only looking at oversized nation-states. Communism works better on much smaller scales, e.g. communes. (So does Democracy, for that matter, e.g. communes.)
The important thing about that is, of course, that communes are strictly voluntary--if you don't like it you can always leave. I have no problem with anyone who wants to live in such a manner, and wish them the best of luck.
But as a system of government, communism sucks and results in brutal totalitarian regimes--and there's no historical evidence to suggest it ever will do anything but.
No one on either end of the spectrum with an ounce of sense has ever said that.
I agree that this statement is true, but there's quite a few folk without said lick of sense that always post something along those lines in any/. story related to politics, civil liberties, etc.
Once you give the government that much power, once it can decide what you may or may not own, once it can decide that someone or something else is more deserving of something YOU own, then tyranny is inevitable. I don't care if the original goal of the government was Economic Justice or Aryan Supremacy, in the end they will all end up the same.
Sadly, this is the result of any government whose citizens allow it too much power... and the nature of government is that it will always seek to increase its power. The United States will get there one day, too (some would argue we're well down that path) and our founders knew that going in.
Whenever I see a "I'd take the ruler of North Korea over George W. Bush" or even a simple "US is teh sux0r!" post, it always burns me up that those same people are remarkably silent when we see something like this.
Yep, our nation has some serious problems right now, but we haven't (yet?) even come close to this kind of garbage. So for the next guy who says, "I can't wait for China to replace the US as the global superpower" all I can say is "be careful what you wish for.
In defense of the sci-fi channel Mystery Science Theater 3000 was kick ass!
Actually, this goes to the point of what the grandparent was getting at: MST3k was originally on Comedy Central (actually, it was originally on KTMA but we dont need to go into that) and Scifi pretty much just ruined and cancelled it.
Correct, copyrights last 95 years currently (regardless of whether the original author still lives or not).
Close, but not entirely correct. Copyright on works created by corporations does indeed last 95 years. However, works created by human authors are protected by copyright for the life of the author + 70 years, which is potentially far longer.
A hypothetical book written by a person 25 years old in the year 2000, whose author dies at the ripe old age of 75, will be covered by copyright for a total of 120 years.
Re:Tinfoil Hat Jokes aside
on
Tinfoil Hat House
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
So let me get this straight: you knew/know for a fact that he was sane, actually being followed, and that all of this was quite possibly engineered to end in the way it did... and you did nothing about it?
Seems like the simple counter measure is a "blacklist" of the honeymonkey servers.
You're ignoring that the honeymonkey people will undoubtedly react to those countermeasures... and I think it's safe to say they'd win in the end. Given that worms, spam, spyware, etc are everyone's problem, it's in the interest of large ISPs to cooperate by providing resources to this effort.
A blacklist won't be so simple when you have to worry about more than just Microsoft's netblocks... and blacklisting those belonging to, say, AOL kind of defeats the purpose of writing the worm to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
UI is funded through payroll taxes - the employer pays the tax.
I'm betting he's self-employed. The self-employed are the ones who get truly screwed by our tax system--they pay both the employer and employee halves of all payroll related taxes, and as a result are taxed double. His anger at the situation--particularly about being forced to pay 3x the allowable benefit for his insurance--is quite understandable, and completely justified.
seriously, whatare the odd you would have stashed that 10 K away abd had it available?
Instead of the government collecting a tax, set up a situation where the money that would be taxed goes into an interest bearing fund owned by the individual and only accessible when you're unemployed. See, that way when you retire you can access the funds you've never used. If you die before retirement, your money can be passed on to your heirs.
In the context of social security, everyone seems to be against this idea. To me, it just makes perfect sense, and unemployment insurance is another good niche for it.
Don't get me wrong--I'm in full agreement with you on this issue. I was simply correcting the assertion that eminent domain only goes back to the railroads of the 19th century.
It pisses me of when Americans confuse Democrats with liberals.
It pisses me off when people forget that words mean different things in different places.
The whole concept is from legislation dating back to the 1800's for the railroads to gobble up property to build cross-country rail lines.
Actually, eminent domain is mentioned in the constitution, so the concept goes back further than you state.
If his 12V arms shorted I don't think it would even phase this guy.
:)
I've gotta ask: was that an intentional pun, or just luck?
Another point that has become somewhat of a sore spot that companies like HP and Dell are going to have to learn quickly is support. When I call IBM, I get someone with a brain who isn't just reading from a script. All too often when you call a company like HP/Dell you get some foreigner who is reading form a script, and hangs up on you when you deviate from that script.
I can't think of a single admin that wants to be treated like some idiot user when their shiny new $15,000 server just decided to put its fingers in its ears.
Thankfully, Dell's server line doesn't get treated like its laptop or desktop lines. Last time I had to call for support, I got a competant professional who wasn't working from a script, did NOT suggest absurd remedies (oh, your display adapter isn't working? have you tried removing all floppy disks from the drive?) The guy actually listened to what my problem was and what steps I'd already taken, and we went from there.
Given that we have standardized on Dell as corporate policy (which, unfortunately, I have no say in) I was reassured by this.
But this is more than sufficient that if there were intelligent life (fabulously unlikely) then they would quickly notice that things were a few percent lighter at night than during the day.
Sounds like a good premise for a sci-fi story: a civilization where all major construction is performed at night, because it's cheaper.
(scribbles into notebook)
Thanks!
I work(ed) at a "school" photography studio for the past year, and that $40 you pay for the package doesn't even provide enough cash (amortized, as you say, over the student population) to pay enough to keep the studio staffed full time through the year.
:) However, as the customer what I expect to be paying for is your time and actual expenses. As far as I'm concerned "+30%, because there are no weddings between september and march" isn't an expense you need to be passing on to me.
I'm amazed at this attitude (the other guy above you had the same one) that "there's really not enough work in this particular segment to make this a year round career, therefore you need to subsidize me." Bullshit. I'm NOT disagreeing that you guys are talented in and skilled at your choice of career, but for god's sake FIND OTHER WORK DURING THE OFF SEASON. It's like a landscaper (bad comparison, I know--creative/skilled vs. unskilled labor--but bear with me) demanding that he needs to be paid $20/hr because he only works six months out of the year.
The backend to "shoot a school photo" as you put it, just in the equipment is something to the effect of 7-10k per photo station (the way we shoot which is perhap a bit forward tech wise)
I recognize your fixed costs are quite high, but you depreciate those costs over 3-5 years, not one job. I was actually expecting your equipment costs to be more while I was ranting--last time I looked at that sort of thing, it totalled out alot higher.
So the 30 seconds you are talking about is NOTHING near the actual reality.
You referenced my "amortized over the student population" comment, but think I'm dumb enough to think that you're JUST spending 30 seconds per kid? No, I understand the reality even though I'm not in your industry.
You don't have an idea of the equipment, training and cost involved. Photography is a VERY hard industry to make a living in and you folks have no idea. The idea of a wedding photog being one of the top-ten overpaid careers is laughable. It is a hard job, that doesn't pay well, and people think, "Hey I'll just put disposable cameras on the table, that will do the job better anyway"
Once upon a time, I worked on advertising and albumn covers. I have a decent grasp of the equipment, training, and costs involved (or at least what they were ten years ago.
Several meetings before the wedding (no fee for those)
An engagement session (maybe no fee for that)
Selecting the engagement session meeting (not charging hourly for that)
Printing the engagement session (maybe an album, maybe souvenirs at the wedding, this can vary)
The actual wedding shoot (the shortest part of all this in all likelyhood)
Go through the photos (not charging that nominal hourly here either)
Make the proof set (See Nominal Hourly)
Meeting about what photos are going to be selected (See that hourly again)
Procuring the album(s) and making the prints for them (this maybe broken out, but just as often is in the "overall price")
So charge for it! Other than an initial meeting (personally, I liken this to a job interview) a professional should be getting paid for the hours they're putting into a project. You missed something else I said: I have nothing against paying talented people what they're worth. And your list above misses the very point we're talking about: after you do the above, and I pay you for it, you retain the copyright to the images.
So for a "5 hour" wedding, as a photog how many hours have I put in? 20? 50? none of those are billed at "$200 an hour" last I checked.
25 hours @ $200/hr = $5k, and I've seen people pay even more than that. I'm sorry; while you do raise some good points, you have not changed my opinion that your industry basically consists of "lowball the quote, then hold the images hostage."
How does something like a wedding photo not fall under the category of "work for hire?"
When people tell me how much they pay for wedding photos, I'm always stunned--if you were paying a nominal rate of $200/hr, things would be significantly less expensive! School photos are even worse, when the amount of time spent per child is less than a minute and the setup time amortizes across an entire student body... and the package of 20 wallet sized photos (that sometimes come on a single sheet you get to cut out yourself) costs $40.
I have nothing against paying people what they're worth for good results, but cases like the above are absurd.
As for being "difficult, if not impossible" to move? No, it's not. I've had to do it several times over the years for various reasons. It's a pain in the butt sometimes, but it's not a good reason for continuing to pay money to a spammer-supporting operation.
Since you're contributing to this discussion in a meaningful way (and you mention leasing half a rack at a colo) I'm going to take it for granted that you have at least a moderate amount of IT experience. Moving, for you, would be a pain in the ass but not something particularly strenuous and would probably take you little more time or cost much more than is involved with moving the equipment from one colo to another.
However: say you're in a position where you lease your CPE from the provider. Say you're locked into a multi-year agreement with the ISP. Imagine going through such a move when you have no in-house IT support (say you're a four or five person garage operation?) Now moving is not so easy, nor is it inexpensive. Your business is esentially being held hostage by the RBL with the intent of forcing a third party whom you do business with to change its policies.
I'm as anti-spam as the next guy who has to admin mail servers (not to mention getting massive amounts of spam in my personal mailboxes) but somewhere along the line we've forgotten that the purpose of an email server is to deliver mail to users. Anti-spam is a tool that is supposed to make delivering mail easier (by reducing cost and overhead caused by spam) but turning it into a political statement by which we refuse to deliver legitimate mail misses the point entirely.
Imagine if you will if the US Post Office decided it was no longer going to accept mail from entire zip codes, because bulk mailers lived there. The idea is absurd!
When I found out, I raised royal heck with my ISP, and told them in no uncertain circumstances that I would pull my service if they didn't clean up. They kicked the spammer, the Spamhaus listings were gone the next day, and within a week, the SPEWS listing covering me had been reduced so that I was no longer affected.
This is great--IF you have the leverage to do it. If you're a large (six figures a year in spending and up) customer, you can get the ISP to jump at your command. Likewise, if you're dealing with a small local ISP, you have a significant amount of leverage even if your spending is low.
On the other hand, if you're someone with a single DS1 being provided by someone like Verio, you have NO power to negotiate or threaten. Sure, you CAN leave, but for a small organization (perhaps one with minimal or even no IT support) this kind of move is difficult, if not impossible--and in any case, is going to be really expensive. And what happens when the next time (and there will be a next time) comes around? You get to go through it all again.
RBLs (when used exclusively, instead of in some kind of weighted average ala spamassassin) are like a bad action movie--you know the ones, where the cops walk into a crowded theater and open up on the bad guys, while ignoring anyone else in the line of fire. It doesn't matter who gets taken out as long as we get our man--right?
The tinfoiled, myself among them, will point out that even if there is a paper trail, it may never be seen if an election is not close enough. In a lot of places, manual recounts are triggered by elections being too close; if elections are decided by electronic tabulation first, we will never see a paper ballot.
Personally, I like the precision that electronic voting has the potential to deliver--and the instant results are definitely a plus. The solution to your problem is, of course, to count the paper record of a random sampling of machines and compare them to the electrionic records of those machines, in every election. This verifies that everything is on the up and up.
Now, what tinfoil hatted folk like me are wondering is "where the fuck was the new york times these last few election cycles when both conservatives and liberals were pointing out how easy it was to defraud the machines and asking 'why dont these things have paper records?'"
If it takes Microsoft five years to get something out the door
Worse yet, it's not just "something" it's Microsoft's equivalent to bash!
It seems strange to justify your nation's problems by simply pointing and saying, "Well we're not there yet".
I'm not attempting to justify anything--in fact, I'm disgusted by the current state of affairs--and there was a reason my "yet" was a question, not a statement.
It's still quite possible for the US to avert the police state that appears to be coming. China, on the other hand, already is a brutal totalitarian police state. See the difference?
That's because you're only looking at oversized nation-states. Communism works better on much smaller scales, e.g. communes. (So does Democracy, for that matter, e.g. communes.)
The important thing about that is, of course, that communes are strictly voluntary--if you don't like it you can always leave. I have no problem with anyone who wants to live in such a manner, and wish them the best of luck.
But as a system of government, communism sucks and results in brutal totalitarian regimes--and there's no historical evidence to suggest it ever will do anything but.
No one on either end of the spectrum with an ounce of sense has ever said that.
/. story related to politics, civil liberties, etc.
I agree that this statement is true, but there's quite a few folk without said lick of sense that always post something along those lines in any
you can easily have totalitarianism (of which this is an example) without communism.
Quite right... unfortunately, the reverse doesn't seem to be true. I've yet to see an example of a communist government that wasn't totalitarian.
Once you give the government that much power, once it can decide what you may or may not own, once it can decide that someone or something else is more deserving of something YOU own, then tyranny is inevitable. I don't care if the original goal of the government was Economic Justice or Aryan Supremacy, in the end they will all end up the same.
Sadly, this is the result of any government whose citizens allow it too much power... and the nature of government is that it will always seek to increase its power. The United States will get there one day, too (some would argue we're well down that path) and our founders knew that going in.
Whenever I see a "I'd take the ruler of North Korea over George W. Bush" or even a simple "US is teh sux0r!" post, it always burns me up that those same people are remarkably silent when we see something like this.
Yep, our nation has some serious problems right now, but we haven't (yet?) even come close to this kind of garbage. So for the next guy who says, "I can't wait for China to replace the US as the global superpower" all I can say is "be careful what you wish for.
No, you can not, because you are then selling a derivative work.
By this logic, it would also be unlawful for me to sell a book in which I've hilighted certain passages, and made notes in the margin.
In defense of the sci-fi channel Mystery Science Theater 3000 was kick ass!
Actually, this goes to the point of what the grandparent was getting at: MST3k was originally on Comedy Central (actually, it was originally on KTMA but we dont need to go into that) and Scifi pretty much just ruined and cancelled it.
Correct, copyrights last 95 years currently (regardless of whether the original author still lives or not).
Close, but not entirely correct. Copyright on works created by corporations does indeed last 95 years. However, works created by human authors are protected by copyright for the life of the author + 70 years, which is potentially far longer.
A hypothetical book written by a person 25 years old in the year 2000, whose author dies at the ripe old age of 75, will be covered by copyright for a total of 120 years.
So let me get this straight: you knew/know for a fact that he was sane, actually being followed, and that all of this was quite possibly engineered to end in the way it did... and you did nothing about it?
With friends like you, who needs enemies?
Seems like the simple counter measure is a "blacklist" of the honeymonkey servers.
You're ignoring that the honeymonkey people will undoubtedly react to those countermeasures... and I think it's safe to say they'd win in the end. Given that worms, spam, spyware, etc are everyone's problem, it's in the interest of large ISPs to cooperate by providing resources to this effort.
A blacklist won't be so simple when you have to worry about more than just Microsoft's netblocks... and blacklisting those belonging to, say, AOL kind of defeats the purpose of writing the worm to begin with.