Then explain why an American worker today can be more productive than his or her predecessors, yet paid a substantially smaller fraction of the proceeds from his or her labors?
Greater productivity per worker means less demand for workers. Less demand means lower price. Thus, more productive workforce means worse-paid workforce.
The real question, to me, is, why was the flight attendant not on the flight deck while the pilot was away?
Because you can regulate anything, but in reality the pilot is not going to announce every time he has to pee. Nothing has happened before, so nothing will happen this time.
Except when there is a terrorist threatening the pilot outside, asking him to enter the code...
But that terrorist will be bum rushed by everyone on board and beaten to the ground. Even the hostage knows his best bet is to take the knife between ribs - better odds surviving that than the destruction of the plane.
Terrorists - or anyone - stopped hijacking airplanes the second such hijackings stopped meaning a delay and started meaning everyone aboard dying.
People don't lose their humanity just because they work for (or own) a corporation.
But neither does it extend to the corporation. Aardvarkjoe Catering, LLC doesn't have a religion even if its owner(s) and employee(s) do, and thus can't refuse anything on religious grounds. An employee of Aardvarkjoe Catering, LLC may feel servicing sexual, ethnical, political or other minorities is unacceptable, and if so Aardvarkjoe Catering, LLC must deal with the issue as it sees fit within limits dictated by law; but Aardvarkjoe Catering, LLC is not that employee.
You don't get to put down your corporate shield whenever that suits you, yet hide behind it the rest of the time.
It's much more debatable whether society has, for example, such an interest in forcing you to participate in a gay wedding.
You aren't participating in a gay wedding. Aardvarkjoe Catering, LLC is. Corporate veil doesn't disappear whenever that happens to be advantageous to you yet shield you the rest of the time.
If you respect the right of gay people to choose who to marry, why not respect the rights of others to choose who the associate with also.
And Gen Con has this right too, does it not?
The issue at stake is not religious freedom (since businesses don't have religion), or even freedom of association (since businesses don't have that either), but using the quirks of current economic system and corporate law to bully people into submission. Which, apparently, is fine as long as it's done to gays, and bad when the favour is returned.
But then again, crying foul when someone hits back is pretty typical bully behaviour.
Spread the blame to everyone that made poor choices: Indian Institute of Planning and Management, Wikipedia and those that enrolled without verifying their expectations.
Those that enrolled without verifying their expectations to some unspecified degree made poor choices, or possibly good choices that went bad due to sheer bad luck, as any might.
Wikipedia made the lazy choice of not bothering to verify its contents, despite being a Power That Be in its own right nowadays, likely more influental than most nations.
Indian Institute of Planning and Management made a morally represensible choice of purposefully lying in order to commit fraud.
Do you honestly see these as equivalent in any way? A fool, a slightly irresponsible "dude" and a fraudster don't have a common type of blame they could share.
And more to your point, I (the collective manifestation of the citizenry) have leverage against a government that does as you suggest by keeping firearms in my possession, being proficient in their use, and advocating (through constitutionally protected peaceable means) for my right to do so. This is one of the functions of the second amendment: to act as a check on a government that overreaches. Tax-dodging nuts holed up in the mountains notwithstanding, governments need checks on their powers that have teeth in them.
The Second Amendment doesn't have any teeth. The problem is, in a democracy the government already is the collective manifestation of the citizenry. And any single overreach only hurts a small minority of people who can usually be dressed up as unpleasant and/or deserving of their fate to the rest, so the populace ends up shooting off its own foot one toe at a time.
Second Amendment serves exactly one purpose, and it's letting people who are too gutless to even vote for a third party to pretend they could stage an armed rebellion any time they wanted. Altough ensuring that there's a steady stream of armed criminals/cults/tax-dodging nuts acting as boogeymen might also count as an intentional purpose for particularly cynical politicians.
if there were some foundational document that codified your right to both military weapons and speech of all sorts, and prohibited the government from passing laws restricting either.
Even then it would obviously not cover obscenity, which is defined as "I know it when I see it". And, well, the algorithmic description of SHA-1 is pretty suggestive, don't you think?
Yes, right in the summary: "SolarCity claims its GridLogic program can provide electricity to communities and businesses for less than they pay for utility power and the facilities can still be connected to their area's utility power grid as an added backup."
For the utility grid to provide backup power, it has to have spare capacity. Upkeeping that capacity is not free. This plan is trying to make the electric company effectively subsidize SolarCity customers.
If you can substitute the term "white male" into your premise and suddenly find it offensive, then was actually racist/sexist all along.
"a project that passes the test must feature at least one function written by a white male developer, that calls a function written by another white male developer. "
But even your argument had any truth to it, the question then becomes: where will the Russia gets the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and huge amount of materiel to lose again stepping on the same rake?
Well, it does have over 2 million men in reserve.
More importantly, Finland has a conscription army. Should Russia come calling, I wonder how many Finns would actually fight back? The economy is getting from bad to worse and all the budget cuts are hitting hardest those already weakest and most vulnerable. Add some recent high-profile tax refugees, and the question "Why should I shed my or anyone else's blood over this country?" is getting harder and harder to answer.
A welfare state can trust conscription, since it has done something to earn people's loyalty. But Finnish politics have shifted to the right, and continue to do so, so why wouldn't someone who's told to risk their life for it make a business analysis and cut their losses?
Reminder: Finland is not a member of NATO. It's not an enemy of Russia like NATO is.
Rather, it's a potential target for conquest.
And Russia and NATO are not enemies. They're each other's best friends. Without Russia, how could NATO recruit new members or justify military spending? Without NATO, how could Russia distract its people from bad leadership?
Just look at how lost the entire global economy has been for the last few decades without Cold War creating endless demand. Look how desperately a few cave-dwelling barbarians have been dressed up as a serious threat. But non-secularized religions are too likely to act rather than just talk, even when they can get their act together, which they usually can't. If global capitalism is to be saved, what we need is a new Red October.
Luckily, Putin seems hell-bent on following in the footprints of the last tsar, so it's mainly a race between which country's populace gets tired of economic troubles first.
We could fund it the same way we fund class action lawsuits: By giving the lawyers a big slice of the penalty if they win, and nothing if they lose. That way Google would end up funding their own prosecution, and no tax dollars would be needed.
Google would also fund its own defence. I'm not sure if giving FTC effectively unlimited resources would be a good idea, since wouldn't it basically allow them to do the RIAA?
Also, you have to make significant efforts to lower your water usage to 200l per person per day? Gee, I wonder why you got an 8 year drought.
Water usage is unrelated to rainfall. It is, however, related to climate patterns which in turn are changed by climate change. Get ready for a lot more "worst droughts", "biggest floods" and other extreme weather phenomenom, as the water that previously went to California goes somewhere else. That's why it needs to be stopped, before everyplace is in crisis.
That's hilarious. Calhoun wasn't a member of the "political right". The fact that you associate some of those things with the right today, does not mean he was a "right winger" in his own day.
...That isn't really saying anything too nice about modern-day right wing, you know.
Lincoln did not like negroes.
But he still issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Calhoun issued the tripe we just read. That's their respective contributions to history, and is what they are to it.
You are blaming people for living in the day they lived, and for the society in which they were raised. Granted, it might have been rough and bigoted by our standards, but those were the best standards those people knew at the time.
Except the whole reason the Civil War was fought in the first place is that people did know a better way, but some simply didn't want to give up their unjust privileges. Perhaps it's unfair to judge Calhoun with our standards, but he also falls short of those of his own time.
And it's not like the idea of slaves and slavemasters - or serfs and lords - is gone. The whip and manacles have been disguised and integrated into the very structures of society itself, but still some do the work and others watch their coffers fill. And it's always the right wing which champions the rich and powerful against the poor and weak. Championing hierarchy and inequality is the very definition of right-wing politics. It's simply a milder version of dictatorship and authoritarianism, and like them, belongs in the dark past of human species, to become nothing but a bad memory and perhaps a museum exhibition.
And consumption without production doesn't help anybody.
A company without customers isn't going to keep producing anything for long. And once it goes belly-up, any employees it had will become unemployed, ceasing their consumption due to lack of income and thus causing the circle to repeat with another company.
Capitalistic economy has a boom-bust cycle precisely because supply is a time-lapse function of demand, and demand is a function of supply (since you can only generate demand if you have income, which is typically earned through working). The problem is, as technology advances supply requires less and less people, so the booms become smaller and the busts deeper. Simply giving people money in the form of credit has kept the whole house of cards standing this far, but the problem with credit is that it can't grow forever - or could, but at that point it's just a less honest name for citizen pay.
Future historians will also let people starve. Why would you think things will be different in the future ?
It's irrational and ineffective. Starving people contribute neither production nor consumption. They merely create a revolt risk. A system that provides at least subsistence-level income for all its members will outcompete a system that doesn't through sheer endurance.
Put another way, at some point the only way for a corporate entity - a nation, a company, whatever - to expand is to make the world effectively bigger by lifting people out of poverty so they have time and energy for nationalism, trade, posting on Slashdot, etc.
Also, with the ever-deadlier weapons even Joe Terrorist can afford, at some point the future historians either ensure no one's desperate or future history will end.
And this differs from having children the old fashioned way how?
"The two morons have a right to procreate. So far, every attempt to curtail that right has resulted in material fit to inspire horror writers."
To claim that this process is necessarily going to be made worse by adding some human intelligence to the mix is problematic.
Not necessarily, but possibly. Whether the risks outweight the benefits is what the debate is about. Or at least the meaningful parts of it; I have no doubt there's people who are using it as a proxy for some other, unrelated issues.
But the debate should be about how to use this power wisely, not whether we should develop it at all. Someone will, and it's better that that happen out in the open than in some secret lab in $EVIL_NATION or funded by $EVIL_BILLIONAIRE.
And where does personal responsibility fit into your narrative? It's not the government or the nebulous "powers" causing the bulk of the problems in society it is the choices individuals make that determines their quality of life.
Your individual choices determine - or at least influence - the particular role you play. What roles and in what proportion are available is determined by the Powers That Be.
It's like a game of musical chairs: sure, who gets the chair and who doesn't is determined by the player's personal qualities, but that someone was bound to be left without is determined by the nature of the game itself, as are the consequences.
Storming the barricades will not solve any problems it would only result in a new set of problems that are much worse.
Much worse for whom? The increasingly small set of "winners"? Where's their personal responsibility for the fate their own behaviour is bringing ever closer?
Revolutions occur when enough people have nothing to lose but their chains. Whether they actually solve anything depends on whether these people blame it all on the current "elites" of society or see beyond that surface to the nature of the game itself - the "nebulous powers" you mentioned. Replacing one king with another won't solve anything, but replacing absolute monarchy with constitutional democracy does.
The use of outrageous hyperbole, lies of omission, and anecdotal evidence has also contributed to the problems we face today.
Insofar as these have all been used to blame social problems on their victims, yes. Time will tell whether those who excuse their selfishness with such deception can bear to put it aside while there's still time to save the nation and themselves.
Some countries are forced to capitulate to the Americans and their corporations out of tactical necessity. Weaklings like Mulroney and Harper *like* being vassals.
Every human being who has power is a vassal to whatever grants them that power. Mulroney and Harper are no different than US senators in that respect. In a democracy the Powers That Be are ideally interested in the wellbeing of their citizens, and instruct their vassals accordingly; but even in the most seemingly powerful dictator is merely riding the tiger, and will be cast aside and replaced - and likely devoured - if he ever gets fancy ideas about actually being in charge. Just look at what happened with Gorbachev for a good example.
Human society is a superorganism, a living thing in its own right. Human beings don't rule it. They can, at the most, hope to be sufficiently trusted agents to be allowed some freedom in how they act on its behalf. But even if you find a new political or cultural movement or something, and even if it's based on your personal convictions, once institutionalized the power rests in the movement and will wield you, not the other way around. Heck, even if you fund everything from your personal property, you're still only allowed to keep it as long as you conform to economic forces.
But that's a deal a lot of people are willing to make, either due to weakness or having some cause they consider worth the cost. But I wonder how many of them actually realized this is the trade they're making, rather than entertaining delusions about bending power to their own will rather than being its tools.
And the same thing can be done with electric cars. It's possible to make the charging software smart, and have it look at the spot price graph, user desired charge levels, and determine whether to charge the battery, wait, or even sell some power back to the grid.
So basically, I'm going to be paying for a larger battery than I actually need, which will also get more usage and thus wear down faster than it otherwise would, just so the electric company can avoid paying for that infrastructure. Oh, and the whole thing is going to be less energy efficient than electric corp batteries would be, since it'll be moving lots of electricity through long low-voltage lines back and forth, back and forth again. And of course I'll be paying for the resulting losses, too, as well as whatever margin the electric company wants for selling and then buying back power.
Oh well, I guess there'll be a market for command filters to sit between the car and the grid to stop these shenanigans.
Slashdot Mirror
Greater productivity per worker means less demand for workers. Less demand means lower price. Thus, more productive workforce means worse-paid workforce.
Yay capitalism.
Because you can regulate anything, but in reality the pilot is not going to announce every time he has to pee. Nothing has happened before, so nothing will happen this time.
But that terrorist will be bum rushed by everyone on board and beaten to the ground. Even the hostage knows his best bet is to take the knife between ribs - better odds surviving that than the destruction of the plane.
Terrorists - or anyone - stopped hijacking airplanes the second such hijackings stopped meaning a delay and started meaning everyone aboard dying.
But neither does it extend to the corporation. Aardvarkjoe Catering, LLC doesn't have a religion even if its owner(s) and employee(s) do, and thus can't refuse anything on religious grounds. An employee of Aardvarkjoe Catering, LLC may feel servicing sexual, ethnical, political or other minorities is unacceptable, and if so Aardvarkjoe Catering, LLC must deal with the issue as it sees fit within limits dictated by law; but Aardvarkjoe Catering, LLC is not that employee.
You don't get to put down your corporate shield whenever that suits you, yet hide behind it the rest of the time.
One friend of mine hates onions but is fine with tomatoes. I hate tomatoes but am fine with onions. But one weirdo we know eats both.
I guess wrinkly skin is just some kind of fashion amongst the elderly, then.
You aren't participating in a gay wedding. Aardvarkjoe Catering, LLC is. Corporate veil doesn't disappear whenever that happens to be advantageous to you yet shield you the rest of the time.
And Gen Con has this right too, does it not?
The issue at stake is not religious freedom (since businesses don't have religion), or even freedom of association (since businesses don't have that either), but using the quirks of current economic system and corporate law to bully people into submission. Which, apparently, is fine as long as it's done to gays, and bad when the favour is returned.
But then again, crying foul when someone hits back is pretty typical bully behaviour.
Those that enrolled without verifying their expectations to some unspecified degree made poor choices, or possibly good choices that went bad due to sheer bad luck, as any might.
Wikipedia made the lazy choice of not bothering to verify its contents, despite being a Power That Be in its own right nowadays, likely more influental than most nations.
Indian Institute of Planning and Management made a morally represensible choice of purposefully lying in order to commit fraud.
Do you honestly see these as equivalent in any way? A fool, a slightly irresponsible "dude" and a fraudster don't have a common type of blame they could share.
But redundant.
The Second Amendment doesn't have any teeth. The problem is, in a democracy the government already is the collective manifestation of the citizenry. And any single overreach only hurts a small minority of people who can usually be dressed up as unpleasant and/or deserving of their fate to the rest, so the populace ends up shooting off its own foot one toe at a time.
Second Amendment serves exactly one purpose, and it's letting people who are too gutless to even vote for a third party to pretend they could stage an armed rebellion any time they wanted. Altough ensuring that there's a steady stream of armed criminals/cults/tax-dodging nuts acting as boogeymen might also count as an intentional purpose for particularly cynical politicians.
Even then it would obviously not cover obscenity, which is defined as "I know it when I see it". And, well, the algorithmic description of SHA-1 is pretty suggestive, don't you think?
Yes, right in the summary: "SolarCity claims its GridLogic program can provide electricity to communities and businesses for less than they pay for utility power and the facilities can still be connected to their area's utility power grid as an added backup."
For the utility grid to provide backup power, it has to have spare capacity. Upkeeping that capacity is not free. This plan is trying to make the electric company effectively subsidize SolarCity customers.
So... does that offend you? Why?
Well, it does have over 2 million men in reserve.
More importantly, Finland has a conscription army. Should Russia come calling, I wonder how many Finns would actually fight back? The economy is getting from bad to worse and all the budget cuts are hitting hardest those already weakest and most vulnerable. Add some recent high-profile tax refugees, and the question "Why should I shed my or anyone else's blood over this country?" is getting harder and harder to answer.
A welfare state can trust conscription, since it has done something to earn people's loyalty. But Finnish politics have shifted to the right, and continue to do so, so why wouldn't someone who's told to risk their life for it make a business analysis and cut their losses?
Rather, it's a potential target for conquest.
And Russia and NATO are not enemies. They're each other's best friends. Without Russia, how could NATO recruit new members or justify military spending? Without NATO, how could Russia distract its people from bad leadership?
Just look at how lost the entire global economy has been for the last few decades without Cold War creating endless demand. Look how desperately a few cave-dwelling barbarians have been dressed up as a serious threat. But non-secularized religions are too likely to act rather than just talk, even when they can get their act together, which they usually can't. If global capitalism is to be saved, what we need is a new Red October.
Luckily, Putin seems hell-bent on following in the footprints of the last tsar, so it's mainly a race between which country's populace gets tired of economic troubles first.
Google would also fund its own defence. I'm not sure if giving FTC effectively unlimited resources would be a good idea, since wouldn't it basically allow them to do the RIAA?
Water usage is unrelated to rainfall. It is, however, related to climate patterns which in turn are changed by climate change. Get ready for a lot more "worst droughts", "biggest floods" and other extreme weather phenomenom, as the water that previously went to California goes somewhere else. That's why it needs to be stopped, before everyplace is in crisis.
...That isn't really saying anything too nice about modern-day right wing, you know.
But he still issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Calhoun issued the tripe we just read. That's their respective contributions to history, and is what they are to it.
Except the whole reason the Civil War was fought in the first place is that people did know a better way, but some simply didn't want to give up their unjust privileges. Perhaps it's unfair to judge Calhoun with our standards, but he also falls short of those of his own time.
And it's not like the idea of slaves and slavemasters - or serfs and lords - is gone. The whip and manacles have been disguised and integrated into the very structures of society itself, but still some do the work and others watch their coffers fill. And it's always the right wing which champions the rich and powerful against the poor and weak. Championing hierarchy and inequality is the very definition of right-wing politics. It's simply a milder version of dictatorship and authoritarianism, and like them, belongs in the dark past of human species, to become nothing but a bad memory and perhaps a museum exhibition.
A company without customers isn't going to keep producing anything for long. And once it goes belly-up, any employees it had will become unemployed, ceasing their consumption due to lack of income and thus causing the circle to repeat with another company.
Capitalistic economy has a boom-bust cycle precisely because supply is a time-lapse function of demand, and demand is a function of supply (since you can only generate demand if you have income, which is typically earned through working). The problem is, as technology advances supply requires less and less people, so the booms become smaller and the busts deeper. Simply giving people money in the form of credit has kept the whole house of cards standing this far, but the problem with credit is that it can't grow forever - or could, but at that point it's just a less honest name for citizen pay.
It's irrational and ineffective. Starving people contribute neither production nor consumption. They merely create a revolt risk. A system that provides at least subsistence-level income for all its members will outcompete a system that doesn't through sheer endurance.
Put another way, at some point the only way for a corporate entity - a nation, a company, whatever - to expand is to make the world effectively bigger by lifting people out of poverty so they have time and energy for nationalism, trade, posting on Slashdot, etc.
Also, with the ever-deadlier weapons even Joe Terrorist can afford, at some point the future historians either ensure no one's desperate or future history will end.
Water contains hydrogen. Drink enough, and you too can be a star!
"The two morons have a right to procreate. So far, every attempt to curtail that right has resulted in material fit to inspire horror writers."
Not necessarily, but possibly. Whether the risks outweight the benefits is what the debate is about. Or at least the meaningful parts of it; I have no doubt there's people who are using it as a proxy for some other, unrelated issues.
True enough, I suppose.
Your individual choices determine - or at least influence - the particular role you play. What roles and in what proportion are available is determined by the Powers That Be.
It's like a game of musical chairs: sure, who gets the chair and who doesn't is determined by the player's personal qualities, but that someone was bound to be left without is determined by the nature of the game itself, as are the consequences.
Much worse for whom? The increasingly small set of "winners"? Where's their personal responsibility for the fate their own behaviour is bringing ever closer?
Revolutions occur when enough people have nothing to lose but their chains. Whether they actually solve anything depends on whether these people blame it all on the current "elites" of society or see beyond that surface to the nature of the game itself - the "nebulous powers" you mentioned. Replacing one king with another won't solve anything, but replacing absolute monarchy with constitutional democracy does.
Insofar as these have all been used to blame social problems on their victims, yes. Time will tell whether those who excuse their selfishness with such deception can bear to put it aside while there's still time to save the nation and themselves.
Every human being who has power is a vassal to whatever grants them that power. Mulroney and Harper are no different than US senators in that respect. In a democracy the Powers That Be are ideally interested in the wellbeing of their citizens, and instruct their vassals accordingly; but even in the most seemingly powerful dictator is merely riding the tiger, and will be cast aside and replaced - and likely devoured - if he ever gets fancy ideas about actually being in charge. Just look at what happened with Gorbachev for a good example.
Human society is a superorganism, a living thing in its own right. Human beings don't rule it. They can, at the most, hope to be sufficiently trusted agents to be allowed some freedom in how they act on its behalf. But even if you find a new political or cultural movement or something, and even if it's based on your personal convictions, once institutionalized the power rests in the movement and will wield you, not the other way around. Heck, even if you fund everything from your personal property, you're still only allowed to keep it as long as you conform to economic forces.
But that's a deal a lot of people are willing to make, either due to weakness or having some cause they consider worth the cost. But I wonder how many of them actually realized this is the trade they're making, rather than entertaining delusions about bending power to their own will rather than being its tools.
So basically, I'm going to be paying for a larger battery than I actually need, which will also get more usage and thus wear down faster than it otherwise would, just so the electric company can avoid paying for that infrastructure. Oh, and the whole thing is going to be less energy efficient than electric corp batteries would be, since it'll be moving lots of electricity through long low-voltage lines back and forth, back and forth again. And of course I'll be paying for the resulting losses, too, as well as whatever margin the electric company wants for selling and then buying back power.
Oh well, I guess there'll be a market for command filters to sit between the car and the grid to stop these shenanigans.