I call that the "bathroom wall" scenario -- where someone picks a dentist (in this case) because they see the number written on a bathroom wall. In real life that is not how people find someone to pull their teeth.
For the traditional professions (medicine, law, engineering) I give some credence to government licensing. But requiring licensing for interior decorators and tour guides, etc, is just a way to limit competition and extract fees.
I see a lot of "security theater" in both the assumption that bad guys want to become cab drivers in order to commit crimes, and that fingerprinting is some kind of magic solution to preventing that.
Depends on where you draw your baseline. If your baseline is a hypothetical perfect democracy that has never existed, the USA is in negative territory democracy-wise.
If your baseline is North Korea, the USA is robust functioning real-world democracy.
I would have more sympathy for Italy if it were not so corrupt and inefficient. And a place where tax evasion is apparently a national pastime. And where someone like Silvio Berlusconi can be elected as leader.
You may not like Google, but they are extremely innovative and have a transformational vision.
The Italian government is going after the easy (foreign) target instead of addressing the real domestic issues.
Typically, the bad decision that bankers made was to lend money on mortgages to people who didn't pay them back. If you would seriously throw away the whole legacy of the rule of law, and retroactively change the law and (forgoing due process) proceed to execute said bankers, you are a lot more dangerous than they are.
Sounds like you were born a couple of centuries too late, you would be a good candidate for the Reign of Terror.
It's another sad day for/. when an article about women's education in Iran can generate an obtuse post about democracy in the US that gets modded insightful. Anything to contribute about, like, women, or education, or Iran, or something remotely on topic?
This is +5 insightful? Who determines who gets eliminated, you? Would you eliminate Abraham Lincoln, because he was a politician who took the country to war?
What do you think, when the bad guys come into the room you know because there is ominous background music? Oh wait, that's on television.
200 years ago, Somalia would have been fair game. Now, international law backed by major powers guarantees the sanctity of Somalia's national borders -- essentially props it up no matter how dysfunctional. So though the Somalians might benefit from being invaded by a neighbor who imposed governance, that can't happen under the current system.
and turn it into an opportunity to vent against the USA. How about discussing the Venezuela story on its own merits? Single internet access point for the whole country, controlled by the government, good idea or no?
A big part of the private debts were individual's insured bank deposits. Foreigners (like the British) deposited money in Irish banks and considered it safe because those deposits were insured by the Irish state.
In retrospect it is obvious that the state should not be insuring bank deposits when the amounts become so large relative to GDP, and maybe the Irish state should not have honored that pledge, but it's not stupid or corrupt of them to do so.
Also you can't blame this on free markets, insured deposits are extremely mainstream but have nothing to do with free markets. The problem with the regulators was that they were asleep or caught up in the exhilaration of the housing bubble.
If you want to cut an immigration program how about the immigration lottery? Right, there are 50K or permanent visas awarded annually to random applicants. How can that be better than giving visas to college graduates?
The Congressionally mandated Diversity Immigrant Visa Program makes available 50,000 diversity visas (DV) annually, drawn from random selection among all entries to persons who meet strict eligibility requirements from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.
So who has the right to express their views about policies? University presidents? Union leaders? The Pope? Why shouldn't corporations have the same right to expression?
Actually the problem of what government policies are best for the economy is complex to unsolvable, nobody knows the answers. You have the right to express what your position is, "tax the hell out of the corporations." Why shouldn't Google be able to say, "tax the hell out of us and we'll move somewhere else?"
I don't know where you get the idea that oil is subsidized in Brazil, maybe you are thinking of ethanol, but I don't think that is subsidized either, just cheap to produce.
It's all about the incentives. If you want someone to work their ass off, give them the right incentive. It's much more effective than fear of punishment in producing effort. And just about everyone responds to some kind of incentive, hopeless slackers aside. You just have to find out what it is.
We need a variation of Godwin's law that covers the use of 'slavery' in discussions about employment. There is a huge difference that is obvious to everybody, who the f* is talking about anything that remotely resembles actual slavery? It lowers the argument to the level of pie-throwing.
You are confusing human rights, where everyone is entitled to their opinion, and economic productivity, which should be data-based. Productivity is complicated, but I think you would find in some cases giving employees more rights is associated with more productivity, and sometimes less productivity. People are prone to vastly oversimplify the issues based on their feelings.
When I read the RTFA, I thought, I'm more like John Smith than Miguel Aguilar -- I know a lot of math, but I would probably have a hard time maintaining discipline in a 5th grade class and getting the kids interested in math. So I would be a bad math teacher. Fortunately I'm not a teacher, and I'm pretty good at my actual job, 'software engineer'.
In the long run we're not doing anybody any favors by protecting people with little teaching aptitude. I'd rather see the teaching jobs go to people with good teaching skills, and pay them well, and let the John Smith's (and me) find some other work that we're better suited for.
That is why science is different than religion. In science, if the facts contradict your belief, you are required to change your belief. Science is not somehow equivalent to religion, or just another belief system. It's fundamentally different.
On the one hand, it is the desire for $$$ that drives the competition and the innovation.
On the other hand, the products are so complicated that it is impossible for the non-expert to understand them.
So the solution sounds like more of what we already have, a competitive market with regulations around it.
The problem with passing a bunch of laws that go against people's economic self-interest is that they will find ways to evade them. There is an assumption in a bunch of these comments that more laws and regulations will make these problems go away. Experience suggests the opposite: the more unreasonable the laws, the bigger the black economy gets, with the exact result that there are more illegal workers who get no protection from the legal system.
It is not some kind of absolute free-market concept that if you make it easier to get legal guest worker status, that would improve the conditions for these workers because they would then have basic legal protections.
There is not enough info in question to provide a meaningful answer. But it seems like there should be at least an initial presumption that there is some alignment between the goals of the company and the goals of the individual.
For example, the company may be concerned about paying for an expensive cert for an employee, who then goes out and gets another job. So maybe pay back over a year or two.
I definitely prefer working at companies where there is a feeling of teamwork, if the company succeeds we all succeed. Then I expect some additional reward for myself, but I understand that it is shared around.
I have a problem with people that create an adversarial relationship, and vent their grievances publically. They poison the environment for everybody. We all have to stand up for ourselves in the job negotiation process, but spreading negativity and resentment around is a morale-killer and holds the company back. If you think you should be getting more, the best proof is a job offer from somewhere else, that speaks volumes.
That said, when the company I work for now needed employees with clearances for some government projects, I went through that process. I don't clock in/clock out, I wouldn't count the time as 'my time' vs 'their time'. But they certainly paid for it, to me that is a cost of doing business for them.
If you think that there should be "National Cable TV Administration" that would take over all the cable tv companies and provide cable tv as a public service, and that that would be more consumer-friendly and provide better service, I gape in amazement.
If you believe we should change the regulatory environment, one way or another, unless you are going to go all Hugo Chavez and ignore the existing laws, you are talking about a multi-year if not multi-decade effort.
Either way we are talking about slow, tactical changes to a complex regulated environment. "More regulation" vs "more competition" comes down to what initiatives and how they are drafted. Like the parent post.
The heated philosophical debate on this just shows how people like to hear the sound of their own voices.
More fundamentally, war is something that people have always done. From the hunter gatherers on, there has never been an era that was free from war.
So those that dream of a world without war are basically similar to creationists, imposing their faith on a set of data that doesn't support it. That doesn't mean I am unaware of the existence of Scandinavia, it means there is no evidence that the peacefulness of Scandinavia can be scaled up to a planetary scale, and all of human history arguing that it can't.
Excluding radical changes like massive genetic engineering or killing 95% of boys at birth or such.
So then the question becomes, given the likely persistence of some amount of war as long as humans are around, what is the most efficient way to meet that need? I would say, maximize the ceremony and drama and minimize the actual destruction and killing. So from that point of view the current wars in the middle east are pretty effective, compared to the devastation of World Wars I and II.
Cynicism or realism? If wars don't meet some human need, how come we've always had them?
Knowing what to say and what not to say is a requirement for any job higher than low-mid level. I used to work with a guy who had good technical skills but no control over his mouth, he would piss people off for no reason at all. So do you admire a guy like that for saying whatever he thinks, or do you think he's an idiot? Once you get into the territory of shading what you say based on what you are trying to accomplish, there is a big gray area, before you get into the total lying Bernie Madoff zone.
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For the traditional professions (medicine, law, engineering) I give some credence to government licensing. But requiring licensing for interior decorators and tour guides, etc, is just a way to limit competition and extract fees.
I see a lot of "security theater" in both the assumption that bad guys want to become cab drivers in order to commit crimes, and that fingerprinting is some kind of magic solution to preventing that.
If your baseline is North Korea, the USA is robust functioning real-world democracy.
You may not like Google, but they are extremely innovative and have a transformational vision.
The Italian government is going after the easy (foreign) target instead of addressing the real domestic issues.
Sounds like you were born a couple of centuries too late, you would be a good candidate for the Reign of Terror.
It's another sad day for /. when an article about women's education in Iran can generate an obtuse post about democracy in the US that gets modded insightful. Anything to contribute about, like, women, or education, or Iran, or something remotely on topic?
This is +5 insightful? Who determines who gets eliminated, you? Would you eliminate Abraham Lincoln, because he was a politician who took the country to war? What do you think, when the bad guys come into the room you know because there is ominous background music? Oh wait, that's on television.
200 years ago, Somalia would have been fair game. Now, international law backed by major powers guarantees the sanctity of Somalia's national borders -- essentially props it up no matter how dysfunctional. So though the Somalians might benefit from being invaded by a neighbor who imposed governance, that can't happen under the current system.
and turn it into an opportunity to vent against the USA. How about discussing the Venezuela story on its own merits? Single internet access point for the whole country, controlled by the government, good idea or no?
In retrospect it is obvious that the state should not be insuring bank deposits when the amounts become so large relative to GDP, and maybe the Irish state should not have honored that pledge, but it's not stupid or corrupt of them to do so.
Also you can't blame this on free markets, insured deposits are extremely mainstream but have nothing to do with free markets. The problem with the regulators was that they were asleep or caught up in the exhilaration of the housing bubble.
http://travel.state.gov/visa/immigrants/types/types_1322.html
The Congressionally mandated Diversity Immigrant Visa Program makes available 50,000 diversity visas (DV) annually, drawn from random selection among all entries to persons who meet strict eligibility requirements from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.
Actually the problem of what government policies are best for the economy is complex to unsolvable, nobody knows the answers. You have the right to express what your position is, "tax the hell out of the corporations." Why shouldn't Google be able to say, "tax the hell out of us and we'll move somewhere else?"
I don't know where you get the idea that oil is subsidized in Brazil, maybe you are thinking of ethanol, but I don't think that is subsidized either, just cheap to produce.
It's all about the incentives. If you want someone to work their ass off, give them the right incentive. It's much more effective than fear of punishment in producing effort. And just about everyone responds to some kind of incentive, hopeless slackers aside. You just have to find out what it is.
... that they can't emotionally handle this
We need a variation of Godwin's law that covers the use of 'slavery' in discussions about employment. There is a huge difference that is obvious to everybody, who the f* is talking about anything that remotely resembles actual slavery? It lowers the argument to the level of pie-throwing.
You are confusing human rights, where everyone is entitled to their opinion, and economic productivity, which should be data-based. Productivity is complicated, but I think you would find in some cases giving employees more rights is associated with more productivity, and sometimes less productivity. People are prone to vastly oversimplify the issues based on their feelings.
When I read the RTFA, I thought, I'm more like John Smith than Miguel Aguilar -- I know a lot of math, but I would probably have a hard time maintaining discipline in a 5th grade class and getting the kids interested in math. So I would be a bad math teacher. Fortunately I'm not a teacher, and I'm pretty good at my actual job, 'software engineer'.
In the long run we're not doing anybody any favors by protecting people with little teaching aptitude. I'd rather see the teaching jobs go to people with good teaching skills, and pay them well, and let the John Smith's (and me) find some other work that we're better suited for.
Who the f* is going to eliminate religion? Would you recommend the Stalin/Mao approach?
That is why science is different than religion. In science, if the facts contradict your belief, you are required to change your belief. Science is not somehow equivalent to religion, or just another belief system. It's fundamentally different.
On the one hand, it is the desire for $$$ that drives the competition and the innovation. On the other hand, the products are so complicated that it is impossible for the non-expert to understand them. So the solution sounds like more of what we already have, a competitive market with regulations around it.
It is not some kind of absolute free-market concept that if you make it easier to get legal guest worker status, that would improve the conditions for these workers because they would then have basic legal protections.
For example, the company may be concerned about paying for an expensive cert for an employee, who then goes out and gets another job. So maybe pay back over a year or two.
I definitely prefer working at companies where there is a feeling of teamwork, if the company succeeds we all succeed. Then I expect some additional reward for myself, but I understand that it is shared around.
I have a problem with people that create an adversarial relationship, and vent their grievances publically. They poison the environment for everybody. We all have to stand up for ourselves in the job negotiation process, but spreading negativity and resentment around is a morale-killer and holds the company back. If you think you should be getting more, the best proof is a job offer from somewhere else, that speaks volumes.
That said, when the company I work for now needed employees with clearances for some government projects, I went through that process. I don't clock in/clock out, I wouldn't count the time as 'my time' vs 'their time'. But they certainly paid for it, to me that is a cost of doing business for them.
If you believe we should change the regulatory environment, one way or another, unless you are going to go all Hugo Chavez and ignore the existing laws, you are talking about a multi-year if not multi-decade effort.
Either way we are talking about slow, tactical changes to a complex regulated environment. "More regulation" vs "more competition" comes down to what initiatives and how they are drafted. Like the parent post.
The heated philosophical debate on this just shows how people like to hear the sound of their own voices.
So those that dream of a world without war are basically similar to creationists, imposing their faith on a set of data that doesn't support it. That doesn't mean I am unaware of the existence of Scandinavia, it means there is no evidence that the peacefulness of Scandinavia can be scaled up to a planetary scale, and all of human history arguing that it can't.
Excluding radical changes like massive genetic engineering or killing 95% of boys at birth or such.
So then the question becomes, given the likely persistence of some amount of war as long as humans are around, what is the most efficient way to meet that need? I would say, maximize the ceremony and drama and minimize the actual destruction and killing. So from that point of view the current wars in the middle east are pretty effective, compared to the devastation of World Wars I and II.
Cynicism or realism? If wars don't meet some human need, how come we've always had them?
Knowing what to say and what not to say is a requirement for any job higher than low-mid level. I used to work with a guy who had good technical skills but no control over his mouth, he would piss people off for no reason at all. So do you admire a guy like that for saying whatever he thinks, or do you think he's an idiot? Once you get into the territory of shading what you say based on what you are trying to accomplish, there is a big gray area, before you get into the total lying Bernie Madoff zone.