Something is wrong when people with decades of experience are being laid off at age 60+ just so that the companies that they helped make profitable can become slightly more so.
I've been struggling to find out whether there is something truly wrong when that happens.
The business owner has the right to make a decision about his business. The 60-year-old was involved in a relationship with that business for a number of years. It worked: he delivered value, he got compensated back for it. Why is it wrong to terminate such a relationship if it doesn't make sense for the employer any more? It would be wrong to keep it artificially, wouldn't it? If I am a business owner and I am forced to loose an opportunity to contribute extra into the domestic product by employing (and paying) someone with whom my business is not extracting the value it is interested in, isn't that bad for the economy?
Please debunk to me what is "wrong" with situations like your example: people over 60 getting fired just because the company doesn't need them any more? Is it the fact that the company doesn't need him but the poor fellow still needs them because he is scared of potential difficulties of finding a different job?
Why isn't it realized by people that the job market is nothing more than a big match-making service where people or businesses go and try to find out who fits whose needs at the moment?
Please shed some light on this "moral" issue for me, as I truly am frustrated with the kind of vagueness that people here often use to hide the reality that they simply can't justify something because it "feels right/wrong".
You don't seem to know what you want. You didn't menition anything that shows that you have clear-cut criteria for evaluating this matter and you didn't propose anything, just insist on the same thing over - "corporations are bad", "freedom for private enterprises are bad" and other things (pardon me if I skewed any of your claims in the above-quotes, but that's what it sounds like when you say it).
"I just feel that there are better ways" - it's nice to have a feeling like that, but WHAT are those better ways?
"[...] just seems really dumb" - if something only "seems" to you to be one way or another, and you don't back that up with any reason, then this discussion won't work.
"But hey, you like it" - It's not a matter of liking it or not. If I see that using a financial intermediary and money issued by them is a cheaper way for me to achieve my goals of exchanging goods and services over barter, I'll do it. That's what it's all about.
And what do you think money is? Money is only an entry in a book. Even the fact that printed money exists is just something that is happening out of necessity - to faciliate smaller transactions where it would be cost-prohibitive to bring a bank into the picture.
Banks are "financial intermediaries". This is not a fancy word that "experts" made up, it is actually the most accurate description of what a bank is.
Money is a comodity. How valuable money is is assigned by people out of free will.
It is true that all money that ever shows up in bank ledgers comes from a loan, and it comes at an interest rate. But that interest rate is nothing more than the cost of using money as an intermediary.
In your scenario, no money is present first. Then XYZ borrows $80,000 from a bank (let's say at 1%) and when he buys ABC's house, XYZ's money is crossed out in the bank record and ABC's balance is increased. The house changes hands and now, the situation is such that XYZ is paid interest by the bank for keeping the money there - let's say 0.5% (this is the incentive for ABC to keep the money "on the market" and contribute to the supply of money). On the other hand, XYZ who owns a house is still charged 1%, because technically, he has a loan.
Now, understand that XYZ never had goods or services worth one entire house. He "borrowed". He did not get the house for free! He will either have to keep on paying the interest (and never pay back the loan), or he will have to come up with $80,000 plus a few year's interest. If he keeps on paying just the interest and never the principal, chances are, he will end up paying a LOT more over the long term than paying the principal plus (some) interest sooner.
In either case, he owes "money" to the bank and he has to come up with the money somehow -- he can make an arrangement with the bank that he will mowe the lawn in front of their branch every week and for every lawn mowing, they will forgive $30 of his loan balance. Or, he could go out to the public and sell his lawn-mowing services to people who don't want to / can't mow their lawn in exchange for money. Every time he mows the lawn, the money he receives will be the representation of the value he has created.
See, XYZ didn't get the house for free. He had to create value to make up for it because neither ABC nor the bank is a charity. The only use of the money was to represent value so that XYZ doesn't have to come up with something worth $80,000 all at once, but he can do it in smaller "chunks" of value.
The interest cost of money to XYZ is essentially the cost of convenience of using money (and the bank) as a transactional intermediary. Do you think ABC would sell XYZ a house for 2,667 mowings of the lawn? (I obviously came up with 2,667 by dividing $80,000/$30). I don't think ABC would want mowings of the lawn in return for the house, because in reality, ABC's needs are not for mowing the lawn, but maybe he wants bread. It would be very difficult for ABC to go about convincing other people that they should be selling him bread in exchange for lawn mowings by XYZ. In addition to all that inconvenience, there is risk that XYZ will be unable to perform the mowings (since mowing is a service delivered by human labor) in the long run - ABC certainly doesn't like that.... XYZ will not be able to buy a hosue from ABC if he doesn't use some better form of representation - maybe instead of lawn mowings, he could offer something tangible, probably 2,000 kilos of processed birch wood. Now ABC doesn't have the risk of not getting compensation for the house, but has a different risk, the risk of the fact that the birch wood that he now has to store somewhere will catch a mould. So ABC would have cost associated with storing all the wood. And we still haven't addressed the question of ABC's ability to get other goods (like bread - which he wanted in the first place) for pieces of wood.
You see, the banks are used by people out of convenience and out of need to have a financia
Did you check for etymology of the french word 'étage' ("floor")? Because you're probably using a bad example there and I'd like to know too.
In several other languages, the word used for a floor would actually be literally translated into English as "after-the-stairs area". The English word "floor" really means simply a "platform" (which could obviously be on any level), while the foreign words for "floor" are more specific and refer to an "elevation level" (which is any floor that is no longer on the ground level).
Money in your example was a means of representing something worth a house. You made up that it is the 'permission' for one person to give the other a house. If the reputation of money as a representation of value goes away because of banks, people will tell them good by and switch to some other way of representing value that WILL be respected.
Don't make stuff up and learn about some fundamentals of economics first.
In essence of your second paragraph, you are basically saying that INDUCE will suppport racism because laws are enforced "politically".
You truly must be out of your fucking mind. You must be a non-white person because in everyday life, you hear this kind of shit from non-white people. People of non-white skin color in the U.S. try to find relations to racism in EVERYTHING, no matter how fucking ridiculous it sounds. Get over your grandparent's problems and leave that shit in their grave. Move on, kiddo, move on!
You can tell me all you want about how scriptable Windows is, but here's one that should help demonstrate how scriptable it isn't: How do I script the addition of a new vpn connection under Windows 2000, and make the same script work in Windows XP? Good luck with the answer, I'm still working on it after about two weeks.
Use a WMI managed class called Win32_NetworkAdapterSettings.
By the U.S. constitution, you are innocent until proven guilty. Thus if the jury finds you "not guilty", you will remain innocent.
You are confused. What you were probably talking about was if an accused individual is asked "Are you guilty?" The individual has three options:
1. "I am guilty."
2. "I do not deny."
3. "I am innocent."
And the Supreme Court says it's ok because as citizens we're supposed to know the Bill of Rights well enough that we know they don't have any authority to demand ID or do anything to you if you refuse. (Exception: if you're driving, they can demand to see your driver's license, which is pretty dodgy Constitutionally but tends to hold up.)
So if they ask my for ID, they can try to scan the prints on my middle finger.
Wake up. The Patriot Act already changed everything.
Could you send in the specifics of your setup? You probably have it all documented since you put effort into it, but I wanted to do exactly the same for my house for a long time, it's just that your solution is beautiful and probably debugged, so in case it's not a hassle for you, I'd be glad to download the info on what you did in there. Thanks.
This is the age of outsourcing.
I'd take 'beauty', 'intelligence' and 'likes sex'. Cooking and cleaning can be arranged for through third-party vendors... And geekiness, fuck that, do you want a wife or a co-worker??
Yeah, well, Lightning Source (btw, a subsidiary of Ingram) just lost a patent lawsuit to On Demand Machine Corp. worth $15M with proven willful intent, so they might get hit even more.
Dude, we're talking about a "Pilsner" not a "Budweiser"!
Plus, you don't know a difference between.cz and.pl? It's Czech Republic and Poland. If you are missing such fundamentals in international background, how can you even credibly tell what a good beer is and what is "original"?
The beer you linked to is in fact the original Budweiser. "Budweis" is German for "Ceske Budejovice" (a town in Czech Republic).
Then you go on to introduce an example of VELCRO hook-and-loop fastener, which has even less to do with golden beer than cheese. Aren't you admitting that the topic is broader than the trademark status of "Pilsner"?
I decided to go along with your analogy for solely argumentative purpose, hoping that you would be more inclined to allowing yourself to understand my point if I strayed there. The fact that this process revealed a broader topic is a side-effect that I admit - it turns out that there truly is a broader isssue here.
So is "golden beer" the accepted generic term for lagers of this type, just as "sparkling wine" is the generic term for wines produced in the Champagne region of France and imitations thereof?
Yes!
And by the way, just on a side note, I'll mention something rather amusing. In one of the foreign languages that I happen to be fluent in, the equivalent of the U.S. term "Velcro" translates to "dry zip".
Interstate brand names in American English do have a formal codification maintained by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
I agree that the USPTO is an exception.
If you claim that only Americans commit genericide against trademarks, then explain British "hoovering" for sweeping the carpet with a vacuum cleaner.
Frankly speaking, I don't really know why this is happening. I suspect that "to hoover" is used only in informal language.
Overall, I am not really sure whether it makes sense to argue. After all, I could theoretically comfortably say that I could attribute things that *I* consider as bastardizing the English language to "cultural differences". And as such, I believe that cultural differences are something for everyone to overcome without bitching about it, so I think I'll shut up.
Intereresting discussion it was indeed. Thanks.
And good luck to you.
Europe tends to de-genericise geographical indicators such as CHEDDAR(tm) cheese for cheese made in Cheddar, England.
I don't know about the Cheddar cheese example, but I don't really care because the topic is "Pilsner" and not cheese.Similar problems can carry different circumstaincail backgrounds, you know... But if you truly want to go via the way of examples from different industries, let me give you one term: Velcro - everyone says "velcro" as if that was a general term and yet the noun is a _brand name_ - it is an american simplification to take brand names for generic terms.
And by the way, I would bet my own cash that 80% of Americans would swear to whatever is dear to them that velcro is an American invention even though it's Swiss, but that's a different topic altogether, let's not get into that...
Otherwise, how could SABMiller, which makes MILLER LITE(tm) beer, get away with claiming [xpressmart.com] that MILLER LITE beer is a "true pilsner"?
Based on the only piece of evidence you included, it is not SABMiller directly who claims Miller Lite is a "true pilsner" - it is "Biros Merchandising" who manages the online store xpressmart.com and confidently sells those kind of patches.
When a language such as English does not have a formal codification, it doesn't matter that both "Velcro" and "Pilsner" have a capitalized and non-capitalized version of the two in the "American Heritage" dictionary, because in the end, this kind of ignorance of proper usage of such words is practiced only by less than 5% of the world population.
Slashdot Mirror
Something is wrong when people with decades of experience are being laid off at age 60+ just so that the companies that they helped make profitable can become slightly more so.
I've been struggling to find out whether there is something truly wrong when that happens.
The business owner has the right to make a decision about his business. The 60-year-old was involved in a relationship with that business for a number of years. It worked: he delivered value, he got compensated back for it. Why is it wrong to terminate such a relationship if it doesn't make sense for the employer any more? It would be wrong to keep it artificially, wouldn't it? If I am a business owner and I am forced to loose an opportunity to contribute extra into the domestic product by employing (and paying) someone with whom my business is not extracting the value it is interested in, isn't that bad for the economy?
Please debunk to me what is "wrong" with situations like your example: people over 60 getting fired just because the company doesn't need them any more?
Is it the fact that the company doesn't need him but the poor fellow still needs them because he is scared of potential difficulties of finding a different job?
Why isn't it realized by people that the job market is nothing more than a big match-making service where people or businesses go and try to find out who fits whose needs at the moment?
Please shed some light on this "moral" issue for me, as I truly am frustrated with the kind of vagueness that people here often use to hide the reality that they simply can't justify something because it "feels right/wrong".
You don't seem to know what you want. You didn't menition anything that shows that you have clear-cut criteria for evaluating this matter and you didn't propose anything, just insist on the same thing over - "corporations are bad", "freedom for private enterprises are bad" and other things (pardon me if I skewed any of your claims in the above-quotes, but that's what it sounds like when you say it).
"I just feel that there are better ways" - it's nice to have a feeling like that, but WHAT are those better ways?
"[...] just seems really dumb" - if something only "seems" to you to be one way or another, and you don't back that up with any reason, then this discussion won't work.
"But hey, you like it" - It's not a matter of liking it or not. If I see that using a financial intermediary and money issued by them is a cheaper way for me to achieve my goals of exchanging goods and services over barter, I'll do it. That's what it's all about.
Good luck to you.
And what do you think money is? Money is only an entry in a book. Even the fact that printed money exists is just something that is happening out of necessity - to faciliate smaller transactions where it would be cost-prohibitive to bring a bank into the picture.
Banks are "financial intermediaries". This is not a fancy word that "experts" made up, it is actually the most accurate description of what a bank is.
Money is a comodity. How valuable money is is assigned by people out of free will.
It is true that all money that ever shows up in bank ledgers comes from a loan, and it comes at an interest rate. But that interest rate is nothing more than the cost of using money as an intermediary.
In your scenario, no money is present first. Then XYZ borrows $80,000 from a bank (let's say at 1%) and when he buys ABC's house, XYZ's money is crossed out in the bank record and ABC's balance is increased. The house changes hands and now, the situation is such that XYZ is paid interest by the bank for keeping the money there - let's say 0.5% (this is the incentive for ABC to keep the money "on the market" and contribute to the supply of money). On the other hand, XYZ who owns a house is still charged 1%, because technically, he has a loan.
Now, understand that XYZ never had goods or services worth one entire house. He "borrowed". He did not get the house for free! He will either have to keep on paying the interest (and never pay back the loan), or he will have to come up with $80,000 plus a few year's interest. If he keeps on paying just the interest and never the principal, chances are, he will end up paying a LOT more over the long term than paying the principal plus (some) interest sooner.
In either case, he owes "money" to the bank and he has to come up with the money somehow -- he can make an arrangement with the bank that he will mowe the lawn in front of their branch every week and for every lawn mowing, they will forgive $30 of his loan balance. Or, he could go out to the public and sell his lawn-mowing services to people who don't want to / can't mow their lawn in exchange for money. Every time he mows the lawn, the money he receives will be the representation of the value he has created.
See, XYZ didn't get the house for free. He had to create value to make up for it because neither ABC nor the bank is a charity. The only use of the money was to represent value so that XYZ doesn't have to come up with something worth $80,000 all at once, but he can do it in smaller "chunks" of value.
The interest cost of money to XYZ is essentially the cost of convenience of using money (and the bank) as a transactional intermediary. Do you think ABC would sell XYZ a house for 2,667 mowings of the lawn? (I obviously came up with 2,667 by dividing $80,000/$30). I don't think ABC would want mowings of the lawn in return for the house, because in reality, ABC's needs are not for mowing the lawn, but maybe he wants bread. It would be very difficult for ABC to go about convincing other people that they should be selling him bread in exchange for lawn mowings by XYZ. In addition to all that inconvenience, there is risk that XYZ will be unable to perform the mowings (since mowing is a service delivered by human labor) in the long run - ABC certainly doesn't like that.... XYZ will not be able to buy a hosue from ABC if he doesn't use some better form of representation - maybe instead of lawn mowings, he could offer something tangible, probably 2,000 kilos of processed birch wood. Now ABC doesn't have the risk of not getting compensation for the house, but has a different risk, the risk of the fact that the birch wood that he now has to store somewhere will catch a mould. So ABC would have cost associated with storing all the wood. And we still haven't addressed the question of ABC's ability to get other goods (like bread - which he wanted in the first place) for pieces of wood.
You see, the banks are used by people out of convenience and out of need to have a financia
Did you check for etymology of the french word 'étage' ("floor")? Because you're probably using a bad example there and I'd like to know too.
In several other languages, the word used for a floor would actually be literally translated into English as "after-the-stairs area". The English word "floor" really means simply a "platform" (which could obviously be on any level), while the foreign words for "floor" are more specific and refer to an "elevation level" (which is any floor that is no longer on the ground level).
That's bullshit.
Money in your example was a means of representing something worth a house. You made up that it is the 'permission' for one person to give the other a house. If the reputation of money as a representation of value goes away because of banks, people will tell them good by and switch to some other way of representing value that WILL be respected.
Don't make stuff up and learn about some fundamentals of economics first.
It's peTa, not peNTa!!!
It goes like this: kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa.
Thanks for those sources, I appreciate it.
Typical /., where people get modded up as Informative even though they don't cite any sources to support their claims.
In SI, l/s is not letters per second, but is a measure of German Oktoberfest beer drinking speed (liters per second).
In essence of your second paragraph, you are basically saying that INDUCE will suppport racism because laws are enforced "politically".
You truly must be out of your fucking mind. You must be a non-white person because in everyday life, you hear this kind of shit from non-white people. People of non-white skin color in the U.S. try to find relations to racism in EVERYTHING, no matter how fucking ridiculous it sounds. Get over your grandparent's problems and leave that shit in their grave. Move on, kiddo, move on!
That's not "vwala", but "voila" (or more precisely, with a grave on the 'a': "voilà").
It's sad to see people bastardizing language over and over again...
You can tell me all you want about how scriptable Windows is, but here's one that should help demonstrate how scriptable it isn't: How do I script the addition of a new vpn connection under Windows 2000, and make the same script work in Windows XP? Good luck with the answer, I'm still working on it after about two weeks.
Use a WMI managed class called Win32_NetworkAdapterSettings.
You must be around 16 or 17 years old...
"Guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt", only applies to criminal charges
Just for the future, "doubt" does not have a "shadow" to it. The "shadow of doubt" is more of a paperback novel term.
The correct terminology is "beyond reasonable doubt".
By the U.S. constitution, you are innocent until proven guilty. Thus if the jury finds you "not guilty", you will remain innocent.
You are confused. What you were probably talking about was if an accused individual is asked "Are you guilty?" The individual has three options: 1. "I am guilty."
2. "I do not deny."
3. "I am innocent."
Each has different legal implications.
And the Supreme Court says it's ok because as citizens we're supposed to know the Bill of Rights well enough that we know they don't have any authority to demand ID or do anything to you if you refuse. (Exception: if you're driving, they can demand to see your driver's license, which is pretty dodgy Constitutionally but tends to hold up.)
So if they ask my for ID, they can try to scan the prints on my middle finger.
Wake up. The Patriot Act already changed everything.
WTF is this modded "funny" when it should be modded "Interesting"??
Could you send in the specifics of your setup? You probably have it all documented since you put effort into it, but I wanted to do exactly the same for my house for a long time, it's just that your solution is beautiful and probably debugged, so in case it's not a hassle for you, I'd be glad to download the info on what you did in there. Thanks.
This is the age of outsourcing.
I'd take 'beauty', 'intelligence' and 'likes sex'. Cooking and cleaning can be arranged for through third-party vendors... And geekiness, fuck that, do you want a wife or a co-worker??
Yeah, well, Lightning Source (btw, a subsidiary of Ingram) just lost a patent lawsuit to On Demand Machine Corp. worth $15M with proven willful intent, so they might get hit even more.
You utter imbecile!
Go read the fucking research and complain only after you have accomplished better.
Watch this, read this, plus go at least read the fucking article:
"'This material allows you to see a three-dimensional image,' Professor Tachi said."
And also read this.
Dude, we're talking about a "Pilsner" not a "Budweiser"!
.cz and .pl? It's Czech Republic and Poland. If you are missing such fundamentals in international background, how can you even credibly tell what a good beer is and what is "original"?
Plus, you don't know a difference between
The beer you linked to is in fact the original Budweiser. "Budweis" is German for "Ceske Budejovice" (a town in Czech Republic).
You know what? Here you go, educate yourself.
Then you go on to introduce an example of VELCRO hook-and-loop fastener, which has even less to do with golden beer than cheese. Aren't you admitting that the topic is broader than the trademark status of "Pilsner"?
I decided to go along with your analogy for solely argumentative purpose, hoping that you would be more inclined to allowing yourself to understand my point if I strayed there. The fact that this process revealed a broader topic is a side-effect that I admit - it turns out that there truly is a broader isssue here.
So is "golden beer" the accepted generic term for lagers of this type, just as "sparkling wine" is the generic term for wines produced in the Champagne region of France and imitations thereof?
Yes!
And by the way, just on a side note, I'll mention something rather amusing. In one of the foreign languages that I happen to be fluent in, the equivalent of the U.S. term "Velcro" translates to "dry zip".
Interstate brand names in American English do have a formal codification maintained by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
I agree that the USPTO is an exception.
If you claim that only Americans commit genericide against trademarks, then explain British "hoovering" for sweeping the carpet with a vacuum cleaner.
Frankly speaking, I don't really know why this is happening. I suspect that "to hoover" is used only in informal language.
Overall, I am not really sure whether it makes sense to argue. After all, I could theoretically comfortably say that I could attribute things that *I* consider as bastardizing the English language to "cultural differences". And as such, I believe that cultural differences are something for everyone to overcome without bitching about it, so I think I'll shut up.
Intereresting discussion it was indeed. Thanks.
And good luck to you.
Europe tends to de-genericise geographical indicators such as CHEDDAR(tm) cheese for cheese made in Cheddar, England.
I don't know about the Cheddar cheese example, but I don't really care because the topic is "Pilsner" and not cheese.Similar problems can carry different circumstaincail backgrounds, you know... But if you truly want to go via the way of examples from different industries, let me give you one term: Velcro - everyone says "velcro" as if that was a general term and yet the noun is a _brand name_ - it is an american simplification to take brand names for generic terms.
And by the way, I would bet my own cash that 80% of Americans would swear to whatever is dear to them that velcro is an American invention even though it's Swiss, but that's a different topic altogether, let's not get into that...
Otherwise, how could SABMiller, which makes MILLER LITE(tm) beer, get away with claiming [xpressmart.com] that MILLER LITE beer is a "true pilsner"?
Based on the only piece of evidence you included, it is not SABMiller directly who claims Miller Lite is a "true pilsner" - it is "Biros Merchandising" who manages the online store xpressmart.com and confidently sells those kind of patches.
When a language such as English does not have a formal codification, it doesn't matter that both "Velcro" and "Pilsner" have a capitalized and non-capitalized version of the two in the "American Heritage" dictionary, because in the end, this kind of ignorance of proper usage of such words is practiced only by less than 5% of the world population.
Pilsner is a fucking _brand_ of one of the lagers and comes from Czech Republic!!!
There is no such thing as a "pilsner", a general noun that would describe some sort of a beer. Pilsner is a brand!!!
My new sig: Americans don't know jack shit about beer.