Because the choice is only binary. In that case, the only alternative is to have full and complete regulation of everything controlled by a big central government and nobody has freedom to do anything, since everything is regulated.
Binary Choices are dumb, why do people who don't understand Libertarianism always thinking Anarchy = Libertarianism. ?
Because pure libertarianism would be indistinguishable from anarchy in practice.
You need to qualify pure libertarianism/no government by having a military and court/contract system (at least) in order to stop things degenerating immediately into dog-eat-dog anarchy based purely on who has the most guns.
But if your market value is the minimum wage, then you have no leverage in terms of negotiating with your (potential) employer. They will offer you the minimum wage, the same as every other equally skilled/unskilled applicant.
An lot of jobs are basically minimum wage type, and the more people get educated, the more well educated people will be forced into taking these minimum wage jobs.
Not everyone can or will become a software consultant.
As a contractor, if someone isn't giving me the money I request or we can't come to a dollar amount we can both agree on, I just pass that employment opportunity by.
That is fine if you are a highly skilled contractor with limited competitors, as seems to be the case with most people on slashdot.
It doesn't apply in employment situations where the skills required to do the job are limited, and the pool of potential employees is large. Since pretty much anyone with a car can be an Uber driver, you have a very limited bargaining position. Same with stacking shelves in a supermarket or flipping burgers.
It is pure fantasy to pretend that all jobs are at the highly paid consultant level, or that everyone can somehow reach that level.
No, Taxi driver is a shit job. Many people are choosing to work for Uber because it is less shitty.
In the UK at least (where the barriers to entry for being a minicab driver are pretty low, i.e. you don't need to spend a million quid on a "medallion" as appears to be the case in the US) taxi driving is a fairly shitty job in terms of the number of hours you generally have to do, but a relatively well paid shitty job since you can take a big chunk of your earnings as cash and not pay tax on them. Apparently.
There are a lot of non-Uber jobs out there, nobody is forced to work specifically for Uber.
There's an oligopsony for non-skilled shitty jobs.
Better than/easier to get than flipping burgers is a really low standard./P
For dullards like myself who had never heard this word before and had to google it, an oligopsony is a market where the number of buyers is small and the number of sellers is large.
Because they majored in philosophy and have no skills.
Someone who majored in philosophy has the same skills as someone who majored in biology or computer science (critical thinking, ability to process disparate information and organise their thoughts into written form, etc).
They might not have directly relevant job experience, but that is not what degree courses were ever intended to be for. And most graduates are relatively useless until they've been working for a few years and had some of the self entitlement knocked out of them anyway.
Yes, I know everyone else on slashdot got their PhD at 16 and was a millionaire by 18, but the real world doesn't work like that for most people.
Come to think of it, I heard somewhere that governments are instituted to protect certain unalienable rights, not one particular group from another.
The concept of "unalienable rights" does not have any real meaning.
If "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are unalienable rights (for instance) you can't justify jailing criminals, never mind executing them, nor could you justify killing someone in self defence. But these don't seem to be problems in the US.
If you say that someone has more of a right to life than another person (which is true in practice) then you can't say that the right to life is "unalienable".
Why does the Govt know better than the worker himself how they want to negotiate and work for their pay?
Why does the government interfere in anything at all?
Obviously everyone was better off in the Nineteenth Century with laissez faire economics, and things like Trade Unions, the abolition of child labour, the provision of a social security safety net, health and safety laws and all the rest is just pure evil socialism for its own sake.
Uber will be moving to self-driving cars as soon as they can. They are just trying to string out the "contractor" subterfuge until the technology is ready.
Yeah, because that will be less than five years, right?
Actually, in most states in the US employment is at-will so, in any so-called steady job, your employer can give you your last paycheck, walk you out the door
immediately for no reason and allow you to collect unemployment insurance
This is not the case in most other, civilized countries.
It's the right decision under current law, but it's obvious that what we need is laws setting up a third class of workers between contractors and employees.
You want a special category of person because they are an Uber driver?
It was great of you to provide employee status to the guy who raked your yard occasionally.
To be honest, it seems unlikely anyone would count an occasional gardener as an employee (unless he lived on your premises or something).
The situation normally arises with permanent, live-in nannies, who are most definitely employees, and do need to be accounted for as such by the (rich) people who have them.
New reality: A lot of gig jobs are on demand both ways; many people want the freedom to run themselves as a business, earn in a flexible / very few strings attached format, with an unlimited or unrestricted number of payment sources available.
Highly paid independent consultants are a small subset of society, whatever the worldview of Silicon Velley types.
Reality is more like the removal for everyone (including those on minimum wage in part time jobs who aren't computer programmers) of any remaining employee benefits such as paid sick leave, paid annual leave, health and safety laws and so on.
Personally, I think if a person wants to be a contractor and sets up his own business, he should be a contractor no matter what. But the law seems to not
operate that way.
The point about employee status is that a lot of people WANT to be a contractor, because it has numerous tax advantages, and especially in the US there is no huge advantage in being an employee in terms of labour protection laws, entitlement to sick benefit, paid pension provision or sensible amounts of annual leave, and so on.
Setting up your own business in itself is a strong indication you will be a contractor for tax purposes, but not necessarily if you only work for one employer, and so on.
What's the difference between an employee and a contractor? The contractor doesn't receive any benefits. Since the uber drivers do not receive benefits, they are contractors. This seems like a problem of normative vs. descriptive (is vs. ought) claims. The uber drivers are contractors that don't recieve benefits vs. The uber drivers should receive benefits and therefore be employees.
The reason people get legitimately annoyed about mis-using disinterested is precisely because it is NOT a synonym of uninterested.
Uninterested means that you show no interest in something (i.e. you're bored or indifferent to it). Disinterested means that you are objective about something (i.e. not biased for or against it).
And it's probably a smaller percentage than that, since it probably counts as a tax deduction.
Any expense is a "tax deduction" in the sense that it reduces your taxable profits.
Example. Tax rate is 30%. Your company makes $2000 operating profit. You pay the government $600 tax and are left with $1400 profit to distribute, invest or whatever.
If you decide to make a further allowable payment of $1200, you then pay tax of $240 [30% of 2000 - 1200] leaving you with $560 profit [2000 - 1200 - 240] to distribute or invest.
Unless your marginal tax rate is over 100% it just means you're paying your money to someone other than the government, not that you're actually saving money.
I don't think you're allowed to criticise Kurzweil here. The argument that someone can have produced excelent software, but be an idiot in every other imaginable way, does not compute in the slashdot binary hive mind.
Free market means that prices are determined by the forces of supply and demand, as opposed to artificial (non-free, as in liberty) forces that set price ceilings or price floors. Trade secrets are routinely held secret in free markets.
No, a genuine free market involves many other factors than just how prices are determined, for instance perfect information, perfectly rational actors and so on.
In practice, capitalism allows trade secrets, along with trademarks, cartels and many other distortions of a (theoretical) pure free market.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the choice is only binary. In that case, the only alternative is to have full and complete regulation of everything controlled by a big central government and nobody has freedom to do anything, since everything is regulated.
Binary Choices are dumb, why do people who don't understand Libertarianism always thinking Anarchy = Libertarianism. ?
Because pure libertarianism would be indistinguishable from anarchy in practice.
You need to qualify pure libertarianism/no government by having a military and court/contract system (at least) in order to stop things degenerating immediately into dog-eat-dog anarchy based purely on who has the most guns.
An lot of jobs are basically minimum wage type, and the more people get educated, the more well educated people will be forced into taking these minimum wage jobs.
Not everyone can or will become a software consultant.
There are PLENTY of jobs out there.
So everyone who is unemployed chooses to be?
As a contractor, if someone isn't giving me the money I request or we can't come to a dollar amount we can both agree on, I just pass that employment opportunity by.
That is fine if you are a highly skilled contractor with limited competitors, as seems to be the case with most people on slashdot.
It doesn't apply in employment situations where the skills required to do the job are limited, and the pool of potential employees is large. Since pretty much anyone with a car can be an Uber driver, you have a very limited bargaining position. Same with stacking shelves in a supermarket or flipping burgers.
It is pure fantasy to pretend that all jobs are at the highly paid consultant level, or that everyone can somehow reach that level.
No, Taxi driver is a shit job. Many people are choosing to work for Uber because it is less shitty.
In the UK at least (where the barriers to entry for being a minicab driver are pretty low, i.e. you don't need to spend a million quid on a "medallion" as appears to be the case in the US) taxi driving is a fairly shitty job in terms of the number of hours you generally have to do, but a relatively well paid shitty job since you can take a big chunk of your earnings as cash and not pay tax on them. Apparently.
There's an oligopsony for non-skilled shitty jobs.
Better than/easier to get than flipping burgers is a really low standard./P
For dullards like myself who had never heard this word before and had to google it, an oligopsony is a market where the number of buyers is small and the number of sellers is large.
Because they majored in philosophy and have no skills.
Someone who majored in philosophy has the same skills as someone who majored in biology or computer science (critical thinking, ability to process disparate information and organise their thoughts into written form, etc).
They might not have directly relevant job experience, but that is not what degree courses were ever intended to be for. And most graduates are relatively useless until they've been working for a few years and had some of the self entitlement knocked out of them anyway.
Yes, I know everyone else on slashdot got their PhD at 16 and was a millionaire by 18, but the real world doesn't work like that for most people.
Come to think of it, I heard somewhere that governments are instituted to protect certain unalienable rights, not one particular group from another.
The concept of "unalienable rights" does not have any real meaning.
If "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are unalienable rights (for instance) you can't justify jailing criminals, never mind executing them, nor could you justify killing someone in self defence. But these don't seem to be problems in the US.
If you say that someone has more of a right to life than another person (which is true in practice) then you can't say that the right to life is "unalienable".
Why does the Govt know better than the worker himself how they want to negotiate and work for their pay?
Why does the government interfere in anything at all?
Obviously everyone was better off in the Nineteenth Century with laissez faire economics, and things like Trade Unions, the abolition of child labour, the provision of a social security safety net, health and safety laws and all the rest is just pure evil socialism for its own sake.
Uber will be moving to self-driving cars as soon as they can. They are just trying to string out the "contractor" subterfuge until the technology is ready.
Yeah, because that will be less than five years, right?
Actually, in most states in the US employment is at-will so, in any so-called steady job, your employer can give you your last paycheck, walk you out the door immediately for no reason and allow you to collect unemployment insurance
This is not the case in most other, civilized countries.
It's the right decision under current law, but it's obvious that what we need is laws setting up a third class of workers between contractors and employees.
You want a special category of person because they are an Uber driver?
How about conee?
It was great of you to provide employee status to the guy who raked your yard occasionally.
To be honest, it seems unlikely anyone would count an occasional gardener as an employee (unless he lived on your premises or something).
The situation normally arises with permanent, live-in nannies, who are most definitely employees, and do need to be accounted for as such by the (rich) people who have them.
People are pretty bright, and getting brighter.
As a middle aged person with children, I beg to differ.
New reality: A lot of gig jobs are on demand both ways; many people want the freedom to run themselves as a business, earn in a flexible / very few strings attached format, with an unlimited or unrestricted number of payment sources available.
Highly paid independent consultants are a small subset of society, whatever the worldview of Silicon Velley types.
Reality is more like the removal for everyone (including those on minimum wage in part time jobs who aren't computer programmers) of any remaining employee benefits such as paid sick leave, paid annual leave, health and safety laws and so on.
Personally, I think if a person wants to be a contractor and sets up his own business, he should be a contractor no matter what. But the law seems to not operate that way.
The point about employee status is that a lot of people WANT to be a contractor, because it has numerous tax advantages, and especially in the US there is no huge advantage in being an employee in terms of labour protection laws, entitlement to sick benefit, paid pension provision or sensible amounts of annual leave, and so on.
Setting up your own business in itself is a strong indication you will be a contractor for tax purposes, but not necessarily if you only work for one employer, and so on.
What's the difference between an employee and a contractor? The contractor doesn't receive any benefits. Since the uber drivers do not receive benefits, they are contractors. This seems like a problem of normative vs. descriptive (is vs. ought) claims. The uber drivers are contractors that don't recieve benefits vs. The uber drivers should receive benefits and therefore be employees.
Let me guess, you're not a lawyer are you?
If it was actually true, then slightly over 50% of all employees at any level would be women.
What? They are synonyms...
You are factually incorrect.
The reason people get legitimately annoyed about mis-using disinterested is precisely because it is NOT a synonym of uninterested.
Uninterested means that you show no interest in something (i.e. you're bored or indifferent to it). Disinterested means that you are objective about something (i.e. not biased for or against it).
It is a valuable distinction.
And it's probably a smaller percentage than that, since it probably counts as a tax deduction.
Any expense is a "tax deduction" in the sense that it reduces your taxable profits.
Example. Tax rate is 30%. Your company makes $2000 operating profit. You pay the government $600 tax and are left with $1400 profit to distribute, invest or whatever.
If you decide to make a further allowable payment of $1200, you then pay tax of $240 [30% of 2000 - 1200] leaving you with $560 profit [2000 - 1200 - 240] to distribute or invest.
Unless your marginal tax rate is over 100% it just means you're paying your money to someone other than the government, not that you're actually saving money.
I don't think you're allowed to criticise Kurzweil here. The argument that someone can have produced excelent software, but be an idiot in every other imaginable way, does not compute in the slashdot binary hive mind.
Free market means that prices are determined by the forces of supply and demand, as opposed to artificial (non-free, as in liberty) forces that set price ceilings or price floors. Trade secrets are routinely held secret in free markets.
No, a genuine free market involves many other factors than just how prices are determined, for instance perfect information, perfectly rational actors and so on.
In practice, capitalism allows trade secrets, along with trademarks, cartels and many other distortions of a (theoretical) pure free market.
I hit them with garam marsala
I have never, ever heard of curried porridge before. I'm pretty sure there is a good reason for that.
It certainly sounds like portion sizes in the US are quite large
That is a huge under-statement.
Portion sizes (at least in US restaurants) are ridiculously large. you literally cannot finish most meals there.
a farm hand might have 2 eggs and 5 slices of bacon; if you're sedentary limit it to say 1 egg and 2 slices of bacon.
1 egg and 2 slices of bacon is barely a snack, unless you also have sausages, hash browns, baked beans, mushrooms, tomatoes, fried bread and so on.
Yes, I am English.