I have yet to hear anyone mention anything about how much of SOPA is an anti-drug bill. This tells me that, yet again, people are protesting a bill they haven't read. This was essentially my argument about the NDAA protests also.
The last time I checked, the UK government was highly democratic. Even though it is technically a monarchy, it certainly has a transparent process of lawmaking. If there's some question of sovereignty here, at least the people of the UK can settle such a matter by going as far as calling for a general election *at any time*. I would venture to say that this particular matter is conducted in a way that meets with the (at least tacit) approval of the overwhelming majority of citizens of the UK. So if there's a question of sovereignty, it's that the sovereignty of the UK has been ceded to the British. I can't see the problem.
Stop being one of the fewer than 15% of Americans who travels by air more than once per year. I suggest that, like it or not, you are part of the problem.
It's on a long list of promises that presidential candidates commonly make but which they have zero authority to deliver. Rewriting tax code? Eliminating federal agencies whose authority derives from legislative rules? Outlawing abortion? Legalizing or criminalizing a drug? If any of these things was an objective of the candidate, he or she would be much closer to that authority by running for Congress, because these are in no way within the authority of the President.
A big chunk of First Amendment philosophy stems from a case concerning people protesting the military draft -- the WWI (one!) military draft. Hippies are not such a recent phenomenon.
They aren't (yet) exactly "wandering the subways and accosting people at random." They may have a metal detector and a swab nitrate test at a checkpoint. I worked in a botanical lab and many of my clothes and definitely my laptop bag and folio were contaminated enough from fertilizers to always register false positives at the airport. It sucked to fly, a lot.
Detention = arrest, full stop. If you, a reasonable person, are not free to walk away, you are under arrest and should insist on your right to remain silent and your right to counsel, then and there. Those are the first, last and only words you say. And then you're a deaf, mute, seriously career-limiting problem for whoever arrested you without cause.
It does mean that. And in this case, it's the Massachusetts State Police you should call. And if you're doing this kind of civil disobedience activism, please have the time and patience and ability to see it through. It's not going to be a fun day, either for you, or for the TSA or for the police. Basically at the moment you are under arrest ("not reasonably free to walk away"), what you are looking for next is a Miranda warning. Those need to be the next words you hear, period. You are deaf to anything else, and completely mute from that moment forward, until you are alone with an attorney. If they follow through with an arrest and cannot argue that they had justification, since the TSA operatives are entry-level functionaries, it's the end of their career if they really carry this out.
>People are secure, because the search is not mandatory,
In the OP's question, the search most certainly *is* mandatory. He has been *ordered* by a police officer to comply, and has no reasonable freedom to walk away. He is, literally, under arrest at this point.
Or you'd pay the invoice. Depending on the state, and depending on the professional status of the individual, you might find yourself in the position of paying unspecified civil damages on top of the invoice amount. If he can walk into a courtroom with evidence that he customarily does this kind of work for an established rate, you've got a long road to go down to prove that he agreed to do this "real world problem solving work" on a volunteer basis for no compensation.
I would consider this a serious risk if I were you. Civil damages for this kind of abuse might be a lot more than you think. Now, if you are getting written agreements ahead of time that says, yes, this work is indeed being performed without compensation as part of a mutual speculation, then you *might* be in the clear, but even then I would make an active determination that it is actually legal in your jurisdiction to enter into such an agreement with a professional who has a customary rate for the work you are asking him to do. You might not have as much latitude in this negotiation as you expect. It may even be the case that if you accept the work on a volunteer basis, you can only waive the direct compensation part but still be on the hook for taxation based on the value of the services rendered. Once you get into tax evasion we might be elevating this conversation from civil damages into criminal acts.
I would seriously perform some due diligence work with an employment attorney before I asked any candidate for employment or prospective contractor or a professional in any field where a customary compensation level can be asserted, to do *anything* resembling real work whether it has any relevance to your business domain or not. You may be setting yourself up for a lawsuit, and you may be exposing your company to risks that you haven't even considered, let alone assessed with an eye towards mitigation.
Let's use a car analogy. If you want to evaluate an auto mechanic before you hire him to do "real" work, you give him a smaller piece of lesser "real" work to do. If he bills you for this, and you don't pay, HE GETS A LIEN ON YOUR CAR! If you try to repossess your car without settling, YOU RISK SPENDING THE NEXT DECADE IN PRISON.
So there are probably specific legislative rules that empower the mechanic's lien scenario, but the legal process that enables that situation, also puts your company at risk, and from your posts, I don't think you've quite considered the level of potential risk that is present if you have the kind of policy that the other poster described as an institutional policy.
How certain are you that you won't get someone on your hook who has every intention of teaching you this lesson, and what have you done, specifically, to defend yourself against that person?
"It's so bad that he's unable to see why a 3-server Windows network would take less time to maintain than, say, a 30 non-homogeneous Linux server network."
I have documented results that are contrary to your conjecture, so while I understand the point you are attempting to make, I don't agree with your assumptions.
I have a whiteboard in my cubicle. Over the past few months I've been collecting little magnets (don't ask) and operating a manual Game of Life, updating the board every morning. So far, not one person has noticed it. I'm quite disappointed.
At a mid-career level, you might be looking for candidates who don't so much "need a paycheck" as need to develop from a position of strength to a greater position of strength.
Often, you could leave a job that is sustainable and good for a speculative one that turns out to not be so good, years down the road. You're thinking like an unemployed person. Generally you are NOT "right back where you started". You went from employment to speculation over superior employment, to unemployment. Completely different from where you started.
How about the thread-safe implementation of a tabulator for an online polling system that I was asked to whiteboard? (You know who you are.) That was certainly no FizzBuzz!
Three months "salary" is probably close to nine months "living expenses" with discipline. Three months pre-tax salary might be a year of living expenses. But it's quite a chicken and egg problem, especially for someone starting from debt. You can't save 3 months pre-tax salary in 6, even without debt, unless you have growth investments or something.
>It helps if you have 3 months salary in reserve for emergencies like you should
This. 400% this. There's much more to it than just "emergencies" though. If you have capital, you are more than just an employee at an interview. You are also a potential *investor*. They are not only turning YOU down for a job, they are also showing you to the door WITH A SACK OF CASH IN YOUR HAND. Not all jobs are investment opportunities, but the ones that are happen to be the best jobs, AND give you very discreet ways of communicating the fact that YOUR participation could potentially enrich THEM. You aren't "buying a job", but you are a more valuable asset if you've got capital than if you haven't, whether you intend to share it with them or not.
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The UK should have thought about that when it insisted on signing the Berne Convention! You make your choices. Accept the consequences.
I have yet to hear anyone mention anything about how much of SOPA is an anti-drug bill. This tells me that, yet again, people are protesting a bill they haven't read. This was essentially my argument about the NDAA protests also.
The last time I checked, the UK government was highly democratic. Even though it is technically a monarchy, it certainly has a transparent process of lawmaking. If there's some question of sovereignty here, at least the people of the UK can settle such a matter by going as far as calling for a general election *at any time*. I would venture to say that this particular matter is conducted in a way that meets with the (at least tacit) approval of the overwhelming majority of citizens of the UK. So if there's a question of sovereignty, it's that the sovereignty of the UK has been ceded to the British. I can't see the problem.
"what have we become ?"
Nations who enter into treaties with one another and then abide by the terms of those treaties?
Don't think in terms of "missing your flight."
Stop being one of the fewer than 15% of Americans who travels by air more than once per year. I suggest that, like it or not, you are part of the problem.
It's on a long list of promises that presidential candidates commonly make but which they have zero authority to deliver.
Rewriting tax code? Eliminating federal agencies whose authority derives from legislative rules? Outlawing abortion? Legalizing or criminalizing a drug? If any of these things was an objective of the candidate, he or she would be much closer to that authority by running for Congress, because these are in no way within the authority of the President.
A big chunk of First Amendment philosophy stems from a case concerning people protesting the military draft -- the WWI (one!) military draft. Hippies are not such a recent phenomenon.
They aren't (yet) exactly "wandering the subways and accosting people at random." They may have a metal detector and a swab nitrate test at a checkpoint. I worked in a botanical lab and many of my clothes and definitely my laptop bag and folio were contaminated enough from fertilizers to always register false positives at the airport. It sucked to fly, a lot.
Detention = arrest, full stop. If you, a reasonable person, are not free to walk away, you are under arrest and should insist on your right to remain silent and your right to counsel, then and there. Those are the first, last and only words you say. And then you're a deaf, mute, seriously career-limiting problem for whoever arrested you without cause.
It does mean that. And in this case, it's the Massachusetts State Police you should call. And if you're doing this kind of civil disobedience activism, please have the time and patience and ability to see it through. It's not going to be a fun day, either for you, or for the TSA or for the police. Basically at the moment you are under arrest ("not reasonably free to walk away"), what you are looking for next is a Miranda warning. Those need to be the next words you hear, period. You are deaf to anything else, and completely mute from that moment forward, until you are alone with an attorney. If they follow through with an arrest and cannot argue that they had justification, since the TSA operatives are entry-level functionaries, it's the end of their career if they really carry this out.
>People are secure, because the search is not mandatory,
In the OP's question, the search most certainly *is* mandatory. He has been *ordered* by a police officer to comply, and has no reasonable freedom to walk away. He is, literally, under arrest at this point.
Can you name some of these Americans who are being detained indefinitely without any rights?
No. If these people aren't already working for you, It's unreasonable to assume they want to.
>And I would watch you go.
Or you'd pay the invoice. Depending on the state, and depending on the professional status of the individual, you might find yourself in the position of paying unspecified civil damages on top of the invoice amount. If he can walk into a courtroom with evidence that he customarily does this kind of work for an established rate, you've got a long road to go down to prove that he agreed to do this "real world problem solving work" on a volunteer basis for no compensation.
I would consider this a serious risk if I were you. Civil damages for this kind of abuse might be a lot more than you think. Now, if you are getting written agreements ahead of time that says, yes, this work is indeed being performed without compensation as part of a mutual speculation, then you *might* be in the clear, but even then I would make an active determination that it is actually legal in your jurisdiction to enter into such an agreement with a professional who has a customary rate for the work you are asking him to do. You might not have as much latitude in this negotiation as you expect. It may even be the case that if you accept the work on a volunteer basis, you can only waive the direct compensation part but still be on the hook for taxation based on the value of the services rendered. Once you get into tax evasion we might be elevating this conversation from civil damages into criminal acts.
I would seriously perform some due diligence work with an employment attorney before I asked any candidate for employment or prospective contractor or a professional in any field where a customary compensation level can be asserted, to do *anything* resembling real work whether it has any relevance to your business domain or not. You may be setting yourself up for a lawsuit, and you may be exposing your company to risks that you haven't even considered, let alone assessed with an eye towards mitigation.
Let's use a car analogy. If you want to evaluate an auto mechanic before you hire him to do "real" work, you give him a smaller piece of lesser "real" work to do. If he bills you for this, and you don't pay, HE GETS A LIEN ON YOUR CAR! If you try to repossess your car without settling, YOU RISK SPENDING THE NEXT DECADE IN PRISON.
So there are probably specific legislative rules that empower the mechanic's lien scenario, but the legal process that enables that situation, also puts your company at risk, and from your posts, I don't think you've quite considered the level of potential risk that is present if you have the kind of policy that the other poster described as an institutional policy.
How certain are you that you won't get someone on your hook who has every intention of teaching you this lesson, and what have you done, specifically, to defend yourself against that person?
"I'm not an ornithologist but I did study some things about waterfowl in my hydrology program. Are pigeons migratory?"
"It's so bad that he's unable to see why a 3-server Windows network would take less time to maintain than, say, a 30 non-homogeneous Linux server network."
I have documented results that are contrary to your conjecture, so while I understand the point you are attempting to make, I don't agree with your assumptions.
You probably shouldn't have said that to a wheelchair-bound interviewer.
"Never recruit an architect that doesn't use the whiteboard during the interview."
Allow him or her to use a pad and pen if it's going to be humiliating to try to use the whiteboard from the wheelchair.
I have a whiteboard in my cubicle. Over the past few months I've been collecting little magnets (don't ask) and operating a manual Game of Life, updating the board every morning. So far, not one person has noticed it. I'm quite disappointed.
It's not "magic". It's fitting to a complex societal norm.
At a mid-career level, you might be looking for candidates who don't so much "need a paycheck" as need to develop from a position of strength to a greater position of strength.
>And really, what's the worst that could happen?
Often, you could leave a job that is sustainable and good for a speculative one that turns out to not be so good, years down the road. You're thinking like an unemployed person. Generally you are NOT "right back where you started". You went from employment to speculation over superior employment, to unemployment. Completely different from where you started.
How about the thread-safe implementation of a tabulator for an online polling system that I was asked to whiteboard? (You know who you are.)
That was certainly no FizzBuzz!
Three months "salary" is probably close to nine months "living expenses" with discipline. Three months pre-tax salary might be a year of living expenses. But it's quite a chicken and egg problem, especially for someone starting from debt. You can't save 3 months pre-tax salary in 6, even without debt, unless you have growth investments or something.
>It helps if you have 3 months salary in reserve for emergencies like you should
This. 400% this. There's much more to it than just "emergencies" though. If you have capital, you are more than just an employee at an interview. You are also a potential *investor*. They are not only turning YOU down for a job, they are also showing you to the door WITH A SACK OF CASH IN YOUR HAND. Not all jobs are investment opportunities, but the ones that are happen to be the best jobs, AND give you very discreet ways of communicating the fact that YOUR participation could potentially enrich THEM. You aren't "buying a job", but you are a more valuable asset if you've got capital than if you haven't, whether you intend to share it with them or not.