Really, you're just reacting to my TONE? My first response was to a breathless bit of over-the-top snark lazily blaming the Eeeeeeevil 1% for everyone's problems. That sort of intellectual laziness and ignorance of the global economy, combined with petulance and misdirected juvenile hatred doesn't need some sweet coddling, it needs a smack in the face. I'm not feeling too badly about responding with some bristling to a typical snarky troll.
Why not petition the Government to do what they are supposed to do
Which thing is it that government is supposed to do:
1) Force foreign people to stop offering their services for lower prices?
2) Impose gigantic tariffs on overseas services until the guy in a small town in India costs as much as a programmer making a comfortable income while living in downtown San Francisco? And never mind the resulting trade war?
3) Force the US employer to only hire local people regardless of what it means to their viability as an ongoing business or what it would mean to the prices they'd have to charge to customers... and, what, subsidize them with newly raised taxes taken from other businesses?
Anyone can look at Henry Ford's business model and understand why it worked and built a huge middle class economy
No, anyone can look at the bigger picture and understand that the few decades during which that sort of arrangement in the US produced that sort of prosperity ONLY happened because there was no global economy in the way there is now. Your isolationism is a childish fantasy. You're wishing away entire industries in places like Germany and Korea so that you can insist that things can still be like they were when those didn't exist. You're either actually ignorant of reality, or pretending to be. Either way, you've waived your right to have an opinion. Please don't do anything dangerous like voting.
So, I'm the asshole because I think the deal between an employee and an employer is a two-way street? And the people who think they should be able to leave any time to get a better deal from a different employer are fine, but that employers shouldn't be allowed to do exactly the same thing are villains... they have the perfect world view, from your perspective? The people who think like that are a nightmare to EMPLOY, because they consider their flexibility to be inviolate, but the employer's flexibility to be Eeeeeevil, by definition. I can see why you'd want someone who might point out that hypocrisy to stop posting, sure. Makes sense.
But if a company has nothing left to lose because they are competing against international counterparts with vastly lower costs, you think they should simply fail, rather than use cheaper, foreign employers? That ALSO means the local employees lose their jobs. So, along with the violence you're advocating (don't be coy, you ARE), you'd also rather that companies simply die, rather than exist and operate in the US (paying US taxes, dealing with the local economies in which they sit). At least admit it. Your position: if the employees can't compete with their overseas counterparts, than they company should die with them.
What's the problem, exactly? That I'm objecting to someone who says that as an employer I should have to pay for employees whether I want them or not, even while the employees themselves should have the slack to wander off any time they want? Why shouldn't that be a two way street? Specifically. Would you be willing to trade your expectation that an employer can't stop employing you for your not having the liberty to go get a different job when you want to, for your own reasons? No? Think you should have the flexibility to leave when you want? I see.
Should Americans be paid the same as the people that you outsource to
Why should they? Cost of living in the US is substantially higher than it is in, say, India. A person who wants a decent living in the US needs to be offering an employer something they can't get from someone in India - something worth so much more that the employer is willing to write a much, much larger check for that person's time than he's willing to write to someone in India. For some employers, having a staff that's part of the local culture, speaking comfortably in the local style and able to communicate smoothly with local customers and vendors (all other skills being equal) is WELL worth the difference. Obviously for others, it's not. I've watched clients of mine head off to Indian shops, and then come running back to US-based staff less than a year later, having painfully learned their lesson.
And you won't have to deal with all of us "entitled lazy bums.
Happily, I don't have to deal with such people. I work with people every bit as entrepreneurial as I am, and with unassailable work ethics. The lazy asses I'm talking about are out there, and you KNOW they are. I don't hate them, because I'd rather just ignore them. But unfortunately the people in that entitlement culture have politicians scrambling to tell them they're right that people who start businesses are always the villains. Which would be funny (since everyone seems to want to find one of those businesses to give them a paycheck), if the hypocrisy wasn't so strong that it confuses people into voting for anyone who promises them free stuff and the spectacle of tearing down Eeeeevil business owners (even as they promise to pay for the free stuff through the ongoing taxing of those they want to destroy - the cognitive dissonance is really something).
the worker is considered a commodity. Not the foundation of the business, which is what they actually are.
Ah, I can see you've never actually founded anything. I've started businesses, and believe me, I am the foundation of those businesses. And I've worked with PLENTY of (topically, here) IT people who consider employers to be commodities, exhibiting exactly zero loyalty as soon as a recruiter drops them an email with a slightly better offer. The foundation of the business is the person or group of people who conceived of it, came up with the funding for it, and deal with the crushing load of tax, compliance, and other legal and financial burdens involved in keeping it alive - including dealing the constant churn of employees who very much see them as a commodity - a place where they can work eight or ten hours a day and take home some cash and other benefits.
It's perfectly ok to fuck your employees for a dollar.
That's what you are saying, right?
Are you suggesting that it's illegal for either the employee or the employer to walk away from an "at will" arrangement? Are you suggesting that the both the employer and the employee should be forced to continue a relationship they don't want... or that only the employer should be forced to, but the employee can do whatever they want.
I get it. You think that everyone who starts a business is suddenly a slave to the state, and to anyone that wants a paycheck from them. You're exactly the sort of entitled, lazy bum that's chasing businesses and jobs out of the country.
So if a company in New York finds that they can run their factory more efficiently and thus sell their low-margin products more competitively, by firing their NY staff and moving operations to Kentucky, would that also be wrong? Be specific.
so it is kind of redundant to quantify the term money with "tax payer"
No, it's not. Because a LOT of people seem to think that there actually is something called "government money." Nearly half the country pays no income tax at all, and a large percentage of those get a "tax refund" on the income taxes they don't pay. That flow of money is rarely referred to as "other people's money" - just as tax credit, as earned income credit... as anything other than a portion of the money that other people pay as taxes. Politicians, especially on the left, talk routinely about how they'll start a new program, or enhance regulatory power, or fund this, or that... all with a glossy coat of the atmospherics of it being "government money." They say, "It's high time we funded and expansion of NIH's chimpanzee sexuality study..." instead of "It's high time we gathered up some money from the half of the country that pays income taxes, mostly from the minority of that half that pays almost all such taxes, and have them buy an expansion of NIH's..."
It is this kind of attitude that pushes bean counting and attempted cost savings to such an extreme level that it is detrimental.
No, it's this kind of attitude that helps remind people whose money is being spent. That's part of keeping keeping such expenditures reasonable, instead of running up tens of trillions of dollars of debt... do you really need to hear an explanation as to why that is detrimental?
Asset Forfeiture is treason and the punishment for treason is death.
Abuse of asset forfeiture in a bad thing. But I don't think you actually understand what the word "treason" means. No, I'm sure you don't understand it.
Since the drones can't leave the school territory anyway, you could hardcode the location in software.
What? We're talking about GPS location features that allow students to work with automation that places the drone in precise positions only a meter or so apart along the route. The whole point is to encourage students to understand technology as it's actually being used. Hard-wiring a piece of navigational technology to think it's in exactly one place doesn't help with that mission.
And, incidentally, there's nothing saying the drone can't leave school property. They might very well be using it to do thermal mapping of a nearby wetland, or to spot changes in foliage, or to experiment with tracking things moving on the ground. Students do all SORTS of things away from the classroom. Hopefully you got to, when you were a student.
My favorite part is that teachers are not included, except in an emergency.
Except, of course, if the teacher reaches over and picks up the exact same drone, and flies it with exactly the same care in exactly the same way in exactly the same place, but does it five minutes later. Because then he's off the clock, and he's doing it for fun, which the FAA says is just fine.
Why are those not just engineering problems to solve
Who says they're not? That's not the point. The point is that disingenuous articles talking about how much cheaper per kwh a given solar device is than burning coal without mentioning all of the extra infrastructure needed to make all of that solar actually useful 24 hours a day, year-round, is just nonsense. It's deliberately misleading.
Though, think of like this: all the food we grow is made with solar power
No, think of it like this: imagine that all of your crops would fail if they didn't get sun every day. Growing plants are a bad analogy, because they can coast (by slowing down their energy use) when they're not given good sun. But the electricity you need to run the refrigeration you need to preserve antibiotics or keep a hospital running or keep your food frozen and water flowing and datacenters up... doesn't get to coast on cloudy days. All this talk about how a given solar panel's output being cheaper than coal always avoids the extra infrastructure needed to bridge that cloud-period gap.
There are plenty of "conservatives" who think libertarians are mostly just people who want to smoke weed while on the job, but who ALSO think that, yes, a restaurant owner is a pretty good judge of how much parking she can afford to provide as she tries to establish, grow, and run her business in a highly competitive market. And your false dichotomy where public roads paid for with taxes are either expected or not provided you also accept all other government waste or not - absurd, and you know it.
Like her or hate her, Clinton was the Secretary of State.
So? If her tenure there is characterized by a string of terrible mis-steps, embarrassments and deaths, and her demonstrably lying about them even as she also deletes half of her official records while illegally running all her official correspondence through a home computer and turning none of it over to State's archivists as she left office, as required... is her tenure in that office supposed to be an example of "experience" that makes her a better candidate for an even more sensitive job?
So what you're saying is that because other people have "ties" to (for example) Saudi Arabia, it's cool for her to fly around on your tax dollar and extort tens millions of dollars for her family business from foreign governments?
In addition, government officials form both parties have used private email addresses as well
There is no comparison. Nobody at her level of authority (fourth in line to the presidency, the nation's top diplomat, someone who handled highly classified material as a regular part of her job) has previously completely skipped using secure email services for official business, electing instead to handle ALL of her official email through a personal account served up on a computer in her residential home. Really, try to find another example of that. Then take into account the fact that inspectors general from multiple intelligence agencies have said that she trafficked in classified (even way-above-top-secret) material on her unsecured home computer... and never turned over ANY of it as she left office, as required to. And when hounded by FOIA requests and subpoenas - which she dragged out for YEARS - she deleted tens of thousands of those messages before grudgingly handing over some of it as printed-out hardcopies stripped of all header information.
Cite another top government official who has even approached that level of deliberately hiding ALL OF THEIR OFFICIAL CORRESPONDENCE from scrutiny.
there is no upside for either side to drag this into court.
Sure there is. People who worked under her were subject to losing their careers and even their liberty for doing FAR less than she did. The "upside" to indicting her is to demonstrate that despite the long history of her and her husband's abuses of power, she's not above the law.
Can you write a computer program that has free will, ie, a program that you are unable to decide the outcome of before hand, even if you had an identical computer to test it out on first and gave it 100% identical inputs?
Yes.
Because if, as in reality, you allow some of those inputs to be the behavior of things like the intersections of the synapses of billions of neurons in your brain to be subject to quantum randomness, you're going to get a system far more complex than a bunch of IF... THEN statements. Then have the running state of that computer subject to floods of synapse-impacting chemicals, metabolism, environmental temperature fluctuations, and the random decay of the the memory and communication plumbing... let all of those things seep into your "computer program" and watch your notion of a simple no-free-will model of two side-by-side programs producing the same results go into oblivion. Our brains marshal the resources of multiple subsystems, and adapt to unthinkably large numbers of unpredictable biological events. And we train ourselves to leverage that adaptation to meet our needs and our goals. You know: we make decisions.
Really? Hillary has had her hand in throwing lots of people to their deaths in conflicts launched or made worse on her watch. Or are you trying to ignore that part? Ask some Libyans how all that's going lately.
But from where I sit she doesn't seem to be splitting the democratic party.
What? Have you not been paying attention to the huge number of Bernie supporters who actively, vocally hate her? Enough that she just lost the Indiana primary tonight, if you hadn't noticed. There are plenty of liberals who think she's awful - a war hawk, a moral flip-flopper on almost every substantive issue, someone who smeared other women just to keep her philandering husband in power so she'd have his leverage to get in power herself... someone who demonstrably lies about both the big stuff and, strangely, the little stuff. There are a lot of Democrats who are really tired of her looking them in the eye and simply telling bald-faced lies. They've seen it from both Clintons for decades, and are warming up instead the Get Free Stuff plan from Sanders.
Not divisive? Check those primary results, including tonight's. Her party is FAR more divided than the Republicans are. The numbers don't lie, even though she does.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, you're just reacting to my TONE? My first response was to a breathless bit of over-the-top snark lazily blaming the Eeeeeeevil 1% for everyone's problems. That sort of intellectual laziness and ignorance of the global economy, combined with petulance and misdirected juvenile hatred doesn't need some sweet coddling, it needs a smack in the face. I'm not feeling too badly about responding with some bristling to a typical snarky troll.
Why not petition the Government to do what they are supposed to do
Which thing is it that government is supposed to do:
... and, what, subsidize them with newly raised taxes taken from other businesses?
1) Force foreign people to stop offering their services for lower prices?
2) Impose gigantic tariffs on overseas services until the guy in a small town in India costs as much as a programmer making a comfortable income while living in downtown San Francisco? And never mind the resulting trade war?
3) Force the US employer to only hire local people regardless of what it means to their viability as an ongoing business or what it would mean to the prices they'd have to charge to customers
Anyone can look at Henry Ford's business model and understand why it worked and built a huge middle class economy
No, anyone can look at the bigger picture and understand that the few decades during which that sort of arrangement in the US produced that sort of prosperity ONLY happened because there was no global economy in the way there is now. Your isolationism is a childish fantasy. You're wishing away entire industries in places like Germany and Korea so that you can insist that things can still be like they were when those didn't exist. You're either actually ignorant of reality, or pretending to be. Either way, you've waived your right to have an opinion. Please don't do anything dangerous like voting.
So, I'm the asshole because I think the deal between an employee and an employer is a two-way street? And the people who think they should be able to leave any time to get a better deal from a different employer are fine, but that employers shouldn't be allowed to do exactly the same thing are villains ... they have the perfect world view, from your perspective? The people who think like that are a nightmare to EMPLOY, because they consider their flexibility to be inviolate, but the employer's flexibility to be Eeeeeevil, by definition. I can see why you'd want someone who might point out that hypocrisy to stop posting, sure. Makes sense.
Why should they have a job at all when someone in India is making say 10 percent of what an American worker demands?
Are you really so out of touch with reality that you're actually asking that question? Or is it a rhetorical question, that you know is BS?
I specifically addressed that, above, before you fake-asked the question.
But if a company has nothing left to lose because they are competing against international counterparts with vastly lower costs, you think they should simply fail, rather than use cheaper, foreign employers? That ALSO means the local employees lose their jobs. So, along with the violence you're advocating (don't be coy, you ARE), you'd also rather that companies simply die, rather than exist and operate in the US (paying US taxes, dealing with the local economies in which they sit). At least admit it. Your position: if the employees can't compete with their overseas counterparts, than they company should die with them.
What's the problem, exactly? That I'm objecting to someone who says that as an employer I should have to pay for employees whether I want them or not, even while the employees themselves should have the slack to wander off any time they want? Why shouldn't that be a two way street? Specifically. Would you be willing to trade your expectation that an employer can't stop employing you for your not having the liberty to go get a different job when you want to, for your own reasons? No? Think you should have the flexibility to leave when you want? I see.
Should Americans be paid the same as the people that you outsource to
Why should they? Cost of living in the US is substantially higher than it is in, say, India. A person who wants a decent living in the US needs to be offering an employer something they can't get from someone in India - something worth so much more that the employer is willing to write a much, much larger check for that person's time than he's willing to write to someone in India. For some employers, having a staff that's part of the local culture, speaking comfortably in the local style and able to communicate smoothly with local customers and vendors (all other skills being equal) is WELL worth the difference. Obviously for others, it's not. I've watched clients of mine head off to Indian shops, and then come running back to US-based staff less than a year later, having painfully learned their lesson.
And you won't have to deal with all of us "entitled lazy bums.
Happily, I don't have to deal with such people. I work with people every bit as entrepreneurial as I am, and with unassailable work ethics. The lazy asses I'm talking about are out there, and you KNOW they are. I don't hate them, because I'd rather just ignore them. But unfortunately the people in that entitlement culture have politicians scrambling to tell them they're right that people who start businesses are always the villains. Which would be funny (since everyone seems to want to find one of those businesses to give them a paycheck), if the hypocrisy wasn't so strong that it confuses people into voting for anyone who promises them free stuff and the spectacle of tearing down Eeeeevil business owners (even as they promise to pay for the free stuff through the ongoing taxing of those they want to destroy - the cognitive dissonance is really something).
Who are you talking to? Did I say I have any trouble along those lines? I do not. You need to come up with a better straw man.
the worker is considered a commodity. Not the foundation of the business, which is what they actually are.
Ah, I can see you've never actually founded anything. I've started businesses, and believe me, I am the foundation of those businesses. And I've worked with PLENTY of (topically, here) IT people who consider employers to be commodities, exhibiting exactly zero loyalty as soon as a recruiter drops them an email with a slightly better offer. The foundation of the business is the person or group of people who conceived of it, came up with the funding for it, and deal with the crushing load of tax, compliance, and other legal and financial burdens involved in keeping it alive - including dealing the constant churn of employees who very much see them as a commodity - a place where they can work eight or ten hours a day and take home some cash and other benefits.
It's perfectly ok to fuck your employees for a dollar.
That's what you are saying, right?
Are you suggesting that it's illegal for either the employee or the employer to walk away from an "at will" arrangement? Are you suggesting that the both the employer and the employee should be forced to continue a relationship they don't want ... or that only the employer should be forced to, but the employee can do whatever they want.
I get it. You think that everyone who starts a business is suddenly a slave to the state, and to anyone that wants a paycheck from them. You're exactly the sort of entitled, lazy bum that's chasing businesses and jobs out of the country.
So if a company in New York finds that they can run their factory more efficiently and thus sell their low-margin products more competitively, by firing their NY staff and moving operations to Kentucky, would that also be wrong? Be specific.
so it is kind of redundant to quantify the term money with "tax payer"
No, it's not. Because a LOT of people seem to think that there actually is something called "government money." Nearly half the country pays no income tax at all, and a large percentage of those get a "tax refund" on the income taxes they don't pay. That flow of money is rarely referred to as "other people's money" - just as tax credit, as earned income credit ... as anything other than a portion of the money that other people pay as taxes. Politicians, especially on the left, talk routinely about how they'll start a new program, or enhance regulatory power, or fund this, or that ... all with a glossy coat of the atmospherics of it being "government money." They say, "It's high time we funded and expansion of NIH's chimpanzee sexuality study..." instead of "It's high time we gathered up some money from the half of the country that pays income taxes, mostly from the minority of that half that pays almost all such taxes, and have them buy an expansion of NIH's ..."
It is this kind of attitude that pushes bean counting and attempted cost savings to such an extreme level that it is detrimental.
No, it's this kind of attitude that helps remind people whose money is being spent. That's part of keeping keeping such expenditures reasonable, instead of running up tens of trillions of dollars of debt ... do you really need to hear an explanation as to why that is detrimental?
Asset Forfeiture is treason and the punishment for treason is death.
Abuse of asset forfeiture in a bad thing. But I don't think you actually understand what the word "treason" means. No, I'm sure you don't understand it.
HA! That's what you get for putting up such pathetic opposition. You neo-liberals are all alike!
Uh ... what? I'm sure that made sense inside your own head, though.
Since the drones can't leave the school territory anyway, you could hardcode the location in software.
What? We're talking about GPS location features that allow students to work with automation that places the drone in precise positions only a meter or so apart along the route. The whole point is to encourage students to understand technology as it's actually being used. Hard-wiring a piece of navigational technology to think it's in exactly one place doesn't help with that mission.
And, incidentally, there's nothing saying the drone can't leave school property. They might very well be using it to do thermal mapping of a nearby wetland, or to spot changes in foliage, or to experiment with tracking things moving on the ground. Students do all SORTS of things away from the classroom. Hopefully you got to, when you were a student.
My favorite part is that teachers are not included, except in an emergency.
Except, of course, if the teacher reaches over and picks up the exact same drone, and flies it with exactly the same care in exactly the same way in exactly the same place, but does it five minutes later. Because then he's off the clock, and he's doing it for fun, which the FAA says is just fine.
Thanks, Obama administration.
Why are those not just engineering problems to solve
Who says they're not? That's not the point. The point is that disingenuous articles talking about how much cheaper per kwh a given solar device is than burning coal without mentioning all of the extra infrastructure needed to make all of that solar actually useful 24 hours a day, year-round, is just nonsense. It's deliberately misleading.
Though, think of like this: all the food we grow is made with solar power
No, think of it like this: imagine that all of your crops would fail if they didn't get sun every day. Growing plants are a bad analogy, because they can coast (by slowing down their energy use) when they're not given good sun. But the electricity you need to run the refrigeration you need to preserve antibiotics or keep a hospital running or keep your food frozen and water flowing and datacenters up ... doesn't get to coast on cloudy days. All this talk about how a given solar panel's output being cheaper than coal always avoids the extra infrastructure needed to bridge that cloud-period gap.
There are plenty of "conservatives" who think libertarians are mostly just people who want to smoke weed while on the job, but who ALSO think that, yes, a restaurant owner is a pretty good judge of how much parking she can afford to provide as she tries to establish, grow, and run her business in a highly competitive market. And your false dichotomy where public roads paid for with taxes are either expected or not provided you also accept all other government waste or not - absurd, and you know it.
Like her or hate her, Clinton was the Secretary of State.
So? If her tenure there is characterized by a string of terrible mis-steps, embarrassments and deaths, and her demonstrably lying about them even as she also deletes half of her official records while illegally running all her official correspondence through a home computer and turning none of it over to State's archivists as she left office, as required ... is her tenure in that office supposed to be an example of "experience" that makes her a better candidate for an even more sensitive job?
So what you're saying is that because other people have "ties" to (for example) Saudi Arabia, it's cool for her to fly around on your tax dollar and extort tens millions of dollars for her family business from foreign governments?
In addition, government officials form both parties have used private email addresses as well
There is no comparison. Nobody at her level of authority (fourth in line to the presidency, the nation's top diplomat, someone who handled highly classified material as a regular part of her job) has previously completely skipped using secure email services for official business, electing instead to handle ALL of her official email through a personal account served up on a computer in her residential home. Really, try to find another example of that. Then take into account the fact that inspectors general from multiple intelligence agencies have said that she trafficked in classified (even way-above-top-secret) material on her unsecured home computer ... and never turned over ANY of it as she left office, as required to. And when hounded by FOIA requests and subpoenas - which she dragged out for YEARS - she deleted tens of thousands of those messages before grudgingly handing over some of it as printed-out hardcopies stripped of all header information.
Cite another top government official who has even approached that level of deliberately hiding ALL OF THEIR OFFICIAL CORRESPONDENCE from scrutiny.
there is no upside for either side to drag this into court.
Sure there is. People who worked under her were subject to losing their careers and even their liberty for doing FAR less than she did. The "upside" to indicting her is to demonstrate that despite the long history of her and her husband's abuses of power, she's not above the law.
Can you write a computer program that has free will, ie, a program that you are unable to decide the outcome of before hand, even if you had an identical computer to test it out on first and gave it 100% identical inputs?
Yes.
... THEN statements. Then have the running state of that computer subject to floods of synapse-impacting chemicals, metabolism, environmental temperature fluctuations, and the random decay of the the memory and communication plumbing ... let all of those things seep into your "computer program" and watch your notion of a simple no-free-will model of two side-by-side programs producing the same results go into oblivion. Our brains marshal the resources of multiple subsystems, and adapt to unthinkably large numbers of unpredictable biological events. And we train ourselves to leverage that adaptation to meet our needs and our goals. You know: we make decisions.
Because if, as in reality, you allow some of those inputs to be the behavior of things like the intersections of the synapses of billions of neurons in your brain to be subject to quantum randomness, you're going to get a system far more complex than a bunch of IF
Except at night, when solar is a lot more expensive. Or when it rains.
Really? Hillary has had her hand in throwing lots of people to their deaths in conflicts launched or made worse on her watch. Or are you trying to ignore that part? Ask some Libyans how all that's going lately.
But from where I sit she doesn't seem to be splitting the democratic party.
What? Have you not been paying attention to the huge number of Bernie supporters who actively, vocally hate her? Enough that she just lost the Indiana primary tonight, if you hadn't noticed. There are plenty of liberals who think she's awful - a war hawk, a moral flip-flopper on almost every substantive issue, someone who smeared other women just to keep her philandering husband in power so she'd have his leverage to get in power herself ... someone who demonstrably lies about both the big stuff and, strangely, the little stuff. There are a lot of Democrats who are really tired of her looking them in the eye and simply telling bald-faced lies. They've seen it from both Clintons for decades, and are warming up instead the Get Free Stuff plan from Sanders.
Not divisive? Check those primary results, including tonight's. Her party is FAR more divided than the Republicans are. The numbers don't lie, even though she does.