Higher wages come at a cost; sometimes that cost can be borne over the short and long term, but often it cannot.
Lower wages also come at a cost. The price is the destruction of the middle class, which throughout history has been the primary driver of economic progress and prosperity.
But our politicians have either been bought or are utter and complete imbeciles because they still believe in the race to the bottom. Nevermind that it's destroying economies left, right and center and driving more and more people into poverty.
That depends on the the trade. Labor agreements can be declared generally binding in Germany, in which case they cover everyone in a certain trade, whether or not the employee is a union member and whether or not the employer is in the industrial association.
It sounds to me like what you are saying is that some businesses cannot afford those highly paid union workers.
Oh please, not the oldest troll argument in the world.
But I know that when I see a surge in the "low-income sector", Occam's Razor tells me it's because the "high-income sector" is untenable.
Sure, that's why multi-billion dollar companies with massive profits pay so little that their low-income employees need food stamps. Because they can't afford proper wages. It would reduce profits to - OMG! - just double- instead of tripple-digit millions.
It's strawman, a lie, utter bullshit. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop that is crushing our economies. If you weren't trolling, let me explain it in a simplified format:
There are two ways to run an economy.
One, you can pay everyone good and fair wages, which means everyone can afford to pay fair prices for goods, which means companies selling those goods can afford to pay those wages.
Two, you can pay shitty wages, which means lots of people can only afford very cheap products, which means companies need to sell their stuff very cheaply, which in turn leads to them only being able to pay shitty wages.
The choice between those two options is political, not economical.
No, they are smarter than going the legal way, as they know the courts would eat them alive if they tried (much like in the US, our supreme court has become the defender of the constitution against the government).
What they've done instead is to convince the government that we need a large low-income (aka working poor) sector, and the governments have created that, through incentives and changes in laws not related to unions.
Very few of those people are organized in a union. This way, they've taken the unions the power base they need to affect change.
However,there's still a few things a robot can't or doesn't do.
Or not as well.
There was a masters thesis in my university that was about automated packaging. Basically, a company wanted to replace their manual packers with robots and the thesis was about figuring out how to pack a box with various items with the least waste of space.
After a year and many, many experiments, different algorithms and research, they kept the workers. The thesis ended up proving that even the best algorithm they could come up with was at best as good as the gut feeling of a human being who had been doing the job for a while.
We actually have two systems of worker representation in Germany, related but not identical.
The unions are much the same as everywhere else in the world. They represent all the workers of a certain trade.
The worker councils are small groups of employees of individual companies (or even individual sites for large companies), elected by all the workers. Their job is mostly focussed on day-to-day employee issues, like working conditions. They are explicitly not allowed to discuss wages, as that is union territory.
Usually, unions and worker councils work together, but they're not the same thing. And since this is a wage issue, Amazon referring to the worker councils is just a dishonest strawman, because the worker councils cannot negotiate wages. It's actually forbidden by law. (two years ago I could've told you the paragraph by heart, if you're interested, search the "Betriebsverfassungsgesetz", BetrVG.)
Your history lesson is interesting, but applies only to the USA, not to Germany. Here, unions arose initially during the industrialisation and became stronger, not weaker, in times of crisis. With the exception of the last decade or two, where anti-unionist forces have finally discovered how to weaken the european-style unions.
Over here, unions are workers banding together for protection. They're not greed-driven the way you imply for the US unions. While they usually make headlines when it's about money, many of the actual things they do are about things like workers safety, work hours and work conditions.
Disclaimer: I'm not and never have been a member of a union, but for professional reasons I know quite a bit about it and I've worked with union representatives.
Yeah actually they are. Every decision a CEO makes is a decision with potentially billions on the line.
You've got a monarchy view of corporate politics. Very few companies work like that. In most companies, the decisions that the CEO makes have already been through ten layers of preparation, checking, political in-fighting and throwing stuff out.
That, and the CEOs that I've met (and I've met a couple) are in generally smart and capable, but not 100 times as smart or capable as anyone else in the company, and quite a few of them base their decisions on extremely shaky grounds. They also fuck up regularily.
But in real life, very, very few decisions actually have billions on the line right then and there. And decisions that do are often not made by a CEO, but by the board of directors - it's decisions like selling the company or acquiring a competitor. Most real-world operational decisions are nowhere near that size in consequences, because it takes months or years to make them happen and there's plenty of time to change course if things don't work out. In general, if a company wastes a few billion dollars, it's not been one decision, but a series of mistakes by many people.
Or he might simply not see money as his primary motivation in life. There are cultures on this planet that know the concept of "enough money", and we know from several scientific studies that happiness increases with money only up to a certain amount of affluence (which is surprisingly low, most adult readers of this site will have reached it).
Second, no it's not the same thing. The beauty of Time Machine is the Time Capsule - you can back up to a different device seamlessly and without install or configuration (except for selecting the backup target once).
Backup on the same machine protects against drive failures, but not against, say, a virus wiping your drives.
Even if nobody in the world would be using OpenBSD, it would still be worth doing it, because it is living proof that a secure Unix-based OS is possible if only its makers can be arsed to give a fuck about security and do the hard and not always exciting work required for it.
Chasing the latest trends all the time means you don't have time to check them in depth. Security very often is, first and foremost, simple. If you have one simple and one complex solution to a problem, in most cases the simple one will be more secure, because it is easier to find bugs, review the code, less likely to contain unexpected side-effects, etc. etc.
1) Any photos, bookmarks, etc that you want to keep: have a copy of it on a backup DVD
Doesn't work, never has and never will.
Unless backup is automatic in the background with no user intervention required, regular people will not do backups, period.
Apple's Time Machine is the biggest leap forward for home-user backup in... well, basically ever. Not because it's a technical marvel (it isn't), but because it's so simple and out-of-the-box that regular users actually use it.
cue the usual "but OS X is just as vulnerable" or "only until market share" bla bla bla trolls in 3... 2... 1...
The simple fact is that a) it works, b) it's available now, not theoretically or with enough work and c) it's supported by other people aside from yourself.
There are quite a few areas here where women have actually become the priviledged gender. The goal of some feminist very clearly is not equality of the sexes.
I'll add one very clear example:
We have a political position that is called "Gleichstellungsbeauftrager" - roughly translated a person responsibly for equal rights of the genders. It is usually a woman, of course.
One of these women last year took her job seriously. She actually worked for equality, following up on cases of discrimination both against women and against men. She was forced out of her job and it was said explicitly that here activities were undesireable.
It is, unfortunately, not a strawman. I live in Germany. We denote gender by a suffix, so a cop in german is a "Polizist" and a female cop is a "Polizistin". A teacher is a "Lehrer" and a female teacher a "Lehrerin" - the -in suffix denotes the female gender.
Some feminists have - 20 years or so - decided that the fact that only the female form gets a suffix attached and the base word is male represents chauvinistic oppression and came up with what is called the "Binnen-i" as a so-called solution. It works by capitalizing the I, so if you want to write politically correct in Germany today, you have to write "Die PolizistInnen standen auf der Kreuzung" (the (male and/or female) cops were standing on the crossing).
You have to do this for every word that describes a person that could potentially be male.
This is pure Orwellian thought control. In addition to making texts following this convention unwieldy to read, it also replaces the problem with its opposite - now the female form is not only always present, it is also emphazised.
This is but one example. It goes a lot deeper and more extensive. If a company writes a job advertisement and the job description isn't gender-neutral, they can actually be sued. A candidate who can convince a court (not prove, the standard isn't "beyond reasonable doubt", the burden of proof is actually reversed in these cases, so the company has to prove the opposite) that she was denied a job due to her gender, she can receive 3 months of salary, despite never having worked a day.
I could go on. There are quite a few areas here where women have actually become the priviledged gender. The goal of some feminist very clearly is not equality of the sexes.
Give me a better term than "feminazi" and I'll use it, until then I find it a proper term to describe someone taking things too far, similar to "grammar nazi".
As much as GitHub is within their rights to remove anything they want from their free service, it's yet another shame that feminism is the new religion - you aren't allowed to make fun of it (you're allowed to make fun of religion now, but it was a long and at times bloody struggle, and in some parts of the world it can still get you fucking killed today. I'm glad feminism isn't there yet. I'm afraid some feminazis wish it were.)
Is that a serious question? We live in a democracy, in case you didn't notice.
OK, so the next day after issue your ruling...
We understand that plastering everything with ads is not a sustainable business model and move to something else. None of the strawmen you put up will come to pass. People will very quickly learn that they just might have to pay for things. And they will. Markets will shift, some sites will go down because nobody thinks they're worth it, but others will emerge. The sky won't fall.
On the other hand, we will all of a sudden have several hundred billion dollars we can spend on productive things. The financial crisis would be over.
You missed the point that I made after saying "make it all illegal".
I understand there is legitimate and even wanted advertisement, especially in the B2B segment. Or, for example, trailers for upcoming movies.
The point is to make everything illegal and then define exceptions, instead of the way we're currently running things that very obviously isn't working: To allow everything and define exceptions that we don't want.
I have ads turned off on/. and I very much like that they offer the option - and that they offer it to a limited set of readers, those with high karma or post mods or whatever the factor is. Because it shows that/. understands an important thing: Without the comments, they wouldn't exist.
If I read correctly, this is per ad, not per page. So on your average online magazine, that's 5-10 per page. So that's 1000 page views. Your average article is split up over 2-3 pages these days, in order to generate more ad impressions. It also includes every article you click on, load the page, realize it's not interesting to you and leave again with a second or two.
Not sure how much you read, but for me, that would last me maybe a week, and if it includes sites I frequent a lot, less.
It's come to the point where I honestly believe we need to outlaw all advertisement. Yes, I mean that. Make it illegal, absolutely all of it. Posters, mailings, newsletters, TV and radio, web, banners - the whole lot.
Make all of it illegal and then apply the same principle to it that we know works whenever something is dangerous and easily abused: Whitelisting. After pulling the plug, have a serious conversation about where, what kind and how much advertisement we as a society are willing to accept, and then make limited excemptions.
We know for a fact that blacklisting doesn't work. Nobody sane configures a firewall with allow-all and then block lists. You always start with deny-all and then open up services selectively.
Same approach. Outlaw it all, and then decide what is acceptable.
Advertisement poisons everything. It's time to put a stop to it and this is the only way we can do it without fighting over the topic for the next century.
Slashdot Mirror
Higher wages come at a cost; sometimes that cost can be borne over the short and long term, but often it cannot.
Lower wages also come at a cost. The price is the destruction of the middle class, which throughout history has been the primary driver of economic progress and prosperity.
But our politicians have either been bought or are utter and complete imbeciles because they still believe in the race to the bottom. Nevermind that it's destroying economies left, right and center and driving more and more people into poverty.
Insanity or greed, your pick.
That depends on the the trade. Labor agreements can be declared generally binding in Germany, in which case they cover everyone in a certain trade, whether or not the employee is a union member and whether or not the employer is in the industrial association.
But in general, yes, you are right.
It sounds to me like what you are saying is that some businesses cannot afford those highly paid union workers.
Oh please, not the oldest troll argument in the world.
But I know that when I see a surge in the "low-income sector", Occam's Razor tells me it's because the "high-income sector" is untenable.
Sure, that's why multi-billion dollar companies with massive profits pay so little that their low-income employees need food stamps. Because they can't afford proper wages. It would reduce profits to - OMG! - just double- instead of tripple-digit millions.
It's strawman, a lie, utter bullshit. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop that is crushing our economies. If you weren't trolling, let me explain it in a simplified format:
There are two ways to run an economy.
One, you can pay everyone good and fair wages, which means everyone can afford to pay fair prices for goods, which means companies selling those goods can afford to pay those wages.
Two, you can pay shitty wages, which means lots of people can only afford very cheap products, which means companies need to sell their stuff very cheaply, which in turn leads to them only being able to pay shitty wages.
The choice between those two options is political, not economical.
No, they are smarter than going the legal way, as they know the courts would eat them alive if they tried (much like in the US, our supreme court has become the defender of the constitution against the government).
What they've done instead is to convince the government that we need a large low-income (aka working poor) sector, and the governments have created that, through incentives and changes in laws not related to unions.
Very few of those people are organized in a union. This way, they've taken the unions the power base they need to affect change.
However ,there's still a few things a robot can't or doesn't do.
Or not as well.
There was a masters thesis in my university that was about automated packaging. Basically, a company wanted to replace their manual packers with robots and the thesis was about figuring out how to pack a box with various items with the least waste of space.
After a year and many, many experiments, different algorithms and research, they kept the workers. The thesis ended up proving that even the best algorithm they could come up with was at best as good as the gut feeling of a human being who had been doing the job for a while.
We actually have two systems of worker representation in Germany, related but not identical.
The unions are much the same as everywhere else in the world. They represent all the workers of a certain trade.
The worker councils are small groups of employees of individual companies (or even individual sites for large companies), elected by all the workers. Their job is mostly focussed on day-to-day employee issues, like working conditions. They are explicitly not allowed to discuss wages, as that is union territory.
Usually, unions and worker councils work together, but they're not the same thing. And since this is a wage issue, Amazon referring to the worker councils is just a dishonest strawman, because the worker councils cannot negotiate wages. It's actually forbidden by law. (two years ago I could've told you the paragraph by heart, if you're interested, search the "Betriebsverfassungsgesetz", BetrVG.)
Your history lesson is interesting, but applies only to the USA, not to Germany. Here, unions arose initially during the industrialisation and became stronger, not weaker, in times of crisis. With the exception of the last decade or two, where anti-unionist forces have finally discovered how to weaken the european-style unions.
Over here, unions are workers banding together for protection. They're not greed-driven the way you imply for the US unions. While they usually make headlines when it's about money, many of the actual things they do are about things like workers safety, work hours and work conditions.
Disclaimer: I'm not and never have been a member of a union, but for professional reasons I know quite a bit about it and I've worked with union representatives.
Yeah actually they are. Every decision a CEO makes is a decision with potentially billions on the line.
You've got a monarchy view of corporate politics. Very few companies work like that. In most companies, the decisions that the CEO makes have already been through ten layers of preparation, checking, political in-fighting and throwing stuff out.
That, and the CEOs that I've met (and I've met a couple) are in generally smart and capable, but not 100 times as smart or capable as anyone else in the company, and quite a few of them base their decisions on extremely shaky grounds. They also fuck up regularily.
But in real life, very, very few decisions actually have billions on the line right then and there. And decisions that do are often not made by a CEO, but by the board of directors - it's decisions like selling the company or acquiring a competitor.
Most real-world operational decisions are nowhere near that size in consequences, because it takes months or years to make them happen and there's plenty of time to change course if things don't work out.
In general, if a company wastes a few billion dollars, it's not been one decision, but a series of mistakes by many people.
Or he might simply not see money as his primary motivation in life. There are cultures on this planet that know the concept of "enough money", and we know from several scientific studies that happiness increases with money only up to a certain amount of affluence (which is surprisingly low, most adult readers of this site will have reached it).
First, what the other comment said.
Second, no it's not the same thing. The beauty of Time Machine is the Time Capsule - you can back up to a different device seamlessly and without install or configuration (except for selecting the backup target once).
Backup on the same machine protects against drive failures, but not against, say, a virus wiping your drives.
Yes, they matter.
Even if nobody in the world would be using OpenBSD, it would still be worth doing it, because it is living proof that a secure Unix-based OS is possible if only its makers can be arsed to give a fuck about security and do the hard and not always exciting work required for it.
you don't understand that these two are related.
Chasing the latest trends all the time means you don't have time to check them in depth.
Security very often is, first and foremost, simple. If you have one simple and one complex solution to a problem, in most cases the simple one will be more secure, because it is easier to find bugs, review the code, less likely to contain unexpected side-effects, etc. etc.
1) Any photos, bookmarks, etc that you want to keep: have a copy of it on a backup DVD
Doesn't work, never has and never will.
Unless backup is automatic in the background with no user intervention required, regular people will not do backups, period.
Apple's Time Machine is the biggest leap forward for home-user backup in... well, basically ever. Not because it's a technical marvel (it isn't), but because it's so simple and out-of-the-box that regular users actually use it.
with a Mac or an iPad.
cue the usual "but OS X is just as vulnerable" or "only until market share" bla bla bla trolls in 3... 2... 1...
The simple fact is that a) it works, b) it's available now, not theoretically or with enough work and c) it's supported by other people aside from yourself.
They argue that if the new ones really are so good, people will buy them on their own without being forced to do so.
Which is why Betamax won the video format war. Oh, wait...
Wow. That is... frightening.
There are quite a few areas here where women have actually become the priviledged gender. The goal of some feminist very clearly is not equality of the sexes.
I'll add one very clear example:
We have a political position that is called "Gleichstellungsbeauftrager" - roughly translated a person responsibly for equal rights of the genders. It is usually a woman, of course.
One of these women last year took her job seriously. She actually worked for equality, following up on cases of discrimination both against women and against men. She was forced out of her job and it was said explicitly that here activities were undesireable.
It is, unfortunately, not a strawman. I live in Germany. We denote gender by a suffix, so a cop in german is a "Polizist" and a female cop is a "Polizistin". A teacher is a "Lehrer" and a female teacher a "Lehrerin" - the -in suffix denotes the female gender.
Some feminists have - 20 years or so - decided that the fact that only the female form gets a suffix attached and the base word is male represents chauvinistic oppression and came up with what is called the "Binnen-i" as a so-called solution. It works by capitalizing the I, so if you want to write politically correct in Germany today, you have to write "Die PolizistInnen standen auf der Kreuzung" (the (male and/or female) cops were standing on the crossing).
You have to do this for every word that describes a person that could potentially be male.
This is pure Orwellian thought control. In addition to making texts following this convention unwieldy to read, it also replaces the problem with its opposite - now the female form is not only always present, it is also emphazised.
This is but one example. It goes a lot deeper and more extensive. If a company writes a job advertisement and the job description isn't gender-neutral, they can actually be sued. A candidate who can convince a court (not prove, the standard isn't "beyond reasonable doubt", the burden of proof is actually reversed in these cases, so the company has to prove the opposite) that she was denied a job due to her gender, she can receive 3 months of salary, despite never having worked a day.
I could go on. There are quite a few areas here where women have actually become the priviledged gender. The goal of some feminist very clearly is not equality of the sexes.
Give me a better term than "feminazi" and I'll use it, until then I find it a proper term to describe someone taking things too far, similar to "grammar nazi".
Thanks, the only comment worth reading.
As much as GitHub is within their rights to remove anything they want from their free service, it's yet another shame that feminism is the new religion - you aren't allowed to make fun of it (you're allowed to make fun of religion now, but it was a long and at times bloody struggle, and in some parts of the world it can still get you fucking killed today. I'm glad feminism isn't there yet. I'm afraid some feminazis wish it were.)
And who would decide "what is acceptable"?
Is that a serious question? We live in a democracy, in case you didn't notice.
OK, so the next day after issue your ruling...
We understand that plastering everything with ads is not a sustainable business model and move to something else. None of the strawmen you put up will come to pass. People will very quickly learn that they just might have to pay for things. And they will. Markets will shift, some sites will go down because nobody thinks they're worth it, but others will emerge. The sky won't fall.
On the other hand, we will all of a sudden have several hundred billion dollars we can spend on productive things. The financial crisis would be over.
You missed the point that I made after saying "make it all illegal".
I understand there is legitimate and even wanted advertisement, especially in the B2B segment. Or, for example, trailers for upcoming movies.
The point is to make everything illegal and then define exceptions, instead of the way we're currently running things that very obviously isn't working: To allow everything and define exceptions that we don't want.
And it's still protection money. "Nice browsing experience you have there... would be a shame if anything happened to it."
And I bet that it wouldn't be long before someone eats the "acceptable advertisement" bait, like the idiots at Mozilla or the scammers at ABP did.
I have ads turned off on /. and I very much like that they offer the option - and that they offer it to a limited set of readers, those with high karma or post mods or whatever the factor is. Because it shows that /. understands an important thing: Without the comments, they wouldn't exist.
Days.
If I read correctly, this is per ad, not per page. So on your average online magazine, that's 5-10 per page. So that's 1000 page views. Your average article is split up over 2-3 pages these days, in order to generate more ad impressions. It also includes every article you click on, load the page, realize it's not interesting to you and leave again with a second or two.
Not sure how much you read, but for me, that would last me maybe a week, and if it includes sites I frequent a lot, less.
It's come to the point where I honestly believe we need to outlaw all advertisement. Yes, I mean that. Make it illegal, absolutely all of it. Posters, mailings, newsletters, TV and radio, web, banners - the whole lot.
Make all of it illegal and then apply the same principle to it that we know works whenever something is dangerous and easily abused: Whitelisting. After pulling the plug, have a serious conversation about where, what kind and how much advertisement we as a society are willing to accept, and then make limited excemptions.
We know for a fact that blacklisting doesn't work. Nobody sane configures a firewall with allow-all and then block lists. You always start with deny-all and then open up services selectively.
Same approach. Outlaw it all, and then decide what is acceptable.
Advertisement poisons everything. It's time to put a stop to it and this is the only way we can do it without fighting over the topic for the next century.