All we have to do is convince enough people that spamming hurts Big Business. Then the U.S. government will simply force every other country to adopt tough anti-spam laws (as they are doing with copyright laws to protect the entertainment industry).
(I found this after a little digging; my primary source was an article I read in the Raleigh News & Observer some time ago, but their archive is non-free.
If we could make the case that spam hurts Big Business, surely we could get the U.S. government to force the rest of the world to adopt draconian anti-spam laws, as they do with copyright laws to protect the entertainment industries.
It's not legal everywhere in the U.S. to turn left on red from one one-way street to another. It's legal in Ohio but not in North Carolina, for example.</pedant>
<rant>I can understand frustration about slow drivers hanging out in the left lane on freeways that have all of the exits on the right. However, I tend to have people get frustrated at me (driving some approximation of the speed limit) in the left lane on freeways where a left exit is coming up, or even on large city streets that have intersections where one might have to, oh, I don't know, turn left! I could wait and try to get over at the last minute, which leaves me at the mercy of aggressive assholes who want to keep me from getting over!</rant>
If the govt really wanted to do something meaningful, they would stop employers from pulling credit reports for employee candidates.
I'm with you on this (at least for jobs that aren't about handling huge sums of cash).
The other problem employers using credit scores can cause is the following death-spiral scenario: You lose your job, thereby getting into dire financial straits, credit score goes down, you have trouble getting a job because of that, credit gets worse, more difficulty getting a job,...
Goodbye any chance of pulling yourself out of poverty!
One of the more interesting things about insurance companies: If you have a PPO, read some of your Explanations of Benefits to see how much gets disallowed.
For example, in my doctors' office visits she does a "pulse oximetry", which is clipping a thingamabob on your finger to measure the amount of oxygen in your blood. The doctor bills the insurance company $64 for this. The insurance company pays $5 and the rest is written off due to the doctor's contract with the PPO network.
This means that, presumably, if I had no insurance I would have had to pay $64 for that, but the insurance company, because of their size and clout, only had to pay $5. Situations like that (where it's more expensive to be poor) always bother me... it makes poverty that much more of an insurmountable obstacle.
I've heard that this is also why lawyers tend to reject the college-educated for jury service... they'd rather be able to sway the jurors with emotional arguments than have people picking apart their logic.
(Of course, the non-college-educated can exhibit critical thinking skills as well, but asking about logic skills would be a little more transparent than asking about education level).
I figure that equalization won't happen either; rather, as soon as wages start to rise somewhere, *whoosh* will go the jobs away to someplace even cheaper. This would put the "equilibrium" standard of living not at some average of current-U.S. and Bangladeshi-subsistence-farmer, but rather at the lowest they can possibly be. It's the logical conclusion of the race to the bottom.
It looks like my only way out will be to try to become a robber-baron myself, before the collapse hits and it's impossible to rise above subsistence-level (or less) unless you're already wealthy.
The other problem with this - what fields, that require college education, even have a future?
It's pretty obvious programming is on the way out. Anything that does not have a strict requirement for physical presence has no future in our globalized world, at anything above Third World wages. (Even medicine is seeing things like x-ray reading going offshore, with advances in telemedicine expect to see more of this).
We don't have much in the way of tele-law yet, but since it doesn't, by its nature, require physical presence (except for court appearances, and there's no reason to expect that couldn't be done remotely), that's not secure either.
Rising wages in the places that this work is getting sent to won't help, as the work will just move from there to places that are cheaper. This means that wages will go to Third World levels, and stay there.
I can't think of any jobs that require college education that have a strict requirement for physical presence. Perhaps the communications or shipping industries would be the best places to go - how would one break into those?
Getting an education to better yourself is not a Bad Thing, but in my experience the (by a large margin) primary factor in whether you can get a job is whether you have done the exact same job before. You could be the best generalized problem-solver on the planet, but if you don't have 5 years' experience doing development of banking-industry-specific tools in C# on Windows XP SP2 platforms, then tough shit.
It would be nice if any software (Open Source or not) could have its quality meaningfully metricized (and published). This would put a little bit more "rational and informed" into the customers, and lead to better products. Perhaps it could even help slow the race to the bottom.
Whether or not it's true that the brain itself has to work harder, generally lying is hard work (building a self-consistent story, etc.)
I learned this watching sitcoms as a kid, and formed a school of ethics around it. I noticed that lying to people meant you had to pretend to be gay whenever your landlord was around, all sorts of annoying unintended consequences would pop up, and usually the truth came out anyway despite all your efforts.
It's much easier to simply be honest (except at work, where honesty kills you - I haven't found a good solution to that yet. Might have to learn to lie to my management).
This ties into something I read in Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Philosophy (a nice introductory text), about a school of thought that says that good people have easier lives, and that the Universe is set up to ensure this.
That's the scary part - the easily bought leaders. That means, even if / when people wake up, it might be after they have little enough voice in the government that it doesn't matter.
The issue is that open-source (and, to a lesser extent, free-as-in-beer software) can have good quality, in both design and implementation.
Proprietary software, on the other hand, (especially for the consumer market) typically cannot have good quality in implementation, and often not in design either, because of market forces.
(i.e. the next version always "has" to be rushed out at breakneck speed, with cheap coders, rushed QA, and lots of bugs, because if you don't, someone else will, and everyone will just buy from that company. Isn't the race to the bottom wonderful for everyone?)
... past which power will inexorably slide away from the people towards the corporations? Has it already been passed?
If so, then everything we try to do to get consumer-friendly laws pass will be thwarted, and all we will be able to do is to watch as current trends move towards their logical conclusion, where there's a small number of ultra-rich corps/people, and the rest of the world lives like Bangladeshi farmers do today.
security screeners at the airport are more concerned about searching 78 year old black men and 18 year old young ladies than some more obvious candidates
Minor point here...
Bruce Schneier points out that, if you're not going to search everybody, random searches are more secure than profiled searches.
Example: Suppose you have the resources to screen 20% of people coming through the airport. You can do this randomly or by a profile. If you select the victims randomly, then a Bad Guy has a 20% chance of getting caught no matter what. However, if you select the victims according to a profile, then if the Bad Guys learn what the profile is, and send someone through who does not fit the profile, they have a 0% chance of getting caught.
(Of course, he also points out that airport security is mostly security theater, there to make travelers feel safe and show Something Is Being Done).
A lot of people here are giving advice (on FICA taxes, deductions, etc.) as though you're going to be an "independent contractor". This is philsophically the same as being a plumber - the company is paying you to perform some specific task, rather than hiring you. The IRS has very specific rules
about who can be considered an independent contractor.
However, in all of the "we'll bring you on as a contractor temp-to-perm" cases that I have seen, you'll be hired through a temp agency. Basically, you are a full-time (or part-time) emnployee of the agency (Manpower, etc.), and the agency is a contractor of the employer. This way you need worry about none of the extra taxes / paperwork. You just cash checks, as a regular employee does (some of the agencies even offer benefits). The tradeoff is that the agency skims off of every hour (sometimes by a rather large amount).
This is usually because, if a company hires "independent contractors" that do the same work in the same way as employees, the IRS tends to frown upon that. I had to do some work for a certain
business machines company where I used to work full-time, and I had to get a temp agency because they don't deal in IC's for these reasons. (Boy, was it fun to convince the pimp to take me. "Look, you get to make money on every hour, and you didn't even have to hook me up with the job! I know they don't have a posting. Trust me, they already asked me, and nobody else in the world can do this job without a lot of training. Dammit, just talk to the manager!")
And I've seen this kill FlexLM-licensed stuff (e.g. ClearCase). Whatever the spyware does to the IP stack makes FlexLM not work right (you can resolve the server's name, ping it, telnet to the port, but can't check out licenses. Ugh!) It requires whacking the spyware and/or reinstalling TCP/IP (a bit nontrivial on WinXP - there are a few dead chickens you have to wave over the system).
I'm starting to feel like a crank for mentioning that this is just a natural consequence of capitalism; the pursuit of ever-expanding profits by all legal means, when the corps own the government, is obviously going to lead to tragedy-of-the-commons problems like spam, spyware, pollution, etc.
Surely if the U.S. government can make pirating music and movies illegal the world over, then, if they wanted to, they could make spamming and spyware illegal as well. But, guess what? Pirating music is bad for business, so the gov't will push on it. Spamming and spyware is good for business, though citizen/comsumer-unfriendly, so the government "of the people" says "Suck it up! Don't be un-American by suggesting these businesses shouldn't have the right to shove advertising at you at all times."
There's a bigger potential problem here, and I'm sure others have brought this up when WinXP came out: The vendor can now force you to upgrade. They simply shut off the activation servers and - boom - now the software you bought is a useless coaster.
Sure, <big business apologist>they can put whatever T's&C's on the product they like, you can just use other software, etc.</apologist> but what happens when most / all software uses these methods? (If something's profit-enhancing, even if it's consumer-unfriendly, the need for infinite growth will pressure it into service eventually).
Hopefully FOSS will stay legal; that's my #2 motiviation for using it - not having to deal with crazy licensing schemes. (#1 is quality...)
The problem with "just send your kids to private school" is that it doesn't help the underlying problem. Perhaps trying to fix the problems with public schools might be better for all concerned. (As others have pointed out, the better-educated the society is as a whole, the better off everyone is in lower taxes for jails, etc.) Just imagine, if public schools taught enough and effectively enough about rhetoric that people weren't swayed by the political ads typical of today, how much better off we would all be!
If everyone who recognizes the problems with public schools (and has the means to) just opts out of the system, then the public school system is left only with those with no motivation to fix the problems, and/or those who can't afford any better. The growth in the gap between haves and have-nots just accelerates.
Sure, if YOU send YOUR kid to private school, it fixes the problem neatly for YOU. This is a great example to illustrate that a group of people, all acting in their own self-interest, does not necessarily converge on an ideal solution for society.
Of course it doesn't lead to better products. It leads to cheaper and faster (time-to-market) products, which sell better. This leads to more profit for the company, therefore higher share prices (= cash for the execs involved in the decisions). Employees and consumers get the short end of the stick. The company may be hurting itself in the long-term but none of the execs care, they'll be working elsewhere in a few years anyway.
The real problem in lassiez-faire free-market capitalism can be seen by picking up an Econ 101 textbook and looking up the definition of "free market".
Notice how many of the criteria for a free market are missing from the U.S., like low barriers to entry, informed and rational comsumers, etc.
In short, even getting rid of all regulations would not lead to an idealized free-market situation. Take the "rational comsumers" criterion. I would love to not buy products from companies that exploited employees, polluted, etc. However, that would turn each shopping trip into a MAJOR research exercise. Heck, trying to figure out who exactly actually made a particular product can be difficult to impossible!
The problem is just like getting a cellphone - onerous terms & conditions can be put on you because you have no power in the negotiation.
Since the employer is holding your livelihood over your head, they can get you to agree to pretty much any condition they want. Typically getting another job won't help you because practices that are evil enough tend to become industry standards (market forces push them that way).
Example: I once stopped shopping at Circuit City because my wife had picked up an employment application while we were there, and one of the things they made you sign was a binding-arbitration clause. It was pretty strongly worded too ("I realize if I do not agree to the use of binding arbitration, I can cancel my application within 3 business days...") I gave up recently, as those clauses have turned up pretty much everywhere on everything.
As long as any one company can screw over the employees, capitalism guarantees that all must to stay competitive. The friendlier company will lose (substantially) all its business to the competitor who promises the product faster / cheaper. That's why clueful management can't help you - they will simply be constrained by market forces into making decisions they know are bad, but they have no choice.
Maybe a "Fair Trade"-style certification for all sorts of products might help this, as then consumers who cared would be able to vote with their wallets (instead of shopping entirely on price / featureset).
I've wondered about this... In today's software development world, where it "has" to get out so fast that there's absolutely no room in the schedule for slippage (and the schedule can only be made if miracles occur), surely a strike (even if they hire a whole new staff in a matter of days) would be devastating enough to the company to make them really listen.
When neccesary I will work through the night to get someting done in time. I've put in a 24 hour shift or two in the past to get the project finished in time for a deadline, and I'm not the only one.
The problem with this is that eventually the requests come faster and closer, until you're doing this all the time. Why bust your butt just because management doesn't feel like staffing enough (and/or customers don't feel like paying enough to get it Done Right)? My current manager (maybe he'll understand this stuff more when he gets to be my age) tried the old line of "we don't care how many hours you work, as long as the work gets done." To this I responded "bullshit! If I can do all of my work in 40 hours, you'll simply assign me more things to do."
(from parent):
What kind of hours do you suppose the executives work?
Executives that I have seen tend to work a lot - it's a dirtier job than many realize. You're expected to be married to the company. However, they do also have incentive, in that they actually have a chance to cash in on this.
In my opinion, the best place (as a grunt) to draw the line is at the standard, 40 hours. If it can't get done in 40 hours, it doesn't need to get done. So far (for some reason) I have yet to get fired for holding this viewpoint. Try it! Just like the vague promises of rewards are unlikely to materialize, so are the vague threats against job security. It's not like you'll actually have better job security if you bust your butt. Really.
Slashdot Mirror
All we have to do is convince enough people that spamming hurts Big Business. Then the U.S. government will simply force every other country to adopt tough anti-spam laws (as they are doing with copyright laws to protect the entertainment industry).
(I found this after a little digging; my primary source was an article I read in the Raleigh News & Observer some time ago, but their archive is non-free.
If we could make the case that spam hurts Big Business, surely we could get the U.S. government to force the rest of the world to adopt draconian anti-spam laws, as they do with copyright laws to protect the entertainment industries.
<rant>I can understand frustration about slow drivers hanging out in the left lane on freeways that have all of the exits on the right. However, I tend to have people get frustrated at me (driving some approximation of the speed limit) in the left lane on freeways where a left exit is coming up, or even on large city streets that have intersections where one might have to, oh, I don't know, turn left! I could wait and try to get over at the last minute, which leaves me at the mercy of aggressive assholes who want to keep me from getting over!</rant>
The other problem employers using credit scores can cause is the following death-spiral scenario: You lose your job, thereby getting into dire financial straits, credit score goes down, you have trouble getting a job because of that, credit gets worse, more difficulty getting a job, ...
Goodbye any chance of pulling yourself out of poverty!
For example, in my doctors' office visits she does a "pulse oximetry", which is clipping a thingamabob on your finger to measure the amount of oxygen in your blood. The doctor bills the insurance company $64 for this. The insurance company pays $5 and the rest is written off due to the doctor's contract with the PPO network.
This means that, presumably, if I had no insurance I would have had to pay $64 for that, but the insurance company, because of their size and clout, only had to pay $5. Situations like that (where it's more expensive to be poor) always bother me... it makes poverty that much more of an insurmountable obstacle.
(Of course, the non-college-educated can exhibit critical thinking skills as well, but asking about logic skills would be a little more transparent than asking about education level).
It looks like my only way out will be to try to become a robber-baron myself, before the collapse hits and it's impossible to rise above subsistence-level (or less) unless you're already wealthy.
It's pretty obvious programming is on the way out. Anything that does not have a strict requirement for physical presence has no future in our globalized world, at anything above Third World wages. (Even medicine is seeing things like x-ray reading going offshore, with advances in telemedicine expect to see more of this).
We don't have much in the way of tele-law yet, but since it doesn't, by its nature, require physical presence (except for court appearances, and there's no reason to expect that couldn't be done remotely), that's not secure either.
Rising wages in the places that this work is getting sent to won't help, as the work will just move from there to places that are cheaper. This means that wages will go to Third World levels, and stay there.
I can't think of any jobs that require college education that have a strict requirement for physical presence. Perhaps the communications or shipping industries would be the best places to go - how would one break into those?
Getting an education to better yourself is not a Bad Thing, but in my experience the (by a large margin) primary factor in whether you can get a job is whether you have done the exact same job before. You could be the best generalized problem-solver on the planet, but if you don't have 5 years' experience doing development of banking-industry-specific tools in C# on Windows XP SP2 platforms, then tough shit.
It would be nice if any software (Open Source or not) could have its quality meaningfully metricized (and published). This would put a little bit more "rational and informed" into the customers, and lead to better products. Perhaps it could even help slow the race to the bottom.
I learned this watching sitcoms as a kid, and formed a school of ethics around it. I noticed that lying to people meant you had to pretend to be gay whenever your landlord was around, all sorts of annoying unintended consequences would pop up, and usually the truth came out anyway despite all your efforts.
It's much easier to simply be honest (except at work, where honesty kills you - I haven't found a good solution to that yet. Might have to learn to lie to my management).
This ties into something I read in Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Philosophy (a nice introductory text), about a school of thought that says that good people have easier lives, and that the Universe is set up to ensure this.
That's the scary part - the easily bought leaders. That means, even if / when people wake up, it might be after they have little enough voice in the government that it doesn't matter.
Proprietary software, on the other hand, (especially for the consumer market) typically cannot have good quality in implementation, and often not in design either, because of market forces.
(i.e. the next version always "has" to be rushed out at breakneck speed, with cheap coders, rushed QA, and lots of bugs, because if you don't, someone else will, and everyone will just buy from that company. Isn't the race to the bottom wonderful for everyone?)
If so, then everything we try to do to get consumer-friendly laws pass will be thwarted, and all we will be able to do is to watch as current trends move towards their logical conclusion, where there's a small number of ultra-rich corps/people, and the rest of the world lives like Bangladeshi farmers do today.
Have a pleasant holiday!
Bruce Schneier points out that, if you're not going to search everybody, random searches are more secure than profiled searches.
Example: Suppose you have the resources to screen 20% of people coming through the airport. You can do this randomly or by a profile. If you select the victims randomly, then a Bad Guy has a 20% chance of getting caught no matter what. However, if you select the victims according to a profile, then if the Bad Guys learn what the profile is, and send someone through who does not fit the profile, they have a 0% chance of getting caught.
(Of course, he also points out that airport security is mostly security theater, there to make travelers feel safe and show Something Is Being Done).
However, in all of the "we'll bring you on as a contractor temp-to-perm" cases that I have seen, you'll be hired through a temp agency. Basically, you are a full-time (or part-time) emnployee of the agency (Manpower, etc.), and the agency is a contractor of the employer. This way you need worry about none of the extra taxes / paperwork. You just cash checks, as a regular employee does (some of the agencies even offer benefits). The tradeoff is that the agency skims off of every hour (sometimes by a rather large amount).
This is usually because, if a company hires "independent contractors" that do the same work in the same way as employees, the IRS tends to frown upon that. I had to do some work for a certain business machines company where I used to work full-time, and I had to get a temp agency because they don't deal in IC's for these reasons. (Boy, was it fun to convince the pimp to take me. "Look, you get to make money on every hour, and you didn't even have to hook me up with the job! I know they don't have a posting. Trust me, they already asked me, and nobody else in the world can do this job without a lot of training. Dammit, just talk to the manager!")
I'm starting to feel like a crank for mentioning that this is just a natural consequence of capitalism; the pursuit of ever-expanding profits by all legal means, when the corps own the government, is obviously going to lead to tragedy-of-the-commons problems like spam, spyware, pollution, etc.
Surely if the U.S. government can make pirating music and movies illegal the world over, then, if they wanted to, they could make spamming and spyware illegal as well. But, guess what? Pirating music is bad for business, so the gov't will push on it. Spamming and spyware is good for business, though citizen/comsumer-unfriendly, so the government "of the people" says "Suck it up! Don't be un-American by suggesting these businesses shouldn't have the right to shove advertising at you at all times."
Sure, <big business apologist>they can put whatever T's&C's on the product they like, you can just use other software, etc.</apologist> but what happens when most / all software uses these methods? (If something's profit-enhancing, even if it's consumer-unfriendly, the need for infinite growth will pressure it into service eventually).
Hopefully FOSS will stay legal; that's my #2 motiviation for using it - not having to deal with crazy licensing schemes. (#1 is quality...)
If everyone who recognizes the problems with public schools (and has the means to) just opts out of the system, then the public school system is left only with those with no motivation to fix the problems, and/or those who can't afford any better. The growth in the gap between haves and have-nots just accelerates.
Sure, if YOU send YOUR kid to private school, it fixes the problem neatly for YOU. This is a great example to illustrate that a group of people, all acting in their own self-interest, does not necessarily converge on an ideal solution for society.
Of course it doesn't lead to better products. It leads to cheaper and faster (time-to-market) products, which sell better. This leads to more profit for the company, therefore higher share prices (= cash for the execs involved in the decisions). Employees and consumers get the short end of the stick. The company may be hurting itself in the long-term but none of the execs care, they'll be working elsewhere in a few years anyway.
Notice how many of the criteria for a free market are missing from the U.S., like low barriers to entry, informed and rational comsumers, etc.
In short, even getting rid of all regulations would not lead to an idealized free-market situation. Take the "rational comsumers" criterion. I would love to not buy products from companies that exploited employees, polluted, etc. However, that would turn each shopping trip into a MAJOR research exercise. Heck, trying to figure out who exactly actually made a particular product can be difficult to impossible!
Since the employer is holding your livelihood over your head, they can get you to agree to pretty much any condition they want. Typically getting another job won't help you because practices that are evil enough tend to become industry standards (market forces push them that way).
Example: I once stopped shopping at Circuit City because my wife had picked up an employment application while we were there, and one of the things they made you sign was a binding-arbitration clause. It was pretty strongly worded too ("I realize if I do not agree to the use of binding arbitration, I can cancel my application within 3 business days...") I gave up recently, as those clauses have turned up pretty much everywhere on everything.
As long as any one company can screw over the employees, capitalism guarantees that all must to stay competitive. The friendlier company will lose (substantially) all its business to the competitor who promises the product faster / cheaper. That's why clueful management can't help you - they will simply be constrained by market forces into making decisions they know are bad, but they have no choice.
Maybe a "Fair Trade"-style certification for all sorts of products might help this, as then consumers who cared would be able to vote with their wallets (instead of shopping entirely on price / featureset).
I've wondered about this... In today's software development world, where it "has" to get out so fast that there's absolutely no room in the schedule for slippage (and the schedule can only be made if miracles occur), surely a strike (even if they hire a whole new staff in a matter of days) would be devastating enough to the company to make them really listen.
(from parent):
Executives that I have seen tend to work a lot - it's a dirtier job than many realize. You're expected to be married to the company. However, they do also have incentive, in that they actually have a chance to cash in on this.In my opinion, the best place (as a grunt) to draw the line is at the standard, 40 hours. If it can't get done in 40 hours, it doesn't need to get done. So far (for some reason) I have yet to get fired for holding this viewpoint. Try it! Just like the vague promises of rewards are unlikely to materialize, so are the vague threats against job security. It's not like you'll actually have better job security if you bust your butt. Really.