Publishers don't need to implement that. They just need to support/bribe politicians into shrinking library budgets until libraries aren't able to be effectively run anymore.
The thing that makes me scratch my head about the trespass argument though is that the open fields doctrine found in Oliver v. United States has found that the government can search fields even if doing so would violate laws about trespassing (and even if it involves crossing fences and gates). If this new case is saying that physically invading personal property constitutes a search, does this overrule the jurisprudence in Oliver?
(I don't necessarily disagree that physical trespass means "search", and should require a warrant, but I'd also be quite wary of using that as a minimum.)
I dunno. If the FBI sent an agent to watch every public meeting in the country (political groups, church groups, social activist groups, etc), I'd be pretty damn worried. Why should I be less worried just because doing it on the web is more convenient and practically invisible?
The second is that the founding fathers of the United States did not fear Terrorism.
The founding fathers were the terrorists of their day. They destroyed quite a bit of private property and wanted to overthrow the people governing them. They resorted to unconventional tactics like hit and run and having snipers aim at officers (considered quite unsporting). If they'd have lost, they would've been hung and would probably be remembered not too differently from Guy Fawkes.
I work for a large corporation and also get both of those benefits. I also sometimes work from home (though not often, because I don't find it very productive), and know someone who set it up to work full time from home because he wanted to move to be with his family. Decent corporations (or at least parts of corporations) do exist.
If it's not alive, it's dead. If it's not dead, it's alive.
Are my car keys alive or dead? "Dead" implies that something was once alive, and my car keys do not fit that definition. If you'd said "alive or not alive", you would be closer, though in practice there's significant grey area. You might be able to ask the question "Is this object red" and get a yes/no answer on most things out there, until you come across something that's sort of maroonish, or orange-red, or salmon colored, and then what? See the Sorites paradox.
We do provide everyone with computers. It's called the library. If you don't have a computer of your own, you can go in there and use one to do pretty much whatever you want on the internet.
So they're the same as 20 somethings have always been?
they make a lot of mistakes
No shit, they're just starting out their career. I'm betting you didn't start out your career without making some mistakes. Realistically, if you're setting a young software engineer off on their own with no supervision or training, then you're running a gamble.
won't work very much (if any) overtime without complaining
Regular overtime is a sign of poor project management. It's one thing if there's a sudden deadline, but if you're constantly overrunning 40 hours a week then they have every right to complain.
Lose the talking heads on news. Lose the theme music, lose the captions, lose the scroll, lose the catchy titles for every major news event. Try something different: sober, reasoned, analysis. Don't tell me that "you only 20 seconds left to discuss this"; you're a fricking network, all you HAVE is time. And stop pretending that there are two sides to every story: when one side is obviously insane, lying, or stupid, there aren't. Instead: call them on it.
This is the one that always kills me with the 24 hour "news" networks. How can you have reruns of the same show multiple times in a day? How can you have random Youtube clips showing up as "news"? Hell, it's hard to take them seriously when they devote endless coverage to $Missing_White_Woman_Of_The_Year, yet never manage to be bothered to report about genocide in countries with brown people or the latest government scheme to peer into the average person's life.
In 1990, Congress adopted free-standing legislation directing DOL to promulgate regulations defining the status of computer services workers and to include in that definition an earnings test: not less than 6½ times the federal minimum wage. Although DOL proceeded as directed, Congress revisited the issue in 1996. It moved the computer services exemption from Section 13(a)(1), creating a new categorical exemption in Section 13(a)(17). Here, unburdened by the issue of defining professional, Congress set its own standard. It also froze the earnings test at $27.63 per hour. With the increase in the general wage floor, part of the 1996 amendments, that came to equal 5.4 times the minimum wage.
Why did they freeze it instead of indexing it to inflation, or for that matter, even indexing it to the minimum wage? Measured now, it's only 3.8 times the minimum wage. To bring it back up to 1990 standards, you'd have the floor at $47.125/hr ($98k/yr).
Although it sounds like a good deal for hourly workers, in fact it probably discourages employers from paying people more.
It discourages them from imposing 60 to 80 hour work weeks. Then again, it's still often cheaper to pay overtime than to hire a new employee that gets benefits.
I'd ask what your new website would be named, but Slashdot's own terms of service say:
Prohibited activity includes, but is not limited to: (...) using any information obtained from SourceForge.net in order to contact (...) any user without such user's prior explicit consent (including non-commercial contacts like chain letters);
Oops, I guess replying at all is already contacting.Shit, I think I hear FBI vans.
You want to get your hair cut, you must go to a licensed barber or hairstylist.
You don't have to. You can buy a kit and do it yourself (or get a friend/relative to do it). My mom cuts my dads hair in their kitchen.
We pay taxes to support government workers' lavish pensions. These are people who don't work. This is an artificial cost.
The "lavish" pension system for federal workers was replaced with a much more modest one in the 80s. Most state and local governments have followed suit. Yes, you'll occasionally see abuses of the system, especially on the local level. Vote next time. Or run for office yourself.
We pay enormous amounts to non-government workers to retire at 65. Many could easily continue until 68 or 70. This is an artificial cost.
Social Security retirement ages have been rising. If you start taking Social Security at 65, you'll get a fair bit less benefits than you would if you took it at 69. The biggest cost for it was that it had to pay for all the workers that were retiring just as the system came out who did get pretty much a free ride on it. Well, that and Congress raiding it like a piggy bank to fund wars, tax cuts, and pretty much everything else.
We build roads and other public infrastructure projects with rules requiring a "prevailing wage" (a union wage) be paid. This makes every government project artificially more expensive, so fewer projects are built. This is an artificial cost.
Those evil unions. Wanting to be paid a livable wage. What assholes. If you really want to complain about artificially expensive government projects, take a look at the private military contractors that we've been using as mercenaries over in the Middle East. Or the major bailouts. Or the fed's current lending practices, where it's basically giving 0% loans to banks and letting those same banks deposit that same money for interest.
We have environmental laws that protect animals and hurt people. This creates a lot of artificial costs.
They're costs to prevent companies from dumping all their external costs onto everyone else. Personally, I like not having to worry about rivers being so polluted that they catch on fire.
We have the second highest corporate tax rate in the world,
and our system creates a huge incentive for multinational companies to invest foreign profits anywhere but the US. This is a huge artificial disadvantage and a huge artificial cost.
It's just a transfer from producers to the less productive and unproductive.
I can think of nothing more unproductive than the investment bankers, hedge fund managers, CEOs, and trust fund babies who have done nothing but manipulate our economy for personal profit.
People of the ages of 12 to about 30 are almost always retarded in some way. Gen Y is bad? People called Generation X a bunch of slackers too. Before that, people were complaining about hippies. Before that, it was kids listening to Rock and Roll and seeing that Elvis gyrating his hips or all those beatniks. Before that you had a generation referred to as the "Lost Generation" because they were seen as useless and disaffected from their WW1 experience.
It's not a culture problem, it's a nostalgia filter.
The 9/11 hijackers wouldn't have been stopped by all the screening in the world, simply because box cutter knives weren't illegal at the time (any knife under 4 inches was allowed).
Government has no income or property to ever pay this debt, other than taking another loan
They've got taxes, both present and future. They've got a shitload of federal land (full of valuable resources). Hell, the government could loan out it's services and expertise to other countries in return for payment.
In terms of actual investment vehicles, it's pretty bad looking. Of course, it's kinda hard for the poor the invest in anything when they're barely paying down 30% interest on credit cards and endless car payments.
The changes in household spending that have increased cost the most are:
Housing, due to inflated real estate and people trying to get their kids into good schools (which means an equivalent home across a street can cost a few hundred thousand dollars more).
Education, due to the rise of preschool and the increase in college education (and college education costs).
Health care. It's risen way faster than inflation, with no signs of stopping. Even if you have insurance, you've probably seen it's costs rise and it's benefits fallen.
Child care. With two parents working now and people not living as close to relatives as they used to, child care has pretty much become an entirely new expense that didn't exist a generation ago.
Cars. Not individual cars, mind you. Those costs have actually gone down, usually by driving a car for an extra year or two. On the other hand, with two people in the house working, both need a car of their own to get places, so there's usually an extra car per household.
Beyond that, electronics costs have gone up somewhat (not surprising), but not in an amount anywhere close to those other things.
Food costs are generally down. People eat less meat, buy in bulk, buy more processed stuff, etc.
Really though, you can't even get half the things as they were in the 70s, and certainly not at prices that only account for inflation. So what if people have flatscreen TVs? Do you see a bunch of CRT TVs on the market? How about those old style vacuum tube TVs? Wait, would it even matter, you can't get an analog signal anymore. How about houses, do you think I could find a '70s house at '70s prices? Even with the real estate crash, prices are still higher. Could you get a doctor to use '70s technology and methodology, and even if you could, do you really think that the obsolete machines that you can't even buy anymore are going to be cheaper?
Heck, you might as well say "well, if we settled for the lifestyle of Middle Ages, then with the increase in productivity we could all be living in castles, listening to wandering minstrels, eating wild boar that we had hunted that day, drinking a flagon of ale, but we'd have no sewers. Oh well.".
Perhaps start their own companies and hire some of their contemporaries?
But what should people do if they don't live in an Ayn Rand or Horatio Algier novel?
The Welfare State, for all of it's good intentions, has ultimately become a burden upon us that must be lifted if we are to continue in anything resembling a modern, western society.
Uhh, have you actually taken a look at every other modern western society? We've got nowhere close to a welfare state by comparison.
If we persist in our current path, economic and social collapse, followed by anarchy, tyranny, poverty, and finally the slow starvation death of humanity will follow.
That's some mighty fine scare words madlibs, but you forgot communist, socialist, Stalinist, monarchist, and zombie apocalypse.
Don't believe it can happen? Look at first Greece, and then North Korea for two examples of our future if we do not change course NOW.
Greece had a retirement age of 61 and workers get 25 days of vacation a year, plus 12 public holidays. But really the biggest problem they have, that America doesn't, is that they don't control their currency. Greek debt was based on Euros. American debt is based on dollars. When push comes to shove, the US treasury can print as many dollars as they want. Greece can't.
North Korea is run by a basket case who's only care is his own personal pleasure. At this point it's pretty much in a category of it's own.
>Once the eggs gone
Interestingly, the ovaries have hundreds of thousands of eggs at birth. If menopause can be staved off, there's nothing stopping a woman from being fertile for thousands of years.
Slashdot Mirror
Publishers don't need to implement that. They just need to support/bribe politicians into shrinking library budgets until libraries aren't able to be effectively run anymore.
Unless you want to go to Hawaii.
The thing that makes me scratch my head about the trespass argument though is that the open fields doctrine found in Oliver v. United States has found that the government can search fields even if doing so would violate laws about trespassing (and even if it involves crossing fences and gates). If this new case is saying that physically invading personal property constitutes a search, does this overrule the jurisprudence in Oliver?
(I don't necessarily disagree that physical trespass means "search", and should require a warrant, but I'd also be quite wary of using that as a minimum.)
I dunno. If the FBI sent an agent to watch every public meeting in the country (political groups, church groups, social activist groups, etc), I'd be pretty damn worried. Why should I be less worried just because doing it on the web is more convenient and practically invisible?
The second is that the founding fathers of the United States did not fear Terrorism.
The founding fathers were the terrorists of their day. They destroyed quite a bit of private property and wanted to overthrow the people governing them. They resorted to unconventional tactics like hit and run and having snipers aim at officers (considered quite unsporting). If they'd have lost, they would've been hung and would probably be remembered not too differently from Guy Fawkes.
I work for a large corporation and also get both of those benefits. I also sometimes work from home (though not often, because I don't find it very productive), and know someone who set it up to work full time from home because he wanted to move to be with his family. Decent corporations (or at least parts of corporations) do exist.
If it's not alive, it's dead. If it's not dead, it's alive.
Are my car keys alive or dead? "Dead" implies that something was once alive, and my car keys do not fit that definition. If you'd said "alive or not alive", you would be closer, though in practice there's significant grey area. You might be able to ask the question "Is this object red" and get a yes/no answer on most things out there, until you come across something that's sort of maroonish, or orange-red, or salmon colored, and then what? See the Sorites paradox.
Yeah, there should be a Nobel Film prize. It'd be won by Michael Bay every year.
Next up on Mythbusters, can you fill a flat with Lego tires and drive away?
We do provide everyone with computers. It's called the library. If you don't have a computer of your own, you can go in there and use one to do pretty much whatever you want on the internet.
they make a lot of mistakes
No shit, they're just starting out their career. I'm betting you didn't start out your career without making some mistakes. Realistically, if you're setting a young software engineer off on their own with no supervision or training, then you're running a gamble.
won't work very much (if any) overtime without complaining
Regular overtime is a sign of poor project management. It's one thing if there's a sudden deadline, but if you're constantly overrunning 40 hours a week then they have every right to complain.
Lose the talking heads on news. Lose the theme music, lose the captions, lose the scroll, lose the catchy titles for every major news event. Try something different: sober, reasoned, analysis. Don't tell me that "you only 20 seconds left to discuss this"; you're a fricking network, all you HAVE is time. And stop pretending that there are two sides to every story: when one side is obviously insane, lying, or stupid, there aren't. Instead: call them on it.
This is the one that always kills me with the 24 hour "news" networks. How can you have reruns of the same show multiple times in a day? How can you have random Youtube clips showing up as "news"? Hell, it's hard to take them seriously when they devote endless coverage to $Missing_White_Woman_Of_The_Year, yet never manage to be bothered to report about genocide in countries with brown people or the latest government scheme to peer into the average person's life.
In 1990, Congress adopted free-standing legislation directing DOL to promulgate regulations defining the status of computer services workers and to include in that definition an earnings test: not less than 6½ times the federal minimum wage. Although DOL proceeded as directed, Congress revisited the issue in 1996. It moved the computer services exemption from Section 13(a)(1), creating a new categorical exemption in Section 13(a)(17). Here, unburdened by the issue of defining professional, Congress set its own standard. It also froze the earnings test at $27.63 per hour. With the increase in the general wage floor, part of the 1996 amendments, that came to equal 5.4 times the minimum wage.
Why did they freeze it instead of indexing it to inflation, or for that matter, even indexing it to the minimum wage? Measured now, it's only 3.8 times the minimum wage. To bring it back up to 1990 standards, you'd have the floor at $47.125/hr ($98k/yr).
Although it sounds like a good deal for hourly workers, in fact it probably discourages employers from paying people more.
It discourages them from imposing 60 to 80 hour work weeks. Then again, it's still often cheaper to pay overtime than to hire a new employee that gets benefits.
Heck, wouldn't it be even easier to reduce it if they put a countdown with the yellow light so people actually knew when it would change?
Prohibited activity includes, but is not limited to: (...) using any information obtained from SourceForge.net in order to contact (...) any user without such user's prior explicit consent (including non-commercial contacts like chain letters);
Oops, I guess replying at all is already contacting.Shit, I think I hear FBI vans.
You want to get your hair cut, you must go to a licensed barber or hairstylist.
You don't have to. You can buy a kit and do it yourself (or get a friend/relative to do it). My mom cuts my dads hair in their kitchen.
We pay taxes to support government workers' lavish pensions. These are people who don't work. This is an artificial cost.
The "lavish" pension system for federal workers was replaced with a much more modest one in the 80s. Most state and local governments have followed suit. Yes, you'll occasionally see abuses of the system, especially on the local level. Vote next time. Or run for office yourself.
We pay enormous amounts to non-government workers to retire at 65. Many could easily continue until 68 or 70. This is an artificial cost.
Social Security retirement ages have been rising. If you start taking Social Security at 65, you'll get a fair bit less benefits than you would if you took it at 69. The biggest cost for it was that it had to pay for all the workers that were retiring just as the system came out who did get pretty much a free ride on it. Well, that and Congress raiding it like a piggy bank to fund wars, tax cuts, and pretty much everything else.
We build roads and other public infrastructure projects with rules requiring a "prevailing wage" (a union wage) be paid. This makes every government project artificially more expensive, so fewer projects are built. This is an artificial cost.
Those evil unions. Wanting to be paid a livable wage. What assholes. If you really want to complain about artificially expensive government projects, take a look at the private military contractors that we've been using as mercenaries over in the Middle East. Or the major bailouts. Or the fed's current lending practices, where it's basically giving 0% loans to banks and letting those same banks deposit that same money for interest.
We have environmental laws that protect animals and hurt people. This creates a lot of artificial costs.
They're costs to prevent companies from dumping all their external costs onto everyone else. Personally, I like not having to worry about rivers being so polluted that they catch on fire.
We have the second highest corporate tax rate in the world,
Effective tax rates and statutory tax rates are two different beasts. The reality is that US tax rates are in the middle of the pack of G8 nations.
and our system creates a huge incentive for multinational companies to invest foreign profits anywhere but the US. This is a huge artificial disadvantage and a huge artificial cost.
Uhh, the reason corporations don't want to invest foreign profits in the US is because they keep hoping that they'll get the same kind of tax breaks for doing it that they did in 2004. Breaks that incidentally did absolutely nothing to help employment, yet sure did enrich a few at the top of huge multinationals.
It's just a transfer from producers to the less productive and unproductive.
I can think of nothing more unproductive than the investment bankers, hedge fund managers, CEOs, and trust fund babies who have done nothing but manipulate our economy for personal profit.
In my day... blah, blah blah.
People of the ages of 12 to about 30 are almost always retarded in some way. Gen Y is bad? People called Generation X a bunch of slackers too. Before that, people were complaining about hippies. Before that, it was kids listening to Rock and Roll and seeing that Elvis gyrating his hips or all those beatniks. Before that you had a generation referred to as the "Lost Generation" because they were seen as useless and disaffected from their WW1 experience.
It's not a culture problem, it's a nostalgia filter.
Prison Break, albeit you don't see much of what he did before going to prison.
The 9/11 hijackers wouldn't have been stopped by all the screening in the world, simply because box cutter knives weren't illegal at the time (any knife under 4 inches was allowed).
Government has no income or property to ever pay this debt, other than taking another loan
They've got taxes, both present and future. They've got a shitload of federal land (full of valuable resources). Hell, the government could loan out it's services and expertise to other countries in return for payment.
In the following categories, the top 1% owned (as of 2007):
Business Equity - 62%
Financial Securities - 60%
Trusts - 39%
Stocks and Mutual Funds - 38%
Non-home real estate - 28%
Total Investment Assets - 50%
(Source)
In terms of actual investment vehicles, it's pretty bad looking. Of course, it's kinda hard for the poor the invest in anything when they're barely paying down 30% interest on credit cards and endless car payments.
Or they could join the military. Do two years and your schooling is paid for.
The military is slashing it's education budget.
The changes in household spending that have increased cost the most are:
Housing, due to inflated real estate and people trying to get their kids into good schools (which means an equivalent home across a street can cost a few hundred thousand dollars more).
Education, due to the rise of preschool and the increase in college education (and college education costs).
Health care. It's risen way faster than inflation, with no signs of stopping. Even if you have insurance, you've probably seen it's costs rise and it's benefits fallen.
Child care. With two parents working now and people not living as close to relatives as they used to, child care has pretty much become an entirely new expense that didn't exist a generation ago.
Cars. Not individual cars, mind you. Those costs have actually gone down, usually by driving a car for an extra year or two. On the other hand, with two people in the house working, both need a car of their own to get places, so there's usually an extra car per household.
Beyond that, electronics costs have gone up somewhat (not surprising), but not in an amount anywhere close to those other things.
Food costs are generally down. People eat less meat, buy in bulk, buy more processed stuff, etc.
Really though, you can't even get half the things as they were in the 70s, and certainly not at prices that only account for inflation. So what if people have flatscreen TVs? Do you see a bunch of CRT TVs on the market? How about those old style vacuum tube TVs? Wait, would it even matter, you can't get an analog signal anymore. How about houses, do you think I could find a '70s house at '70s prices? Even with the real estate crash, prices are still higher. Could you get a doctor to use '70s technology and methodology, and even if you could, do you really think that the obsolete machines that you can't even buy anymore are going to be cheaper?
Heck, you might as well say "well, if we settled for the lifestyle of Middle Ages, then with the increase in productivity we could all be living in castles, listening to wandering minstrels, eating wild boar that we had hunted that day, drinking a flagon of ale, but we'd have no sewers. Oh well.".
Perhaps start their own companies and hire some of their contemporaries?
But what should people do if they don't live in an Ayn Rand or Horatio Algier novel?
The Welfare State, for all of it's good intentions, has ultimately become a burden upon us that must be lifted if we are to continue in anything resembling a modern, western society.
Uhh, have you actually taken a look at every other modern western society? We've got nowhere close to a welfare state by comparison.
If we persist in our current path, economic and social collapse, followed by anarchy, tyranny, poverty, and finally the slow starvation death of humanity will follow.
That's some mighty fine scare words madlibs, but you forgot communist, socialist, Stalinist, monarchist, and zombie apocalypse.
Don't believe it can happen? Look at first Greece, and then North Korea for two examples of our future if we do not change course NOW.
Greece had a retirement age of 61 and workers get 25 days of vacation a year, plus 12 public holidays. But really the biggest problem they have, that America doesn't, is that they don't control their currency. Greek debt was based on Euros. American debt is based on dollars. When push comes to shove, the US treasury can print as many dollars as they want. Greece can't.
North Korea is run by a basket case who's only care is his own personal pleasure. At this point it's pretty much in a category of it's own.
>Once the eggs gone Interestingly, the ovaries have hundreds of thousands of eggs at birth. If menopause can be staved off, there's nothing stopping a woman from being fertile for thousands of years.