What incentive will companies have to create REAL jobs if they know they can get indentured servants assigned to them?
Georgia actually started a program to do pretty much something like that with the unemployed a few years ag. (I know, who would have thought a southern state would support slavery, right?). Basically, companies get free unemployed indentured servants for up to 8 weeks, with the only caveat being that they're supposed to receive "training" at the job. The program was scaled back drastically after it came out that most of the companies weren't providing any real training at all and were just using these people as free labor. Shocking, huh?
Sadly, a lot of states are looking to adopt programs modeled on Georgia's. Even Obama is praising it as a model program.
You can't DISMISS student loans (through bankruptcy). You can MOST DEFINITELY default on them. And how are you going to garnish wages if someone is unemployed (or even severely underemployed)?
I have a hard time sympathizing with anyone who has voluntarily taken on large amounts of debt
With almost any decent job these days requiring a 4-year college degree, what the hell do you expect? Unless your parents are upper-class or have had the foresight to save up the money (with no intervening crises to eat it up), your only hope to get anything better than slave wages at some manufacturing plant (that's probably going to China at any minute) is to get a highly-competitive scholarship or take out a student loan. And there are only so many scholarships to go around.
Just wait until you see what happens if THIS group starts going en masse into default. At least with houses, there is some collateral there. What are you going to foreclose on when little Johnny goes into default on his $100,000 loan debt because he can't find a job? You going to foreclose on and resell his worthless degree?
And, sadly, this is only going to get worse. Tuition has been going through the roof at universities in the U.S., even as wages for the jobs post-grads get afterwards have remained stagnant. The wages of parents and post-grads have stayed the same, but they're having to fork out more and more for tuition--driving them to even more debt. So it's hardly surprising to find out that student loan debt has increased over 63% in just ten years.
So what do you think the end result is if this trend continues? Either large segments of the population are going to have to give up on college or they're going to have to put themselves in a position where default is almost an inevitability. I guess that could actually have one positive effect. It could finally dispel the idea that everyone can or should go to college (or that a college degree should be considered a prerequisite for any white collar job).
And, BTW, you know who pays when someone defaults? The U.S. government foots the bill, since these loans are federally guaranteed. So Uncle Sam gets to fund the bailout on that one too, just like he did with the banks and domestic car industry.
Why is it that no one appreciates MODERN science fiction anymore? There are so many great *modern* science fiction writers out there (just take a look at Gardner Dozois's incredible Year's Best Science Fiction anthology sometime for an excellent sampling). Yet every time someone talks about science fiction, all anyone brings up are golden and silver age writers like Henlein, Asimov, Phillip Dick, etc. Not that there is anything wrong with those guys, but does everyone think science fiction writing ended when disco was still hot? There is great NEW stuff coming out every year. Hell, even Fredrick Pohl's best stuff came in the 90's, not the 60's.
Wouldn't that be illegal? A CEO can't run a public company into the ground and then turn around and buy it out of his own pocket for a song. I'm pretty sure the SEC would put you in jail for that.
The U.S. doesn't have VAT taxes, the EU does. And not just little sales taxes of a few percent, I mean*BIG FUCKING VAT TAXES*, no less (Sweden has an almost 50% VAT tax). So, yeah, they're going to cost a helluva lot more in Europe than the U.S.
The U.S. doesn't have *ANY* VAT tax (just local sales taxes, which run 0%-7%). Most of the EU countries have something like a 20%-40% VAT tax added on.
Sure he turned down an offer of $33 a share from MS, only to have the stock plummet to half that value almost immediately afterwards. But he got to tell MS to go to hell, man!
Basically, he spends money now on curing human SYMPTOMS, while ignoring the main issue that really needs to worked on: poverty.
You would make a really shitty triage doctor. When a patient is laying on the gurney with a gunshot wound, you don't throw your hands up and say "Well, until I can treat the underlying problem of gang violence that got him here, fuck it." Helping end disease in Africa will mean a major improvement in lives there. Would it be nice to ALSO end poverty? You betcha. But when you have limited resources, you don't START with the hardest and most intractable problems, you start out with the smaller problems that you can actually SOLVE with those limited resources.
Even a Bill Gates, with his vast individual wealth, couldn't even begin to deal with the issue of poverty in Africa. That would take a coalition of dozens (if not hundreds) of governments willing to pool their resources and work together. And even then it would be a HUGE challenge.
What's REALLY sad that people on/. can't look past their mindless hatred of Bill Gates to acknowledge the real good he's doing in Africa. The bizarre thing is that some of these same people are the ones who cried like their daddy had died when Steve Jobs died--a man who lined his own pockets with billions while never doing ANYTHING to help the sick and impoverished. Not one fucking THING have you or your idol done for the poor in Africa, yet all you can do is criticize Bill Gates, one of the few who is actually getting off his ass and doing something to help.
No, but they had been making a decisive and clear movement towards normalizing relations with the U.S. and making democratic reforms under Khatami. That all ended after GWB's stupid-ass speech.
And just to show us how mad they are, they "elected" Ahmadinejad in a "fair" election, spooled up a nuclear weapons program, "resumed" massive human rights violations (since in your model, they were a great place in 2003), and basically been a regional pain in the ass?
Yeah they did, *AFTER* GWB called them evil and basically threatened to invade them, the country became radicalized again, ended all of Khatami's reforms and elected hard-liners in the next election. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity was missed and now we're pretty much guaranteed an anti-U.S. nuclear Iran (and an anti-U.S. nuclear North Korea too for that matter). All because the commander-in-dipshit thought that acting tough would scare them and cause them to back down. Oh, he scared them alright..scared them right into the only thing that can protect a smaller country against U.S. invasion--nuclear weapons.
But global warming tends to produce more floods *and* more droughts
I love that reasoning. It essentially makes global warming impossible to disprove or challenge. There is no evidence that can be used to argue against it. Have a drought? That's global warming. Have a flood? That's global warming. Have a heat wave? Global warming. Have a blizzard? Global warming. Have normal weather? Well, global warming only effects things in the LONG TERM, see...
There is no trend or pattern sufficient to disprove, or even challenge it. That sounds more like a religion than science to me. You know, a real scientific theory is supposed to be something you could actually *disprove* with the right evidence (like Evolution, not like Creationism).
When GWB made his speech in 2003, the President of Iran was a reformist moderate named Mohammad Khatami. Khatami had made many reforms in the country, had sent official condolences to the U.S. after 9-11, and was even talking about establishing regular diplomatic relations.
After GWB's moronic Axis of Evil speech, all diplomatic ties were cut off, Iran began to actively pursue nuclear weapons, and in the next election, anti-U.S. hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected.
No, they're just sending a message. Every since that stupid "Axis of Evil" speech from George Dumbass, Iran has been freaking out over the possibility of U.S. invasion. Developing nukes and launch capacity is their way of saying to the U.S. and Israel "Don't even THINK about it."
-The thousands of things that Star Trek got COMPLETELY WRONG (including the overarching idea of a socialistic state where everyone works for the common good and not for money).
-How holographic displays have been around since before Star Wars and yet we have never even come close to what is seen in that movie.
-Why self-driving cars, which have been experimented with for decades now, have never materialized in production any more than flying cars.
-Army drones. Are you referring to Terminator-esque robots (which have never materialized), or the glorified RC cars and planes with a missile attached?
-How the Back to the Future Nikes were actually INSPIRED by the movie, but still don't work anything like those seen in the movie (they DO NOT self-lace)
As I said, writers occasionally get an individual piece of technology right, but even when they do, they usually get its context and application completely wrong. You CAN'T predict the future. Deal with it.
Don't worry, I'm sure the U.S. will just declare this a terrorist movement and start actively blocking all alternative DNS servers by IP. Then we can get into the escalating you-jailbreak-it-we-find-a-way-to-stop-the-jailbreak-you-jailbreak-it-again game that seems to be the inevitable result of a conflict between those who want total freedom and those who want to stifle freedom within their own self-serving carefully defined boundaries.
Slashdot Mirror
What incentive will companies have to create REAL jobs if they know they can get indentured servants assigned to them?
Georgia actually started a program to do pretty much something like that with the unemployed a few years ag. (I know, who would have thought a southern state would support slavery, right?). Basically, companies get free unemployed indentured servants for up to 8 weeks, with the only caveat being that they're supposed to receive "training" at the job. The program was scaled back drastically after it came out that most of the companies weren't providing any real training at all and were just using these people as free labor. Shocking, huh?
Sadly, a lot of states are looking to adopt programs modeled on Georgia's. Even Obama is praising it as a model program.
You can't DISMISS student loans (through bankruptcy). You can MOST DEFINITELY default on them. And how are you going to garnish wages if someone is unemployed (or even severely underemployed)?
Boomers think they know everything. Film at eleven.
A resourceful person could do the equivalent of a college education for just the cost of an internet connection (or at the library for free).
That's true. But when's the last time you saw "4-year degree or equivalent do-it-yourself degree" listed as a job prerequisite for a white collar job?
I have a hard time sympathizing with anyone who has voluntarily taken on large amounts of debt
With almost any decent job these days requiring a 4-year college degree, what the hell do you expect? Unless your parents are upper-class or have had the foresight to save up the money (with no intervening crises to eat it up), your only hope to get anything better than slave wages at some manufacturing plant (that's probably going to China at any minute) is to get a highly-competitive scholarship or take out a student loan. And there are only so many scholarships to go around.
Just wait until you see what happens if THIS group starts going en masse into default. At least with houses, there is some collateral there. What are you going to foreclose on when little Johnny goes into default on his $100,000 loan debt because he can't find a job? You going to foreclose on and resell his worthless degree?
And, sadly, this is only going to get worse. Tuition has been going through the roof at universities in the U.S., even as wages for the jobs post-grads get afterwards have remained stagnant. The wages of parents and post-grads have stayed the same, but they're having to fork out more and more for tuition--driving them to even more debt. So it's hardly surprising to find out that student loan debt has increased over 63% in just ten years.
So what do you think the end result is if this trend continues? Either large segments of the population are going to have to give up on college or they're going to have to put themselves in a position where default is almost an inevitability. I guess that could actually have one positive effect. It could finally dispel the idea that everyone can or should go to college (or that a college degree should be considered a prerequisite for any white collar job).
And, BTW, you know who pays when someone defaults? The U.S. government foots the bill, since these loans are federally guaranteed. So Uncle Sam gets to fund the bailout on that one too, just like he did with the banks and domestic car industry.
Why is it that no one appreciates MODERN science fiction anymore? There are so many great *modern* science fiction writers out there (just take a look at Gardner Dozois's incredible Year's Best Science Fiction anthology sometime for an excellent sampling). Yet every time someone talks about science fiction, all anyone brings up are golden and silver age writers like Henlein, Asimov, Phillip Dick, etc. Not that there is anything wrong with those guys, but does everyone think science fiction writing ended when disco was still hot? There is great NEW stuff coming out every year. Hell, even Fredrick Pohl's best stuff came in the 90's, not the 60's.
Wouldn't that be illegal? A CEO can't run a public company into the ground and then turn around and buy it out of his own pocket for a song. I'm pretty sure the SEC would put you in jail for that.
She would actually need to HAVE a career in the first place for that.
"Up-and-coming actress" is Hollywood-speak for "waitress."
She's an unknown. If she wasn't, she wouldn't be pulling this pathetic publicity stunt. So you wouldn't recognize her name anyway.
They released a picture of it. Looks pretty sweet.
But it may still infringe on Apple's "Physical object with an ability to dial a number" patent.
The U.S. doesn't have VAT taxes, the EU does. And not just little sales taxes of a few percent, I mean*BIG FUCKING VAT TAXES*, no less (Sweden has an almost 50% VAT tax). So, yeah, they're going to cost a helluva lot more in Europe than the U.S.
The U.S. doesn't have *ANY* VAT tax (just local sales taxes, which run 0%-7%). Most of the EU countries have something like a 20%-40% VAT tax added on.
Sure he turned down an offer of $33 a share from MS, only to have the stock plummet to half that value almost immediately afterwards. But he got to tell MS to go to hell, man!
Ah man, I was really hoping to unload all my flooz and beenz bucks into this too. I've really got to stop investing in currency based on commercials.
Anyone know if e-gold accepts flooz? Come on man, Whoopi's good for it.
Basically, he spends money now on curing human SYMPTOMS, while ignoring the main issue that really needs to worked on: poverty.
You would make a really shitty triage doctor. When a patient is laying on the gurney with a gunshot wound, you don't throw your hands up and say "Well, until I can treat the underlying problem of gang violence that got him here, fuck it." Helping end disease in Africa will mean a major improvement in lives there. Would it be nice to ALSO end poverty? You betcha. But when you have limited resources, you don't START with the hardest and most intractable problems, you start out with the smaller problems that you can actually SOLVE with those limited resources.
Even a Bill Gates, with his vast individual wealth, couldn't even begin to deal with the issue of poverty in Africa. That would take a coalition of dozens (if not hundreds) of governments willing to pool their resources and work together. And even then it would be a HUGE challenge.
What's REALLY sad that people on /. can't look past their mindless hatred of Bill Gates to acknowledge the real good he's doing in Africa. The bizarre thing is that some of these same people are the ones who cried like their daddy had died when Steve Jobs died--a man who lined his own pockets with billions while never doing ANYTHING to help the sick and impoverished. Not one fucking THING have you or your idol done for the poor in Africa, yet all you can do is criticize Bill Gates, one of the few who is actually getting off his ass and doing something to help.
Lighten up, Francis.
So Iran was all peace and roses in 2003?
No, but they had been making a decisive and clear movement towards normalizing relations with the U.S. and making democratic reforms under Khatami. That all ended after GWB's stupid-ass speech.
And just to show us how mad they are, they "elected" Ahmadinejad in a "fair" election, spooled up a nuclear weapons program, "resumed" massive human rights violations (since in your model, they were a great place in 2003), and basically been a regional pain in the ass?
Yeah they did, *AFTER* GWB called them evil and basically threatened to invade them, the country became radicalized again, ended all of Khatami's reforms and elected hard-liners in the next election. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity was missed and now we're pretty much guaranteed an anti-U.S. nuclear Iran (and an anti-U.S. nuclear North Korea too for that matter). All because the commander-in-dipshit thought that acting tough would scare them and cause them to back down. Oh, he scared them alright..scared them right into the only thing that can protect a smaller country against U.S. invasion--nuclear weapons.
But global warming tends to produce more floods *and* more droughts
I love that reasoning. It essentially makes global warming impossible to disprove or challenge. There is no evidence that can be used to argue against it. Have a drought? That's global warming. Have a flood? That's global warming. Have a heat wave? Global warming. Have a blizzard? Global warming. Have normal weather? Well, global warming only effects things in the LONG TERM, see...
There is no trend or pattern sufficient to disprove, or even challenge it. That sounds more like a religion than science to me. You know, a real scientific theory is supposed to be something you could actually *disprove* with the right evidence (like Evolution, not like Creationism).
When GWB made his speech in 2003, the President of Iran was a reformist moderate named Mohammad Khatami. Khatami had made many reforms in the country, had sent official condolences to the U.S. after 9-11, and was even talking about establishing regular diplomatic relations.
After GWB's moronic Axis of Evil speech, all diplomatic ties were cut off, Iran began to actively pursue nuclear weapons, and in the next election, anti-U.S. hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected.
Good work George.
No, they're just sending a message. Every since that stupid "Axis of Evil" speech from George Dumbass, Iran has been freaking out over the possibility of U.S. invasion. Developing nukes and launch capacity is their way of saying to the U.S. and Israel "Don't even THINK about it."
Explain this:
-The thousands of things that Star Trek got COMPLETELY WRONG (including the overarching idea of a socialistic state where everyone works for the common good and not for money).
-How holographic displays have been around since before Star Wars and yet we have never even come close to what is seen in that movie.
-Why self-driving cars, which have been experimented with for decades now, have never materialized in production any more than flying cars.
-Army drones. Are you referring to Terminator-esque robots (which have never materialized), or the glorified RC cars and planes with a missile attached?
-How the Back to the Future Nikes were actually INSPIRED by the movie, but still don't work anything like those seen in the movie (they DO NOT self-lace)
As I said, writers occasionally get an individual piece of technology right, but even when they do, they usually get its context and application completely wrong. You CAN'T predict the future. Deal with it.
Don't worry, I'm sure the U.S. will just declare this a terrorist movement and start actively blocking all alternative DNS servers by IP. Then we can get into the escalating you-jailbreak-it-we-find-a-way-to-stop-the-jailbreak-you-jailbreak-it-again game that seems to be the inevitable result of a conflict between those who want total freedom and those who want to stifle freedom within their own self-serving carefully defined boundaries.
And jetpacks and robots for all!