Senior engineers with 30+ years of experience are more knowledgeable than people in their 20s? The horror! The shame!
I'm not sure what country you or the GP poster are living in, but the people I grew up with seem a hell of a lot more hard-nosed and street smart than most of the boomer generation. We didn't grow up with peace and prosperity, cheap education, and a straight shot into the middle class. We didn't get to ride the coattails of a 50 year economic boom caused exclusively by the fact that North America was the only part of the developed world that wasn't burnt to the ground in the 1940's.
Your generation of course calls this concept American exceptionalism, because America was largely excepted from the destruction caused by World War 2. This American exceptionalism naturally does not translate to the younger generation, due to the lack of such an important geopolitical event in our parents' lifetimes.
Said exceptional generation seems (at least as far as I can tell from the history books I haven't read) to have earned their wealth primarily through plundering our country and running it in the ground, and whose main occupation currently seems to consist of trying their damnedest to pull the ladder up behind them by removing every single social program they used to get to where they are today, all the while yelling at us that we're stupid and lazy.
This is, of course, completely true. Our generation is demonstrably different from, and in every way inferior to, the one preceding us. This is proven by the obvious fact that our country, right as the younger generation is coming of age (hardly a coincidence wouldn't you say?), is on the edge of economic collapse, with a failing political system and a military that is fighting multiple unnecessary wars around the globe.
In fact, most of those soldiers are members of the younger generation! The fact that we can no longer pay for college, long considered well within the reach of an average working class youth, is further evidence of our generational failure. If only we worked a little harder, like our daddies did, maybe we'd have something to show for it.
There are vast reaches of this great land of ours, usually in the suburbs, where Montessori schools are churning out glaze-eyed traveling team soccer players who are destined to be nothing more than mediocre students and passive recipients of whatever the nanny state or corporate bureaucracy tells them to do.
Places where information is inaccessible, ambition does not exist, minds are not independent, selfs do not actualize, and the older generation is simultaneously the cause and victim of (but entirely devoid of culpability, or indeed self-awareness, in either case) the inter-generational misunderstanding that has been so well-documented over the course of history that to call it trite is a truly magnanimous compliment.
Or... maybe... you're just getting old.
Dude.
I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on
frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond
words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and
respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint. - Hesiod 8th Century BC
It's true that he committed treason, although I am not sure that he violated his ethical code. It's a very complicated issue at the very least.
It's blatantly obvious that what PFC Manning was against Army rules. But we also expect soldiers to take a stand when their superiors give them unethical orders, and we expect that the US servicemen will follow the rules of engagement and otherwise conduct themselves properly, and we expect that the Army will discipline those soldiers that do not do so. We expect fair treatment and a just trial be given to those charged with a crime, and in fact none of that has happened in this case, but PFC Manning is the only that is going to be punished because he embarrassed those in power.
There are differences in scale, but the obvious parallel is with the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. The whistleblowers there were initially denounced as traitors by the Army and a large part of the public, but in hindsight it is obvious that they did the right thing. I suspect PFC Manning will be exonerated by history in the same way.
That's fine. I don't have the right to force somebody to label their foods as GMO or grown by a factory farm. I'm sure agribusiness is perfectly OK with citizens exercising their own rights by creating their own alternative market for people that *do* wish to have that much knowledge about their food supply, right? Right?
Nope. Agribusinesses have been manipulating the laws for 30+ years, trying to prevent that alternative market from developing. And after the market did develop, once they realized the amount of money that was in organic or natural food, whatever you want to call it, they have spent massive amounts of money in lobbying and marketing, trying to deceive consumers into thinking the food they are buying is something that it is not.
If agribusinesses weren't aggressively trying to manipulate consumers, and aggressively trying to subvert food labels that were developed independently of them, they wouldn't be seeing the massive pushback against them that is happening right now. That street runs both ways.
I sympathize with your opinion politically. Nobody should be forced to label their food in such a way that leads consumers to believe it is less safe than it actually is. But this didn't happen in a vacuum, and the agricultural industry is far from an innocent victim. People are trying to defend themselves from the way these businesses have manipulated the organic market over the last decade and a half. It's certainly not an unprovoked attack.
Personally, I don't have any problem with GMOs in principle, but I would like to know *specifically* what it is I'm eating and make an informed decision. These things are granular. Like you said, some folks will avoid *all* GMO food, but a lot of people like me just want to things to be labeled appropriately so that I know what I'm putting into my body. I don't see the problem with GM food that's modified for nutritional content, extended shelf-life, etc., but maybe there will be a difference nutritionally and I'd like to be able to make that decision personally.
I'm not so sure about crops that have been engineered to resist glysophate. I understand that they're probably safe, but I can see the potential for bad things would rather hedge on conservative side and refrain from eating it until I've seen some comprehensive studies that show it to be safe. And I'm 100% opposed to supporting Monstanto and other agribusinesses that use anti-competitive business practices. For that reason I tend to try and buy local organic, and avoid products that use corn and soy as fillers.
seas are sort of obvious, but what about rivers and lakes - these are extremely important for life, due to being sources of fresh water, as opposed to the inevitable salt water in the oceans.
Fresh water is important for terrestrial life. It's not exactly like the oceans on Earth are barren and lifeless.
Maybe the kid had shown repeatedly she would stay up until all hours of the morning chatting with people rather than doing homework or sleeping, causing her grades to slip. Setting a limit on how late you stay up browsing the internet or talking on the phone is a perfectly reasonable thing for a parent to do in that situation, and that's probably what caused it.
Who knows if the parents were being reasonable or not? Certainly not any of us. But anyone who's ever shared a roof with a teenage girl is probably inclined to giv the benefit of the doubt to the parents:)
You can't make a general utility statistic like VORP for most football positions, but you can measure a lot of discrete situations. Then you use old-fashioned football knowledge to assess how that measurement is relevant to the position and the function of the team as a whole.
You're still going to have to make a lot more "eyeball" judgments, and that's going to introduce strong biases. It's a lot more old-school than baseball. Not only is it difficult in football to get a useful quantitative value, you also have to properly assess the quality and relevance of that value in order to give that number meaning. And to do both those things you must have an expert's understanding of the game and a solid mathematical background, and those aren't two skills that many people share.
You did touch on the greatest difficulty with football statistics, though, which is sample size. Often there just isn't a large enough sample size to do anything other than *suggest* certain things. Another problem caused by the relatively small number of games played is the large variance in schedule strength. Because of the divisional structure of the NFL, some teams play much easier schedules than the rest of the league, like the Colts this year. Sometimes an offense can go through the entire season and have to play only one or two elite defenses. It's difficult to adjust for that systematically.
You'd be surprised, actually. I work at a ski resort and a substantial amount of people just stay inside and do normal things when they're on vacation.
It has very little to do with a "green agenda". It has to do with the fact that there are six million people in the DC metro area and a HUGE amount of those people live in the suburbs and commute into the city. This certainly won't come as a shock to you if you've ever driven your car inside the beltway during commute time, but you are not the only one who would like to use their own car to commute into the city.
What's the alternative? Seriously, what is a more efficient alternative to moving that many people over that distance on a regular basis? It sure isn't automobiles. Try driving around LA or Houston during rush hour if you think that a city that size designed around automobile travel is more efficient.
The fact is that if you live in a major metro area like DC and want to maintain the suburban Midwestern lifestyle you're used to while regularly visiting the city center for work and play, you're going to have to pay for it in time and money. There's just no way around it. I mean, how far are you commuting? West of Fairfax into DC? That's a pretty damn long commute. You can't really complain that the service is poor when you live that far away.
No, I understood what you meant to say. I think you're the one that doesn't understand me:)
Like I said, regular marijuana use before 16 does not imply any of those things you said.
Let's say 10% of kids 14-16 are classified as "troubled" (whatever the hell that means, but I'm just using numbers as an example). Of those, 40% are regular marijuana users. Let's say 90% are "normal." Of those, 10% are regular marijuana users. That means, 4% of kids are "troubled" students who regularly use marijuana, 9% are "normal" kids who regularly use marijuana. That means 70% of the kids who are smoking weed are perfectly normal high school students who are trying out marijuana.
Now in that situation, the statement "troubled kid are more likely to be marijuana users" and "marijuana use does not suggest that the kid is troubled" are both true statements. That is what I am saying is what is actually happening. Obviously I just pulled the numbers out of my butt, but the example holds true.
Dang. They didn't teach any of the stuff at Carnegie Mellon? Did they not have software engineering classes in the curriculum? I would expect more from a top rate CS school like that.
I went to Utah and we had a solid two course software engineering sequence. Nothing terribly advanced, but did go over design patterns, naming conventions, testing, and error handling/logging. I don't remember covering anything about version control or extensibility. The beginning CS courses were taught in Java and we learned javadoc, although IIRC we weren't actually graded on comments, just reminded that we should be writing them.
I know it was a rhetorical question, but over the last dozen years the ideological right wing has grown incredibly powerful. Moderates in the Republican party have been pushed out, and anyone who doesn't conform is voted out in the primaries.
But it's not just the Republicans anymore. Beginning in response to the clusterfuck that was the Bush presidency, the far left has grown more powerful and over the last election cycle or two the same thing has started happening to the Democrats. So unfortunately now we have two parties that have become incredibly polarized ideologically. The moderates have been pushed out or retired and very few centrists remain in the legislative branch. Although the Republicans still rate a higher on the crazy scale, *both* parties have become less willing to compromise. And since neither side has a clear mandate, we have arrived at the situation at hand where we can't even pass basic legislation.
++. Can you find work in the industry without a degree? Absolutely, but you will find a lot more open doors if you have that piece of paper.
I actually had a full-time offer from a company I interned at for 3 years with stellar recommendations from everyone I worked for during that time period. HR wouldn't let me take the job until after I had graduated, and I had three years experience and positive performance reviews!
...you're misrepresenting what I said. I never said that "a teenager smoking marijuana implies X, Y, and Z".
I'm not misrepresenting it. That's nearly word-for-word exactly what you said:
It's also a socioeconomic red flag that suggests a lot of confounders: these kids came from the wrong side of the tracks, they've had crappy and neglectful parenting, they've dropped out of school or are on the verge of doing so.
See? That's literally exactly what you said, right down to the x,y, z structure of the statement. The only difference is you used the word suggest rather than imply.
The issue I take with that is that regular marijuana does not imply either 1) the kid is poor 2) they have neglectful parents or 3) they are failing at school. In my personal experience all of those things are wildly off-base, and I've never seen any scientific study that shows otherwise.
Yes, because marijuana is mostly illegal and people have a tendency to self-medicate, kids who are troubled are going to be more likely to use drugs. But marijuana use is so commonplace that this fact in no ways implies any of those things you are suggesting. Maybe in extreme cases where you have kids starting at age 12 or earlier, where recreational drug use is still an exceptional case, but 15 or 16 is a perfectly normal age for an average high schooler to start experimenting with marijuana use.
You are vastly underestimating the prevalence of marijuana use. Check this survey out. 36 percent of high school seniors report having smoked marijuana in the past year, 23 percent in the past month, and 6.5 percent are daily users. These *are* the kids that are taking AP Calc and gunning for the Ivy League.
You are correct that disadvantaged or troubled kids are statistically more likely to be using drugs, but everything you say after "socieconomic red flag" in your original post is so wildy off base it almost seems like you're trolling. Very successful people are regular marijuana users, most of those people started in their teens, and they are not in any way statistical outliers. The idea that a teenager smoking marijuana implies that they had poor parents or are on the verge of failing out of school is absurd.
Really? Who was "terrorized" last week? Steven Crowder got punched in the face after taunting union protesters, but he was being intentionally confrontational towards them and those people were arrested by the police and denounced by the unions. That's hardly terrorism.
And there actually is something stopping a union lead from taking advantage of his constituents. Unions are democratic. And while they are far from perfect institutions, like I said, to claim that unions are just as bad as corporations with regard to the working man, that the petty politics and corruption that exist in the major unions are even in the same realm as that tactics corporations have used against workers for the better part of two centuries, is patently outrageous.
Using SSNs for identification is foolish as well. They are not guaranteed to be unique identifiers (multiple people are sometimes issued the same SSN by the government and a whole lot more use someone else's SSN illegally), and not everybody is guaranteed to have one.
The system as designed was perfectly fine, because they never planned on using it for ID. But it's still operating largely as it did when it was first implemented even though it's now an ID card, so there are some half-assed hacks being made to try and make it marginally more secure. The government needs to just make a national ID card and be done with it.
I've been peripherally involved with many different types of unions, and while they certainly can have their problems, saying unions were "just as evil as the overlords they were created to overthrow" is such a gross misstatement that I cant' imagine you know the actual history of the labor movement.
Cronyism and protectionism are bad, but not even in the same conversation as what companies do to workers. Unions aren't beating and murdering people. Unions aren't giving people horrible, chronic diseases and then leaving them to die without assistance. And I'm not talking about ancient history, this is something that was common practice well into the 80s, and to a lesser extent still is today. Read up on the history of labor struggles in the US, it's not pretty.
Most of the employment laws and benefits we enjoy as US citizens are the result of generations of back-breaking struggle, and we're giving them our rights back just as quickly as we can, without even thinking, kowtowing to the same pro-corporate policies that were used to terrorize the generations before us into submission. The "unions are just as bad as the corporations" nonsense that seems to be taken at face value nowadays is nothing more than fossilized propaganda.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what country you or the GP poster are living in, but the people I grew up with seem a hell of a lot more hard-nosed and street smart than most of the boomer generation. We didn't grow up with peace and prosperity, cheap education, and a straight shot into the middle class. We didn't get to ride the coattails of a 50 year economic boom caused exclusively by the fact that North America was the only part of the developed world that wasn't burnt to the ground in the 1940's.
Your generation of course calls this concept American exceptionalism, because America was largely excepted from the destruction caused by World War 2. This American exceptionalism naturally does not translate to the younger generation, due to the lack of such an important geopolitical event in our parents' lifetimes.
Said exceptional generation seems (at least as far as I can tell from the history books I haven't read) to have earned their wealth primarily through plundering our country and running it in the ground, and whose main occupation currently seems to consist of trying their damnedest to pull the ladder up behind them by removing every single social program they used to get to where they are today, all the while yelling at us that we're stupid and lazy.
This is, of course, completely true. Our generation is demonstrably different from, and in every way inferior to, the one preceding us. This is proven by the obvious fact that our country, right as the younger generation is coming of age (hardly a coincidence wouldn't you say?), is on the edge of economic collapse, with a failing political system and a military that is fighting multiple unnecessary wars around the globe.
In fact, most of those soldiers are members of the younger generation! The fact that we can no longer pay for college, long considered well within the reach of an average working class youth, is further evidence of our generational failure. If only we worked a little harder, like our daddies did, maybe we'd have something to show for it.
There are vast reaches of this great land of ours, usually in the suburbs, where Montessori schools are churning out glaze-eyed traveling team soccer players who are destined to be nothing more than mediocre students and passive recipients of whatever the nanny state or corporate bureaucracy tells them to do.
Places where information is inaccessible, ambition does not exist, minds are not independent, selfs do not actualize, and the older generation is simultaneously the cause and victim of (but entirely devoid of culpability, or indeed self-awareness, in either case) the inter-generational misunderstanding that has been so well-documented over the course of history that to call it trite is a truly magnanimous compliment.
Or... maybe... you're just getting old.
Dude.
It's true that he committed treason, although I am not sure that he violated his ethical code. It's a very complicated issue at the very least.
It's blatantly obvious that what PFC Manning was against Army rules. But we also expect soldiers to take a stand when their superiors give them unethical orders, and we expect that the US servicemen will follow the rules of engagement and otherwise conduct themselves properly, and we expect that the Army will discipline those soldiers that do not do so. We expect fair treatment and a just trial be given to those charged with a crime, and in fact none of that has happened in this case, but PFC Manning is the only that is going to be punished because he embarrassed those in power.
There are differences in scale, but the obvious parallel is with the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. The whistleblowers there were initially denounced as traitors by the Army and a large part of the public, but in hindsight it is obvious that they did the right thing. I suspect PFC Manning will be exonerated by history in the same way.
That's fine. I don't have the right to force somebody to label their foods as GMO or grown by a factory farm. I'm sure agribusiness is perfectly OK with citizens exercising their own rights by creating their own alternative market for people that *do* wish to have that much knowledge about their food supply, right? Right?
Nope. Agribusinesses have been manipulating the laws for 30+ years, trying to prevent that alternative market from developing. And after the market did develop, once they realized the amount of money that was in organic or natural food, whatever you want to call it, they have spent massive amounts of money in lobbying and marketing, trying to deceive consumers into thinking the food they are buying is something that it is not.
If agribusinesses weren't aggressively trying to manipulate consumers, and aggressively trying to subvert food labels that were developed independently of them, they wouldn't be seeing the massive pushback against them that is happening right now. That street runs both ways.
I sympathize with your opinion politically. Nobody should be forced to label their food in such a way that leads consumers to believe it is less safe than it actually is. But this didn't happen in a vacuum, and the agricultural industry is far from an innocent victim. People are trying to defend themselves from the way these businesses have manipulated the organic market over the last decade and a half. It's certainly not an unprovoked attack.
Amen brother.
Personally, I don't have any problem with GMOs in principle, but I would like to know *specifically* what it is I'm eating and make an informed decision. These things are granular. Like you said, some folks will avoid *all* GMO food, but a lot of people like me just want to things to be labeled appropriately so that I know what I'm putting into my body. I don't see the problem with GM food that's modified for nutritional content, extended shelf-life, etc., but maybe there will be a difference nutritionally and I'd like to be able to make that decision personally.
I'm not so sure about crops that have been engineered to resist glysophate. I understand that they're probably safe, but I can see the potential for bad things would rather hedge on conservative side and refrain from eating it until I've seen some comprehensive studies that show it to be safe. And I'm 100% opposed to supporting Monstanto and other agribusinesses that use anti-competitive business practices. For that reason I tend to try and buy local organic, and avoid products that use corn and soy as fillers.
Fresh water is important for terrestrial life. It's not exactly like the oceans on Earth are barren and lifeless.
Maybe the kid had shown repeatedly she would stay up until all hours of the morning chatting with people rather than doing homework or sleeping, causing her grades to slip. Setting a limit on how late you stay up browsing the internet or talking on the phone is a perfectly reasonable thing for a parent to do in that situation, and that's probably what caused it.
:)
Who knows if the parents were being reasonable or not? Certainly not any of us. But anyone who's ever shared a roof with a teenage girl is probably inclined to giv the benefit of the doubt to the parents
You can't make a general utility statistic like VORP for most football positions, but you can measure a lot of discrete situations. Then you use old-fashioned football knowledge to assess how that measurement is relevant to the position and the function of the team as a whole.
You're still going to have to make a lot more "eyeball" judgments, and that's going to introduce strong biases. It's a lot more old-school than baseball. Not only is it difficult in football to get a useful quantitative value, you also have to properly assess the quality and relevance of that value in order to give that number meaning. And to do both those things you must have an expert's understanding of the game and a solid mathematical background, and those aren't two skills that many people share.
You did touch on the greatest difficulty with football statistics, though, which is sample size. Often there just isn't a large enough sample size to do anything other than *suggest* certain things. Another problem caused by the relatively small number of games played is the large variance in schedule strength. Because of the divisional structure of the NFL, some teams play much easier schedules than the rest of the league, like the Colts this year. Sometimes an offense can go through the entire season and have to play only one or two elite defenses. It's difficult to adjust for that systematically.
All of these things already exist, and most teams use them. The Bills are at least a decade behind if they haven't been using any advanced metrics.
You'd be surprised, actually. I work at a ski resort and a substantial amount of people just stay inside and do normal things when they're on vacation.
You could do it, it just would have to be second run movies, which is probably what a theatre in a town that small is doing anyway.
Except for the fact that movie theaters aren't dying. Not even close, actually. Last year was the best year ever for box office receipts in the US.
Depends on where you were. I remember gas being $.99 in Idaho during the 90's.
It has very little to do with a "green agenda". It has to do with the fact that there are six million people in the DC metro area and a HUGE amount of those people live in the suburbs and commute into the city. This certainly won't come as a shock to you if you've ever driven your car inside the beltway during commute time, but you are not the only one who would like to use their own car to commute into the city.
What's the alternative? Seriously, what is a more efficient alternative to moving that many people over that distance on a regular basis? It sure isn't automobiles. Try driving around LA or Houston during rush hour if you think that a city that size designed around automobile travel is more efficient.
The fact is that if you live in a major metro area like DC and want to maintain the suburban Midwestern lifestyle you're used to while regularly visiting the city center for work and play, you're going to have to pay for it in time and money. There's just no way around it. I mean, how far are you commuting? West of Fairfax into DC? That's a pretty damn long commute. You can't really complain that the service is poor when you live that far away.
No, I understood what you meant to say. I think you're the one that doesn't understand me :)
Like I said, regular marijuana use before 16 does not imply any of those things you said.
Let's say 10% of kids 14-16 are classified as "troubled" (whatever the hell that means, but I'm just using numbers as an example). Of those, 40% are regular marijuana users. Let's say 90% are "normal." Of those, 10% are regular marijuana users. That means, 4% of kids are "troubled" students who regularly use marijuana, 9% are "normal" kids who regularly use marijuana. That means 70% of the kids who are smoking weed are perfectly normal high school students who are trying out marijuana.
Now in that situation, the statement "troubled kid are more likely to be marijuana users" and "marijuana use does not suggest that the kid is troubled" are both true statements. That is what I am saying is what is actually happening. Obviously I just pulled the numbers out of my butt, but the example holds true.
Dang. They didn't teach any of the stuff at Carnegie Mellon? Did they not have software engineering classes in the curriculum? I would expect more from a top rate CS school like that.
I went to Utah and we had a solid two course software engineering sequence. Nothing terribly advanced, but did go over design patterns, naming conventions, testing, and error handling/logging. I don't remember covering anything about version control or extensibility. The beginning CS courses were taught in Java and we learned javadoc, although IIRC we weren't actually graded on comments, just reminded that we should be writing them.
I know it was a rhetorical question, but over the last dozen years the ideological right wing has grown incredibly powerful. Moderates in the Republican party have been pushed out, and anyone who doesn't conform is voted out in the primaries.
But it's not just the Republicans anymore. Beginning in response to the clusterfuck that was the Bush presidency, the far left has grown more powerful and over the last election cycle or two the same thing has started happening to the Democrats. So unfortunately now we have two parties that have become incredibly polarized ideologically. The moderates have been pushed out or retired and very few centrists remain in the legislative branch. Although the Republicans still rate a higher on the crazy scale, *both* parties have become less willing to compromise. And since neither side has a clear mandate, we have arrived at the situation at hand where we can't even pass basic legislation.
++. Can you find work in the industry without a degree? Absolutely, but you will find a lot more open doors if you have that piece of paper.
I actually had a full-time offer from a company I interned at for 3 years with stellar recommendations from everyone I worked for during that time period. HR wouldn't let me take the job until after I had graduated, and I had three years experience and positive performance reviews!
I'm not misrepresenting it. That's nearly word-for-word exactly what you said:
See? That's literally exactly what you said, right down to the x,y, z structure of the statement. The only difference is you used the word suggest rather than imply.
The issue I take with that is that regular marijuana does not imply either 1) the kid is poor 2) they have neglectful parents or 3) they are failing at school. In my personal experience all of those things are wildly off-base, and I've never seen any scientific study that shows otherwise.
Yes, because marijuana is mostly illegal and people have a tendency to self-medicate, kids who are troubled are going to be more likely to use drugs. But marijuana use is so commonplace that this fact in no ways implies any of those things you are suggesting. Maybe in extreme cases where you have kids starting at age 12 or earlier, where recreational drug use is still an exceptional case, but 15 or 16 is a perfectly normal age for an average high schooler to start experimenting with marijuana use.
You are vastly underestimating the prevalence of marijuana use. Check this survey out. 36 percent of high school seniors report having smoked marijuana in the past year, 23 percent in the past month, and 6.5 percent are daily users. These *are* the kids that are taking AP Calc and gunning for the Ivy League.
You are correct that disadvantaged or troubled kids are statistically more likely to be using drugs, but everything you say after "socieconomic red flag" in your original post is so wildy off base it almost seems like you're trolling. Very successful people are regular marijuana users, most of those people started in their teens, and they are not in any way statistical outliers. The idea that a teenager smoking marijuana implies that they had poor parents or are on the verge of failing out of school is absurd.
Eat less.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
Really? Who was "terrorized" last week? Steven Crowder got punched in the face after taunting union protesters, but he was being intentionally confrontational towards them and those people were arrested by the police and denounced by the unions. That's hardly terrorism.
And there actually is something stopping a union lead from taking advantage of his constituents. Unions are democratic. And while they are far from perfect institutions, like I said, to claim that unions are just as bad as corporations with regard to the working man, that the petty politics and corruption that exist in the major unions are even in the same realm as that tactics corporations have used against workers for the better part of two centuries, is patently outrageous.
Using SSNs for identification is foolish as well. They are not guaranteed to be unique identifiers (multiple people are sometimes issued the same SSN by the government and a whole lot more use someone else's SSN illegally), and not everybody is guaranteed to have one.
The system as designed was perfectly fine, because they never planned on using it for ID. But it's still operating largely as it did when it was first implemented even though it's now an ID card, so there are some half-assed hacks being made to try and make it marginally more secure. The government needs to just make a national ID card and be done with it.
How is that any different than the environment in the 70s and the 80s? That didn't stop them then. Go watch Harlan County, USA, and get back to us.
I've been peripherally involved with many different types of unions, and while they certainly can have their problems, saying unions were "just as evil as the overlords they were created to overthrow" is such a gross misstatement that I cant' imagine you know the actual history of the labor movement.
Cronyism and protectionism are bad, but not even in the same conversation as what companies do to workers. Unions aren't beating and murdering people. Unions aren't giving people horrible, chronic diseases and then leaving them to die without assistance. And I'm not talking about ancient history, this is something that was common practice well into the 80s, and to a lesser extent still is today. Read up on the history of labor struggles in the US, it's not pretty.
Most of the employment laws and benefits we enjoy as US citizens are the result of generations of back-breaking struggle, and we're giving them our rights back just as quickly as we can, without even thinking, kowtowing to the same pro-corporate policies that were used to terrorize the generations before us into submission. The "unions are just as bad as the corporations" nonsense that seems to be taken at face value nowadays is nothing more than fossilized propaganda.