The WTO certainly has teeth, but they are purely political - not legal. The United States cannot be taken to any real binding court for ignoring the WTO, in the sense that you or I can be haled into court for breaking our local jurisdictions' laws. The remedies you talk about surely are available, but one sentence you wrote perfectly embodies the teeth that the WTO has (at least in the US): "have fun explaining that to US companies that suddenly find themselves getting hit with a 10% tarrif to ship their goods to the UK or Japan." Since the US politicians who make the decision as to whether or not to abide by the WTO's regulations are the people who would have to explain it to US companies, and those companies are a substantial portion of how those politicians got elected in the first place, they tend to do what the WTO says.
I was merely saying that there is no legal repercussion to contra-WTO actions by US legislators. Like I said, "the WTO has no real power to tell the US" what to do. It does, however, have some (significant) indirect political power to penalize the US for doing something. More importantly, you have to look at US federalism to decide whether the federal government has the power to force pro- or anti-gambling laws on states on account of WTO regulations saying you can't ban internet gambling. It's a murky field, to be sure.
I think you're on the right track. The people complaining about the US going against the WTO on this matter (if the US actually did, which the article submitter's sensationalism makes it hard to tell without spending more time than I have reading about it right now) need to realize that, as well. The US is not, as far as I can tell, trying to legislate foreign behavior. It has the power to legislate behavior that crosses the national boundaries or involves internal "interstate" commerce, but that's about it. And the WTO has no real power to tell the US not to. That's the beauty of being a sovereign nation.
sole law of maximizing shareholder wealth for public companies
Just a note - in the United States of America, corporations (public and private) owe their first duty to their shareholders. In parts of Europe, however, they owe their first duty to someone else - typically to the society as a whole.
I wish that old stories would give the year along with the date. Is the June 18 article from 2005 or from 2004? We don't know without deep investigation.
Even the dictionary definition of "racism" is loaded that way, so I can't go exactly with that. Just consider it this way...
I see someone's name and it is Xiang Li. I assume from that name that the person is Asian. I don't have to involve racism to do so - there is racial prejudice in the sense that I judged a fact about the person based on their race, or vice versa, but it is not racism because there is no negative thought behind my conclusion or the inference through which I reached it. The name example is a bad one to use, because I frankly cannot think of any way that racism would be involved in the logical leap from "Xiang Li" to "Asian person."
However, if I assume that you are black because you have an address on your resume in a poor part of town, then I have applied racism to my logic. Specifically, my conclusion depends upon the racist believe that black people are poor and poor people are black. However, if I get it right and you turn out to be black, then that racism is accurate. (Note that any racism that is not involved in the logical deduction, such as "black people are criminals," is not included in my "it must be accurate" statement.)
Is it a good thing that the racism is accurate? No. Is it even an excuse to be racist that your beliefs are accurate? No. It is just a fact that your racist belief happens to be accurate.
And that is what hurts my head. When racism is accurate, how the hell do you fix it? You can't just force everyone to stop believing things because those beliefs are racist, when they are also true. You have to solve the problem on some other level. But I do hate forced political correctness, which is just renaming problems so as to avoid solving them. And I hate affirmative action, because it doesn't really help when it is applied in the places that it commonly is. (If you had a crappy upbringing in a poor family, a crappy education in a poor high school, and so forth, then it doesn't matter which college you get into or how cheap it is to go there - it won't help you as much as it would if you got in on the merits because you had a fair childhood and a fair high school education.)
But that's it for this rant. The point is just that any racism that you actually use to deduce something about a person's race is going to tend toward accuracy.
I think you are reading words other than those that I have written. Carefully read over my comments on this thread. I certainly do not believe that there is any epidemic of racism. I simply said that any racism that you actually used to deduce the race of the person from their application must be accurate. If you employ racism to reach that deduction, then it's accurate. If you do not employ racism to reach it, then there is no racism to decide the accuracy of.
I may have failed to make this subtle point clear earlier. I hope that I have rectified that failure.
No. It simply means that any racism that led you to that deduction must be accurate. Your racial prejudice that people named Xiang Li are Asian certainly is an accurate one, so I don't see that you are in a position to disagree with me using that example.
I never said anything about nationality, just race. Do you think people should care enough about race to name their children in a sufficiently stereotypical manner as to make that difference?
If you can tell the race of an applicant based on their online job application alone without asking it directly, then any racism you actually do harbor is accurate.
I lost an argument with a company in 2003 over their job posting that required 10 years of C# experience. And by "lost an argument," I mean that they were too stupid to know what I was talking about and therefore did not offer me a job. This isn't nearly as funny of a joke as it should be.:(
I play it safe with "Bourbon." Wikipedia claims "whiskey" under the Bourbon article, but the Whiskey article claims that "Kentucky [where all Bourbon is made]... usually spells its product 'whisky'."
If you want to guess, guess "whiskey." All other American whiskeys are spelled that way.
The article blurb gets it right once and wrong once. I checked TFA and he used a Ballantine's bottle. Ballantine's is a Scotch, which is a type of whisky (without the E). Other whiskies/whiskeys use different spellings:
Of the current 7, only two cases were won - and one of them for only $900. Most frivolous lawsuits get thrown out of court in short order. The problem is that this makes sense, so it doesn't get printed in the news. You only hear about these cases getting filed, and everyone gets fired up over them, even though most will be quietly dismissed.
Please share your dictionary. It is not the same as mine, which defines authoritarian as favoring blind submission to authority and/or favoring centralized monarchy or oligarchy with no limits on their power.
To be perfectly fair, authoritarianism comes in many forms, some of which are blind to the facts (Nero) and others of which are not (Stalin). The common thread is lack of any check on power, which is what we're working our way towards the more people rely on the federal government. And, by "people," I mostly mean entitlement-mentality asshats.
Minor correction: A stock option is properly the option to buy or sell a given number of shares on a given date for a given price. See Wikipedia for a more thorough discussion, but in short what a stock option as a means of compensation entails is this: The company gives you an option to buy N shares for X dollars each on D date. If the stock price on the open market is greater than X dollars per share (call it Y), then you can exercise your option by spending N * X dollars to buy N shares of stock. Actually, you can do that even if Y < X, but that would be equivalent to buying a gallon of gas for $2.50 when it costs $1.50 across the street. Once you buy the N shares of stock, you can (as most people do) sell them back into the market for their going rate, Y dollars each. So your profit from fully exercising your stock option is N * (Y - X).
If you hear someone say their stock options are "under water," it means that Y < X and the options are worthless. Also, note that most stock options given as compensation for work are not freely transferable, whereas stock options purchased on the options market can be sold back into the market. That's most of what options traders do.
But the other people pointing out that this story is not about stock options but rather about actual stock shares are probably correct, at least as far as the company's founders go. They already own shares of stock and are just selling the shares off into the market for cash. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both do this from time to time with their respective companies. How it works is you form a company, call it Acme. You incorporate it as Acme Inc. and, in the articles of incorporation, grant yourself 1 million shares of common stock. Then you later make an initial public offering and the Acme Inc. board authorizes the issue of 1 million more shares of common stock, which get sold through the stock market (probably covered by an underwriter or something initially and sold from there). So now you own 1 million shares and other people own 1 million shares. All you have to do to get rich is sell your shares out into the market.
Slashdot Mirror
I was going to have to make my own cartoon...with blackjack...and hookers.
The WTO certainly has teeth, but they are purely political - not legal. The United States cannot be taken to any real binding court for ignoring the WTO, in the sense that you or I can be haled into court for breaking our local jurisdictions' laws. The remedies you talk about surely are available, but one sentence you wrote perfectly embodies the teeth that the WTO has (at least in the US): "have fun explaining that to US companies that suddenly find themselves getting hit with a 10% tarrif to ship their goods to the UK or Japan." Since the US politicians who make the decision as to whether or not to abide by the WTO's regulations are the people who would have to explain it to US companies, and those companies are a substantial portion of how those politicians got elected in the first place, they tend to do what the WTO says.
I was merely saying that there is no legal repercussion to contra-WTO actions by US legislators. Like I said, "the WTO has no real power to tell the US" what to do. It does, however, have some (significant) indirect political power to penalize the US for doing something. More importantly, you have to look at US federalism to decide whether the federal government has the power to force pro- or anti-gambling laws on states on account of WTO regulations saying you can't ban internet gambling. It's a murky field, to be sure.
I think you're on the right track. The people complaining about the US going against the WTO on this matter (if the US actually did, which the article submitter's sensationalism makes it hard to tell without spending more time than I have reading about it right now) need to realize that, as well. The US is not, as far as I can tell, trying to legislate foreign behavior. It has the power to legislate behavior that crosses the national boundaries or involves internal "interstate" commerce, but that's about it. And the WTO has no real power to tell the US not to. That's the beauty of being a sovereign nation.
sole law of maximizing shareholder wealth for public companies
Just a note - in the United States of America, corporations (public and private) owe their first duty to their shareholders. In parts of Europe, however, they owe their first duty to someone else - typically to the society as a whole.
The Orbitz backend makes extensive use of Lisp.
Actually, it's not. GPL stands for General Public License, not GNU Public License. But GNU/GPLv3 would be fine. :)
I doubt that it will do any good in my car, which is the only place I'm likely to drop a cup of coffee.
I wish that old stories would give the year along with the date. Is the June 18 article from 2005 or from 2004? We don't know without deep investigation.
http://cl-sdl.sourceforge.net/ for CL-SDL. :-P
Even the dictionary definition of "racism" is loaded that way, so I can't go exactly with that. Just consider it this way...
I see someone's name and it is Xiang Li. I assume from that name that the person is Asian. I don't have to involve racism to do so - there is racial prejudice in the sense that I judged a fact about the person based on their race, or vice versa, but it is not racism because there is no negative thought behind my conclusion or the inference through which I reached it. The name example is a bad one to use, because I frankly cannot think of any way that racism would be involved in the logical leap from "Xiang Li" to "Asian person."
However, if I assume that you are black because you have an address on your resume in a poor part of town, then I have applied racism to my logic. Specifically, my conclusion depends upon the racist believe that black people are poor and poor people are black. However, if I get it right and you turn out to be black, then that racism is accurate. (Note that any racism that is not involved in the logical deduction, such as "black people are criminals," is not included in my "it must be accurate" statement.)
Is it a good thing that the racism is accurate? No. Is it even an excuse to be racist that your beliefs are accurate? No. It is just a fact that your racist belief happens to be accurate.
And that is what hurts my head. When racism is accurate, how the hell do you fix it? You can't just force everyone to stop believing things because those beliefs are racist, when they are also true. You have to solve the problem on some other level. But I do hate forced political correctness, which is just renaming problems so as to avoid solving them. And I hate affirmative action, because it doesn't really help when it is applied in the places that it commonly is. (If you had a crappy upbringing in a poor family, a crappy education in a poor high school, and so forth, then it doesn't matter which college you get into or how cheap it is to go there - it won't help you as much as it would if you got in on the merits because you had a fair childhood and a fair high school education.)
But that's it for this rant. The point is just that any racism that you actually use to deduce something about a person's race is going to tend toward accuracy.
I think you are reading words other than those that I have written. Carefully read over my comments on this thread. I certainly do not believe that there is any epidemic of racism. I simply said that any racism that you actually used to deduce the race of the person from their application must be accurate. If you employ racism to reach that deduction, then it's accurate. If you do not employ racism to reach it, then there is no racism to decide the accuracy of.
I may have failed to make this subtle point clear earlier. I hope that I have rectified that failure.
See my reply to the Xiang Li question.
No. It simply means that any racism that led you to that deduction must be accurate. Your racial prejudice that people named Xiang Li are Asian certainly is an accurate one, so I don't see that you are in a position to disagree with me using that example.
I never said anything about nationality, just race. Do you think people should care enough about race to name their children in a sufficiently stereotypical manner as to make that difference?
You both have made my day. :)
If you can tell the race of an applicant based on their online job application alone without asking it directly, then any racism you actually do harbor is accurate.
Okay. So now we have TWO references - the story and a Slashdot comment. I guess that verifies it.
I lost an argument with a company in 2003 over their job posting that required 10 years of C# experience. And by "lost an argument," I mean that they were too stupid to know what I was talking about and therefore did not offer me a job. This isn't nearly as funny of a joke as it should be. :(
I play it safe with "Bourbon." Wikipedia claims "whiskey" under the Bourbon article, but the Whiskey article claims that "Kentucky [where all Bourbon is made] ... usually spells its product 'whisky'."
If you want to guess, guess "whiskey." All other American whiskeys are spelled that way.
Just in case anyone is interested...
;)
The article blurb gets it right once and wrong once. I checked TFA and he used a Ballantine's bottle. Ballantine's is a Scotch, which is a type of whisky (without the E). Other whiskies/whiskeys use different spellings:
Scotch whisky
Irish whiskey
Rye whiskey
Tennessee whiskey
Canadian whisky
Bourbon
And now you know the rest of the story.
Better yet - write it in Lisp.
but I wouldn't mind taking in that much just to clean people's teeth.
Except that most of your clients have nasty breath.
Of the current 7, only two cases were won - and one of them for only $900. Most frivolous lawsuits get thrown out of court in short order. The problem is that this makes sense, so it doesn't get printed in the news. You only hear about these cases getting filed, and everyone gets fired up over them, even though most will be quietly dismissed.
Please share your dictionary. It is not the same as mine, which defines authoritarian as favoring blind submission to authority and/or favoring centralized monarchy or oligarchy with no limits on their power.
To be perfectly fair, authoritarianism comes in many forms, some of which are blind to the facts (Nero) and others of which are not (Stalin). The common thread is lack of any check on power, which is what we're working our way towards the more people rely on the federal government. And, by "people," I mostly mean entitlement-mentality asshats.
Me culpa.
Minor correction: A stock option is properly the option to buy or sell a given number of shares on a given date for a given price. See Wikipedia for a more thorough discussion, but in short what a stock option as a means of compensation entails is this: The company gives you an option to buy N shares for X dollars each on D date. If the stock price on the open market is greater than X dollars per share (call it Y), then you can exercise your option by spending N * X dollars to buy N shares of stock. Actually, you can do that even if Y < X, but that would be equivalent to buying a gallon of gas for $2.50 when it costs $1.50 across the street. Once you buy the N shares of stock, you can (as most people do) sell them back into the market for their going rate, Y dollars each. So your profit from fully exercising your stock option is N * (Y - X).
If you hear someone say their stock options are "under water," it means that Y < X and the options are worthless. Also, note that most stock options given as compensation for work are not freely transferable, whereas stock options purchased on the options market can be sold back into the market. That's most of what options traders do.
But the other people pointing out that this story is not about stock options but rather about actual stock shares are probably correct, at least as far as the company's founders go. They already own shares of stock and are just selling the shares off into the market for cash. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both do this from time to time with their respective companies. How it works is you form a company, call it Acme. You incorporate it as Acme Inc. and, in the articles of incorporation, grant yourself 1 million shares of common stock. Then you later make an initial public offering and the Acme Inc. board authorizes the issue of 1 million more shares of common stock, which get sold through the stock market (probably covered by an underwriter or something initially and sold from there). So now you own 1 million shares and other people own 1 million shares. All you have to do to get rich is sell your shares out into the market.