You're joking, but I have to wonder why Brill (submitter), who probably saw the photos himself, didn't pass them on to Slashdot or some other site to host, rather than gripe about how they're not available anymore. Seems it would have been the courteous thing to do.
Which logical fallacy would that be? You don't know, do you? Oh, I know, it's a "strawman". People are now starting to use that as a generic catchall for "argument I disagree with", so hey, why not use it here, too? There was no logical fallacy. He was simply trying to say that something we normally think of as bad is *really* good because it will work toward stopping that bad thing -- never mind we'd be better off without the bad thing altogether. It's good against novices who are generally slow to pick up on these things. And you, apparently.
In addition to what the other poster said, even if the employer knows he'll win, the mere threat of litigation and bad publicity can force him to the bargaining table. You're acting like employment law has no effect on the workplace. Nothing could be further from the truth. And it's a bad thing too. When you put a noose on anyone *publicizing* a job opening, you see a shift toward more internal promotions, and hiring of previous acquantances. Which accomplishes the exact opposite of what employment law is supposed to do: mitigate the harms of not having connections or being part of the "good ol' boys" network.
Yeah, that's what I thought, bitch. Go run and hide. Your ass is probably still bleeding from that rhetorical assfuck I just handed you. Well, with your moronic comments, someone was bound to call you on it at some point or another, right?
Hey gramps. Been to a retail outlet after 1980? Most of them categorize their items into a taxonomy. Most of them constantly update their prices based on a wide variety of factors. Most of them have a way to look up items.
Well, there are records of innoculation from ancient India. And of course, the general concept of innoculation goes back to the days of the caveman, when they learned that:
"Chief, Zug broke his leg while hunting." "WHAT?? Why weren't you guys more careful!"
was inferior to:
"Chief, Zug was eaten by a lion while hunting." "What?? Why weren't you guys more careful!" "Just kidding. By the way, Zug broke his leg while hunting." "Phew! Good job on making the best out of a bad situation.";-)
So the best you can come up with is, "it's novel because it's on the internet". Where do they even find people like you? Are you seriously telling me that over 10% of the population was incapable of thinking of offering a "buy it now" option for their online auction?
You tell us. What's so novel about this? Isn't selling anything online a version of this? That's a "buy it now" price, right? What about ads on the internet that say "$X OBO". (OBO means "or best offer" and that should clue YOU in that the whole idea of "holding out for a higher price unless someone meets a threshold" is in no way novel... not in 1999.)
Right, I'm waiting until someone exposes all this by writing a program that goes through the patent database for all trade related patents before, say, 1990, tags "on the internet" or "on a computer" to the end of them, submits a bunch of them, and then laughs at how many get approved. (Before you lecture me about cost, remember that you're not involving an attorney, and won't submit them all.)
It's not just that; the patent in the story covers every single retail outlet in the world. All of them have "buy it now" prices for their merchandise.
Without getting into the actual validity of either of these groups of patents, I think these types of patent wars are both inevitable and good....good because eventually, the government and the large companies that hold sway over it may soon realize the folly of our current patent system,
Oh, great, another one of these "bad thing X is *really* good because it could lead people to better prevent X" arguments. That rhetorical trick is good for scoring on sophomore girls who don't know any better, but not for serious intellectual discussion.
Someone please re-assure me that having an option to buy something at a pre-determined price immediately, rather than wait for the auction to finish on the internet counts as something patentable now. Earlier I had complained about calling "warning people about phishing sites" a "new technology". Well, this is exactly what that kind of mentality gets you.
Despite not being incredibly knowledgeable of history, I am skeptical of this historical theory. The Middle Eastern countries did have merchant ships, and in fact developed the compass, astrolabe, and sextant independently. As for geographical well-suitedness, they were easily within colonization range of sub-Saharan Africa, India, southeast Asia, and Australia. Further, much of the technological advancements happened long before the resources of the New World had time to make a significant impact. For example, the Italian Renaissance. The resources fueling the English Industrial Revolution were all extracted internally, from the iron and coal deposits in Wales. Any gold that came in didn't really increase productive capacity; it just increased the money supply. Where England differed from other civilizations on the verge of an Industrial Revolution (Rome, Song Dynasty, Medieval MidEast) was their lack of serious prohibition on loaning money at interst, which made riskier ventures more feasible.
Why don't you try re-reading it? The first year it mentions (which apparently you went straight to) is not the year it was invented. It doesn't even state the specific year it was invented, just that had finally reached somewhere in the 15th century.
Actually, the article mentions military uses of gunpowder (including the making of torpedos and missles in the 15th century),
So gunpowder was around before then (Song Dynasty, 13th century). Are you one of the "if you use an old invention on the internet, it deserves a patent" people?
vaccination brought from Istanbul in 1724 (including the use of cowpox to fight smallpox 50 years before the West)
Innoculation was also around before 1300. Please don't tell me it "doesn't count" until the West has it! (1724 was the year it was brought over, not the year it was invented.)
and the creation of coffee in 1650.
People drank it long before that, just not in significant numbers, or in coffeehouses.
Would have replied sooner, but telling the truth about Ubuntu took my karma down to where I only get 10 posts per 24 hours. But, oddly enough, the post of mine whose modding down you cheered... got modded back up. Funny how that works out. Anyway:
Wrong. A strike is merely refusing to work - what you are referring to is a sit-down strike.
Really? So when I quit, that's a strike? You know, there's a reason they call it a "strike action" rather than a "strike inaction". Strike inactions tends to result in "You won't be staying? That's unfortunate. I'll have to find a replacement."
None of my assertions required citations. Your's do. For example:
It happens *every* time. Name me one time it *didn't* happen -- a time when the union members merely refused to show up for work and never sued of threatend to sue the employer for hiring replacement workers. I'm not holding my breath.
You could have just named a random strike since you allege they have *all* been a certain way. No research needed; I would have looked it up.
The workers are certianally entitled to sueing if the company broke contract or labor laws. But back to my origional point: name me some examples of sit-downs where the workers got violent.
Okay, let's try to focus here. FOCUS. FOCUS. I know this thread is already well beyond your attention span, but can you please look like you're pretending to maintain a pretense of following it? The thread was about the consistency of strikes with free market principles. Virtually all labor law is inconsistent therewith. So threatening to sue based on that would indeed be very unlibertarian. And strikes rarely if ever happen when the employer breaks a contract for the precise reason that they can sue.
Now, I'm out of your attention span, so take a break and come back.
Welcome back. Now, you're claiming I said all sit-ins involved violence. No I didn't. Just that -- again -- they were inconsistent with free market (and probably your) principles. It is rather unlibertarian to "peacefully" sit-in when your employer has dismissed you. And it is grossly immoral to demand higher pay based thereon. What if I had a "peaceful sit-in" in your bedroom? In front of the entrance to your car?
So -- again, RECALLING WHAT WE WERE ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT IN THE THREAD -- unions do not simply say "take it or leave it" and walk away when they leave it. They actively impede the work of the business, in violation of free market private property principles. And I know you don't care much for those principles, but when you find a thread that isn't debating that point, I'll start to give a damn.
me:And what's your fetish with ratio to executive pay? If workers are enjoying an ever-higher standard of living, who the fuck cares is others are too?
you:Anyone who's not an idiot? You can hardly fault the company for paying dirt wages if the owner is also making dirt profits. You can fault the company if you and the CEO are both working 60 hour weeks, except your pay and benefits keep getting cut while he makes 500 times as much as you do while still getting massive raises and stock options every year.
Huh? Hey, kid, when you get into college one thing you'll learn is that if you want to get rich when company X does well, there's an easy way: it's called buying stock. If you just want a paycheck with minimal variance, then accept a normal labor contract and invest part of it in a broad array of businesses. But I will admit, it took a lot of balls on your part to demand that workers get bonuses when the company has a good year, but not have to refund wages when the company has a bad year due to its difficulty marketing the product of their labor.
me:Strikes are deliberately chosed to be at critical times when the will have management "by the balls".
you:No, they're usually done during negotiations for new contracts.
As for Ubuntu's install instructions not being correct, I find it highly unlikely. The fact that tens of thousands of people have managed to install it just fine by following those same instructions would seem to indicate that it does work the vast majority of the time. The logical conclusion when a set of instructions work fine for thousands of people but don't work for you, would seem to be that you did something wrong. Believe it or not, even an "engineer" can fuck up sometimes. Did you try the install again paying closer attention to the instructions? Did you make sure your partitions were correct? Did you try using LILO instead? Or did you just get pissed and start trolling?
Except for LILO and the trolling (odd that explaining your problem and the shortcomings of the solutions others provide now counts as "trolling"), yes, yes, a hundred times yes. I didn't just give up once. I tried installing it again and again, and yes, I did exactly what the install instructions said. Burned to a CD, booted from it, followed install instructions, made partitions, and so on. But don't take my word for it -- why don't you name one thing I could have fucked up that would have caused this specific error -- GRUB error 25, a hard disk read error on a hard disk that works fine? As for intelligence, I made perfect scores on the GRE analytical and quantitative, and completed a mechanical engineering program directly from high school in two years and one semester. So save the attribution to intellectual deficiency.
Oh, and by the way, I like how you state that you're not a software engineer and that you have no idea how PCs boot, and then make suggestions about how GRUB and the boot process should work. Do you have software engineers telling you how helicopters should work? How often are their good ideas thrown out because they don't know how anything works?
The general principles of engineering -- i.e., since you want to call programmers "software engineers" apply to all fields. Following those principles, you should focus most efforts on correcting those components whose failures cause the worst problems. When GRUB had that error, nobody on the Ubuntu forums even knew what I should do. And the fact that, finally, someone with experience in programming bootloaders can help me is bad, not good, because it signals that these eventualities simply were not planned for. There was no Plan B for when GRUB fails -- nor was the error even diagnosed properly! If you think you can excuse these because it's software "engineering", and you have to be a software "engineer" to "get it", I don't know what to tell you.
Agree and disagree. If Congress created the SSN with the specific condition that no business ever use it as a way of identifying someone (which they did, and which people violate routinely), they need to put a stop to this. But I seriously doubt it would help the problem that you describe. If the SSN weren't around, credit agencies would just create a different unique identifier that they would all share, and it would be just as hard to take out a loan or hide from a credit record. Asking that lenders make loans with no clue who you are or what your history of paying back load is, creates a huge adverse selection problem. Not that you were advocating this but someone always suggests that in such discussions.
You're of course right that they need to better protect this, but my question is, why hasn't competition between lenders and between credit reporters sorted this out already?
Because that would be stupid for both parties. The workers want a job, the company wants workers. Actually quitting en mass wouldn't do either any good. This is what strikes are for - employees refuse to work, giving managment the option of negotiating or firing the strikers and hiring a new workforce.
Sorry, I should have said "refuse to show up for work en masse" instead of "quit en masse". But merely refusing to show up for work isn't "striking" -- it's a "sick out" or something to that effect. "Strike" refers to when they refuse to leave and actively harass replacement workers. And unions don't exactly "give them the option" of hiring replacement workers. They actively harass such "scabs". (Which is a term that should be regard as on the same level as the n-, s-, or k-words.)
me:They block enterances and refuse to leave. They harass customers and resort to violence.
you:Okay, how many times has this actually happened in the last 50 years.
It happens *every* time. Name me one time it *didn't* happen -- a time when the union members merely refused to show up for work and never sued of threatend to sue the employer for hiring replacement workers. I'm not holding my breath.
Of course you have economic facts to back this up, such as ratio of worker to executive pay, adjusting for different currencies and industries, right?
lol, as if you've bothered with the facts yourself.
Since you asked:
Between 1860 and 1890, real (inflation adjusted) wages grew 50 percent in America. The shortening of the workweek made real per-hour earnings increase about 60%. Source: Walton, Gary and Rockoff, Hugh, History of the American Economy. New York: Dryden Press, 1998, p. 408.
It doesn't give the specific figures for Europe but adds that they were a small fraction of this.
And what's your fetish with ratio to executive pay? If workers are enjoying an ever-higher standard of living, who the fuck cares is others are too?
me:Would you really want to invest somewhere where your employees will randomly decide to just shut down at a critical moment?
you:And you seriously asked why you got modded down?
Yes, please explain. Strikes are deliberately chosed to be at critical times when the will have management "by the balls". The problem though is that where such unionization or tactics become commonplace, investors learn to *anticipate* such actions and only create jobs there in which they offer wages discounted to account for such disturbances, just like, in the example you failed to grasp, why you would only shop at the described supermarket if they offered lower prices to begin with.
The fact that you're not a software engineer shows.
And my suspicion that programmers have unjustifiably taken the title "software engineer" in a petty attempt to inflate their status shows basis. Where was the failure analysis? Who sat down and said "if this program has an error, how bad is the consequence? What can we do to minimize this negative consequence?" Instead, if GRUB fails, oops, sorry kid, tough luck. Your fault for following the instructions.
If I designed a helicopter engine that, when retrofitted, caused the doors to be permanently locked (when they're a completely unrelated system), I would probably have a hard time finding a job -- after having my ass sued off. As for software "engineers"? "Meh. Shit happens".
Slashdot Mirror
You're joking, but I have to wonder why Brill (submitter), who probably saw the photos himself, didn't pass them on to Slashdot or some other site to host, rather than gripe about how they're not available anymore. Seems it would have been the courteous thing to do.
Which logical fallacy would that be? You don't know, do you? Oh, I know, it's a "strawman". People are now starting to use that as a generic catchall for "argument I disagree with", so hey, why not use it here, too? There was no logical fallacy. He was simply trying to say that something we normally think of as bad is *really* good because it will work toward stopping that bad thing -- never mind we'd be better off without the bad thing altogether. It's good against novices who are generally slow to pick up on these things. And you, apparently.
In addition to what the other poster said, even if the employer knows he'll win, the mere threat of litigation and bad publicity can force him to the bargaining table. You're acting like employment law has no effect on the workplace. Nothing could be further from the truth. And it's a bad thing too. When you put a noose on anyone *publicizing* a job opening, you see a shift toward more internal promotions, and hiring of previous acquantances. Which accomplishes the exact opposite of what employment law is supposed to do: mitigate the harms of not having connections or being part of the "good ol' boys" network.
Okay, I'm calling you out. You have got to fucking be trolling. No one is this stupid.
Yeah, that's what I thought, bitch. Go run and hide. Your ass is probably still bleeding from that rhetorical assfuck I just handed you. Well, with your moronic comments, someone was bound to call you on it at some point or another, right?
Hey gramps. Been to a retail outlet after 1980? Most of them categorize their items into a taxonomy. Most of them constantly update their prices based on a wide variety of factors. Most of them have a way to look up items.
Don't let the muddled language confuse you.
The retail stores probably don't have an automated system for applying this, however.
Sure they do. It's called a scanner.
Well, there are records of innoculation from ancient India. And of course, the general concept of innoculation goes back to the days of the caveman, when they learned that:
;-)
"Chief, Zug broke his leg while hunting."
"WHAT?? Why weren't you guys more careful!"
was inferior to:
"Chief, Zug was eaten by a lion while hunting."
"What?? Why weren't you guys more careful!"
"Just kidding. By the way, Zug broke his leg while hunting."
"Phew! Good job on making the best out of a bad situation."
Your other points are well-taken.
So the best you can come up with is, "it's novel because it's on the internet". Where do they even find people like you? Are you seriously telling me that over 10% of the population was incapable of thinking of offering a "buy it now" option for their online auction?
You tell us. What's so novel about this? Isn't selling anything online a version of this? That's a "buy it now" price, right? What about ads on the internet that say "$X OBO". (OBO means "or best offer" and that should clue YOU in that the whole idea of "holding out for a higher price unless someone meets a threshold" is in no way novel ... not in 1999.)
Right, I'm waiting until someone exposes all this by writing a program that goes through the patent database for all trade related patents before, say, 1990, tags "on the internet" or "on a computer" to the end of them, submits a bunch of them, and then laughs at how many get approved. (Before you lecture me about cost, remember that you're not involving an attorney, and won't submit them all.)
It's not just that; the patent in the story covers every single retail outlet in the world. All of them have "buy it now" prices for their merchandise.
Without getting into the actual validity of either of these groups of patents, I think these types of patent wars are both inevitable and good. ...good because eventually, the government and the large companies that hold sway over it may soon realize the folly of our current patent system,
Oh, great, another one of these "bad thing X is *really* good because it could lead people to better prevent X" arguments. That rhetorical trick is good for scoring on sophomore girls who don't know any better, but not for serious intellectual discussion.
Someone please re-assure me that having an option to buy something at a pre-determined price immediately, rather than wait for the auction to finish on the internet counts as something patentable now. Earlier I had complained about calling "warning people about phishing sites" a "new technology". Well, this is exactly what that kind of mentality gets you.
Despite not being incredibly knowledgeable of history, I am skeptical of this historical theory. The Middle Eastern countries did have merchant ships, and in fact developed the compass, astrolabe, and sextant independently. As for geographical well-suitedness, they were easily within colonization range of sub-Saharan Africa, India, southeast Asia, and Australia. Further, much of the technological advancements happened long before the resources of the New World had time to make a significant impact. For example, the Italian Renaissance. The resources fueling the English Industrial Revolution were all extracted internally, from the iron and coal deposits in Wales. Any gold that came in didn't really increase productive capacity; it just increased the money supply. Where England differed from other civilizations on the verge of an Industrial Revolution (Rome, Song Dynasty, Medieval MidEast) was their lack of serious prohibition on loaning money at interst, which made riskier ventures more feasible.
Why don't you try re-reading it? The first year it mentions (which apparently you went straight to) is not the year it was invented. It doesn't even state the specific year it was invented, just that had finally reached somewhere in the 15th century.
Actually, the article mentions military uses of gunpowder (including the making of torpedos and missles in the 15th century),
So gunpowder was around before then (Song Dynasty, 13th century). Are you one of the "if you use an old invention on the internet, it deserves a patent" people?
vaccination brought from Istanbul in 1724 (including the use of cowpox to fight smallpox 50 years before the West)
Innoculation was also around before 1300. Please don't tell me it "doesn't count" until the West has it! (1724 was the year it was brought over, not the year it was invented.)
and the creation of coffee in 1650.
People drank it long before that, just not in significant numbers, or in coffeehouses.
Nothing on the list came from after 1300 CE/AD. What does that tell you?
In that case, what do you think about Wal-mart's plan to offer financial services? Will it further cartelize banking, or offer real competition?
Would have replied sooner, but telling the truth about Ubuntu took my karma down to where I only get 10 posts per 24 hours. But, oddly enough, the post of mine whose modding down you cheered ... got modded back up. Funny how that works out. Anyway:
Wrong. A strike is merely refusing to work - what you are referring to is a sit-down strike.
Really? So when I quit, that's a strike? You know, there's a reason they call it a "strike action" rather than a "strike inaction". Strike inactions tends to result in "You won't be staying? That's unfortunate. I'll have to find a replacement."
None of my assertions required citations. Your's do. For example:
It happens *every* time. Name me one time it *didn't* happen -- a time when the union members merely refused to show up for work and never sued of threatend to sue the employer for hiring replacement workers. I'm not holding my breath.
You could have just named a random strike since you allege they have *all* been a certain way. No research needed; I would have looked it up.
The workers are certianally entitled to sueing if the company broke contract or labor laws. But back to my origional point: name me some examples of sit-downs where the workers got violent.
Okay, let's try to focus here. FOCUS. FOCUS. I know this thread is already well beyond your attention span, but can you please look like you're pretending to maintain a pretense of following it? The thread was about the consistency of strikes with free market principles. Virtually all labor law is inconsistent therewith. So threatening to sue based on that would indeed be very unlibertarian. And strikes rarely if ever happen when the employer breaks a contract for the precise reason that they can sue.
Now, I'm out of your attention span, so take a break and come back.
Welcome back. Now, you're claiming I said all sit-ins involved violence. No I didn't. Just that -- again -- they were inconsistent with free market (and probably your) principles. It is rather unlibertarian to "peacefully" sit-in when your employer has dismissed you. And it is grossly immoral to demand higher pay based thereon. What if I had a "peaceful sit-in" in your bedroom? In front of the entrance to your car?
So -- again, RECALLING WHAT WE WERE ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT IN THE THREAD -- unions do not simply say "take it or leave it" and walk away when they leave it. They actively impede the work of the business, in violation of free market private property principles. And I know you don't care much for those principles, but when you find a thread that isn't debating that point, I'll start to give a damn.
me:And what's your fetish with ratio to executive pay? If workers are enjoying an ever-higher standard of living, who the fuck cares is others are too?
you:Anyone who's not an idiot? You can hardly fault the company for paying dirt wages if the owner is also making dirt profits. You can fault the company if you and the CEO are both working 60 hour weeks, except your pay and benefits keep getting cut while he makes 500 times as much as you do while still getting massive raises and stock options every year.
Huh? Hey, kid, when you get into college one thing you'll learn is that if you want to get rich when company X does well, there's an easy way: it's called buying stock. If you just want a paycheck with minimal variance, then accept a normal labor contract and invest part of it in a broad array of businesses. But I will admit, it took a lot of balls on your part to demand that workers get bonuses when the company has a good year, but not have to refund wages when the company has a bad year due to its difficulty marketing the product of their labor.
me:Strikes are deliberately chosed to be at critical times when the will have management "by the balls".
you:No, they're usually done during negotiations for new contracts.
Which is another time whe
As for Ubuntu's install instructions not being correct, I find it highly unlikely. The fact that tens of thousands of people have managed to install it just fine by following those same instructions would seem to indicate that it does work the vast majority of the time. The logical conclusion when a set of instructions work fine for thousands of people but don't work for you, would seem to be that you did something wrong. Believe it or not, even an "engineer" can fuck up sometimes. Did you try the install again paying closer attention to the instructions? Did you make sure your partitions were correct? Did you try using LILO instead? Or did you just get pissed and start trolling?
Except for LILO and the trolling (odd that explaining your problem and the shortcomings of the solutions others provide now counts as "trolling"), yes, yes, a hundred times yes. I didn't just give up once. I tried installing it again and again, and yes, I did exactly what the install instructions said. Burned to a CD, booted from it, followed install instructions, made partitions, and so on. But don't take my word for it -- why don't you name one thing I could have fucked up that would have caused this specific error -- GRUB error 25, a hard disk read error on a hard disk that works fine? As for intelligence, I made perfect scores on the GRE analytical and quantitative, and completed a mechanical engineering program directly from high school in two years and one semester. So save the attribution to intellectual deficiency.
Oh, and by the way, I like how you state that you're not a software engineer and that you have no idea how PCs boot, and then make suggestions about how GRUB and the boot process should work. Do you have software engineers telling you how helicopters should work? How often are their good ideas thrown out because they don't know how anything works?
The general principles of engineering -- i.e., since you want to call programmers "software engineers" apply to all fields. Following those principles, you should focus most efforts on correcting those components whose failures cause the worst problems. When GRUB had that error, nobody on the Ubuntu forums even knew what I should do. And the fact that, finally, someone with experience in programming bootloaders can help me is bad, not good, because it signals that these eventualities simply were not planned for. There was no Plan B for when GRUB fails -- nor was the error even diagnosed properly! If you think you can excuse these because it's software "engineering", and you have to be a software "engineer" to "get it", I don't know what to tell you.
You're of course right that they need to better protect this, but my question is, why hasn't competition between lenders and between credit reporters sorted this out already?
Because that would be stupid for both parties. The workers want a job, the company wants workers. Actually quitting en mass wouldn't do either any good. This is what strikes are for - employees refuse to work, giving managment the option of negotiating or firing the strikers and hiring a new workforce.
Sorry, I should have said "refuse to show up for work en masse" instead of "quit en masse". But merely refusing to show up for work isn't "striking" -- it's a "sick out" or something to that effect. "Strike" refers to when they refuse to leave and actively harass replacement workers. And unions don't exactly "give them the option" of hiring replacement workers. They actively harass such "scabs". (Which is a term that should be regard as on the same level as the n-, s-, or k-words.)
me:They block enterances and refuse to leave. They harass customers and resort to violence.
you:Okay, how many times has this actually happened in the last 50 years.
It happens *every* time. Name me one time it *didn't* happen -- a time when the union members merely refused to show up for work and never sued of threatend to sue the employer for hiring replacement workers. I'm not holding my breath.
Of course you have economic facts to back this up, such as ratio of worker to executive pay, adjusting for different currencies and industries, right?
lol, as if you've bothered with the facts yourself.
Since you asked:
Between 1860 and 1890, real (inflation adjusted) wages grew 50 percent in America. The shortening of the workweek made real per-hour earnings increase about 60%. Source: Walton, Gary and Rockoff, Hugh, History of the American Economy. New York: Dryden Press, 1998, p. 408.
It doesn't give the specific figures for Europe but adds that they were a small fraction of this.
And what's your fetish with ratio to executive pay? If workers are enjoying an ever-higher standard of living, who the fuck cares is others are too?
me:Would you really want to invest somewhere where your employees will randomly decide to just shut down at a critical moment?
you:And you seriously asked why you got modded down?
Yes, please explain. Strikes are deliberately chosed to be at critical times when the will have management "by the balls". The problem though is that where such unionization or tactics become commonplace, investors learn to *anticipate* such actions and only create jobs there in which they offer wages discounted to account for such disturbances, just like, in the example you failed to grasp, why you would only shop at the described supermarket if they offered lower prices to begin with.
The fact that you're not a software engineer shows.
And my suspicion that programmers have unjustifiably taken the title "software engineer" in a petty attempt to inflate their status shows basis. Where was the failure analysis? Who sat down and said "if this program has an error, how bad is the consequence? What can we do to minimize this negative consequence?" Instead, if GRUB fails, oops, sorry kid, tough luck. Your fault for following the instructions.
If I designed a helicopter engine that, when retrofitted, caused the doors to be permanently locked (when they're a completely unrelated system), I would probably have a hard time finding a job -- after having my ass sued off. As for software "engineers"? "Meh. Shit happens".
I guess the people who called me stupid for actually following the website's instructions didn't mention anything about that.