Ah, now I understand your confusion. In the first instance, I was speaking rhetorically to the litigious leeches who brought this suit, not to you. But I can see how you might have misinterpreted that.
In the second instance, I was speaking under the assumption that you support the premise of this frivolous lawsuit. Am I wrong??
I wasn't aware that I was employing any sort of "rhetorical trick", but I stand by my original assertion: cost drives cost (even if it isn't the one and only thing that does). What could be more obvious?
Now, unless you have something actually novel to bring to this forum (like those oh-so-easy-to-find statistics you mentioned a couple times), I'm going to leave it at this. You may have the last word, if it pleases you.
Since you are a fan of acts, you might try examining the actual record, rather than putting words into my mouth. I said :
I'm sure it would be simplistic to assume that there could be a single cause for the higher cost of higher education, but it does seem reasonable to assume that the cost of labor is a contributing factor. Is my math wrong?
unquote.
I still don't know how anyone could believe otherwise.
As for accusing you personally of bringing lawsuits... well, you'll just have to show me those words, since I can't find them.
Facts are great, but they are our servants, not our masters. Statistics supporting an argument are only useful when people share the same goals. The fact is, we don't. You seem to be aiming for a sort of socialist utopia in which the authority of the state must be invoked to right every perceived wrong, whereas I aim to let people interact freely, minimizing the role of the state and the need for leeches who extract their income from people at gunpoint.
Combine this with voice emulation... and we've got ourselves a whole new world of alternative facts!
Lyrebird will offer an API to copy the voice of anyone. It will need as little as one minute of audio recording of a speaker to compute a unique key defining her/his voice. This key will then allow to generate anything from its corresponding voice.
Since this so-called discussion is now irretrievable, I guess you won't mind if I join you down there on your level. Flamethrower is now active.
I didn't expect to hear back from you again, but I see that you just don't know when you are beaten. No problem. I'm enjoying the bloodbath.
Let me break it down (again) in terms a monkey could understand. Maybe I can even make it simple enough for your addled mind, but I'm not as conversant in dumdum-speak as you.
- This lawsuit is clearly spurious and baseless. The argument is that the real reason that these valiant IT employees were laid off was that management is racist and ageist, and that cost-cutting is just a transparent excuse to stick it to nice middle-aged white folks. Seriously? I still hold some hope that, even through the haze of your juvenile concepts of righteousness and moral outrage, you might be able to sense that something is weirdly amiss in this legal logic.
- On the concept of principles: Apparently, this idea is news to you. I'm guessing either you don't have any, or that you do, but you have managed to delude yourself into believing that all your deeply held beliefs are directly derived from empirical evidence. What are your values, exactly? Mine are pretty straightforward. It works like this: People should be free to associate, and to dissolve these associations whenever and for whatever reason they see fit. Compelling a relationship to continue against the wishes of either party is counterproductive, unhealthy, and petty. Personally, I never would expect anybody to pay me for my work unless they feel that they that my work is valuable enough to justify my pay. In this particular instance, the world has changed in such a way that, in the estimation of their bosses, the value of the work produced by the disgruntled slobs in question just isn't what it used to be. Bosses can be fools, too, but they are supposed to be responsible for their decisions.
- Clearly, the cost of education in the US has risen in recent decades due to a wide variety of factors. Addressing all the reasons for this rise would take more time than I have, but, as with any enterprise, forcing universities to pay artificially inflated amounts of money for work is just not helpful. You can either pay people a $15/hr. minimum wage, or you can have a free society with a low cost of living, but you can't have it both ways.
Anyway, this whole argument will soon be moot, as robots and AI will soon be taking all those precious jobs. But not to worry! If people like you have your way, there will be plenty of employment far into the future for lawyers, legislators, lobbyists, accountants, auditors, and tax-collectors... you know, all the really useful people.
By the way, you don't live in the US? Good for you, me neither. Why are you frothing at the mouth over something that is of not even distant concern to your life? Some misplaced "workers of the world unite" brand of logic, I take it? If so, then, like all good comrades, you must be reserving the right to income and employment for just your own selected special group of workers, i.e., those who look like you and are members of your special club.
Sorry about all the big words. I'm not so used to talking to people of your intellectual capacity... but you intrigue me! You get gold star just for being amusing.
Now, if you're still alive, please amuse me with your pathetic attempt at a retort. Oh, and I'm still waiting to see those statistics that are so crucial to your argument, as so easy to find.
Just one thing... before you waste our time finding actual statistics to back up your argument, I must warn you that any such numbers are very unlikely to convince me. Because principles. Before you tell me that I don't listen to facts, listen to this: You have them too. I'm guessing that I'd be hard-pressed, for example, to find a statistic that would convince you that free speech is not a desirable policy. Or that fascism is actually quite good for the economy. Or whatever your sacred values might hold. Yes, principles matter.
In this case, the principle at work is a simple one, namely that a job is a contract between an employer and an employee. We no longer require the husband's permission in order for the wife to get a divorce, because the agreement ends whenever either party says it does. Compelling one side to maintain the relationship against their better judgement is just wrong.
Besides the little problem of principles, I still don't see what the issue is here. In an economy that is allowed to function normally should provide plenty of opportunity for income, especially in the IT sector in California. Seriously, stop bringing bogus law suits against universities, and try using that energy to get a job instead.
Whether or not the cost of IT is the one-and-only cause of increases in tuition fees is entirely beside the point. IT is a cost, and controlling costs is what organizations do. If your contention is that IT expenses have zero impact on tuition fees, then I'm afraid I don't follow your logic. Pointing at a diverging graph of historical costs (should you find one) would convince me of nothing. It's like saying that wearing a sweater on a hot summer day is not contributing to me being too hot... because it's the sun, dummy! Well yes... there can be more than one cause.
By the way, if statistics about the cost of IT are so readily available, please do take a moment to share your findings with the rest of the class.
Your idea that students be allowed to replace aging IT staff is a fine one, and I would be surprised if it was not considered. If management rejected (or didn't consider) this idea, that would be their prerogative. I still don't see how lawyering up under false pretenses of "discrimination" solves anything.
And I'll even triple down by saying that it was you, not I, who initiated the personal attacks, dear fellow clown.
It's a shame that people like you are so incapable of engaging in a civil discussion. Resorting to name-calling when one runs out of arguments is a good sign that any actual thinking has come to a halt.
I guess you're right. These bosses are clearly just racists who really hate white people in their 40s. Thanks for showing me how their bigotry is so thinly veiled behind a pretense of wanting to minimize IT costs! What a fool I was for thinking people in charge could be motivated by money!
Well, I did look around a bit for a nice graph indicating the cost of IT departments in general (not specifically for university IT departments, or for universities in California), but I can't find any such historical statistics. If you have a source, please feel free to share. Being in IT myself, I'm willing to bet that costs have risen somewhat over the last 20 years.
Just for the record, I have witnessed and been a "victim" of this outsourcing practice first hand. The Indian company that replaced me was totally incompetent, but cheap. I did not, however, go crying to the government to protect "my" job. I simply got another job, and my life went on. From what I've heard since then, my former employer was far more miserably as a result of this decision than I was.
I'm sure it would be simplistic to assume that there could be a single cause for the higher cost of higher education, but it does seem reasonable to assume that the cost of labor is a contributing factor. Is my math wrong?
Let's just indulge a little fantasy here and speculate that it is just barely possible that the actual motivation for outsourcing these jobs was not, in fact, due to their age, skin color, or the length of their tenure, but rather that they are simply more expensive than their Indian counterparts. Can we really take this lawsuit seriously?
We should just let the cost of education continue to rise without bound. Cost cutting measures are just too... costly.
Indeed, it's an attractive model, but you'll never sell it in the US, where people are married to their Puritan work ethic. So long as work is a value in and of itself, rather than being simply instrumental to producing value, we are screwed. Robots will surely be able to do all those humans' jobs more cheaply, more efficiently, and with less whinging.
As you correctly point out in your example, the "rich" (in this case, Kuwaiti citizens) have known since the beginning of history that wealth does not come from work, but from ownership. As long as people continue to equate job with income, they are screwed.
Anyway, the Kuwaiti model only makes sense in a country where vast natural resources are considered to be the birthright of every citizen. In the US and in most of the world, the available resources are what the people have made of them. It don't believe in confiscatory taxation... but an inflection point is soon approaching, and I fear the worst.
Now I'm extra confused. Am I a communist? No, I am not. Very, very far from it.
No, corporate tax is another concept I never could wrap my head around. What is a corporation, but a pile of paper? What does it mean for a corporation to profit? This sounds about the same as saying that your alarm clock profits from the electricity it uses. In fact, pile of paper don't profit. They only make profit for their clients (i.e., you), employees (also you, for now), their management (maybe you, for now), and shareholders (hopefully you... unless you spent your surplus income on iThings, kitchen upgrades, & such).
As for having no money to invest, I feel you. The single biggest issue for public policy is not "JOBS!" but rather, how to incentivize people to invest, rather than fritter away their savings creating more JOBS! for everyone... which are unsustainable. People who truly can't find a dime to buy the robots might need to be subsidized in some way, but the ownership must still be private.
I'm a little confused by all this. It seems there are people out there who actually want to work for a disinterested boss, at a job that brings little sense of fulfillment, all day, 8 hours (or more) every day, until they either die or manage to save enough money to stop. Can somebody explain to me why anybody considers this life desirable?
I've got a better idea: Own the robots. Invest in the companies that are installing those robots stealing "your" jobs. Then, be happy you don't have to do those jobs.
So... why do they pay income tax, like people? And what means "corporate profit", anyway?
Shareholders, customers, management, employees... these are the people who profit. Corporations are piles of paper. Every dime taxed away from these entities hurts these people. The corporations don't care one lick, since paper doesn't actually have feelings.
Abolish corporate tax. Problem solved. The only people who would be opposed to such an idea would be the corporate tax attorneys, lawyers, accountants, legislators, and judges, and bureaucrats who make their living fighting over this money. Maybe they can all find real jobs. Sounds like a win to me.
I've been using other search engines, and the results are pretty much just as good. I'm sure the good people at Google are well aware that they need to watch their back.
Could somebody please explain to me how any DRM thingy can ever hope to prevent a dedicated individual from simply recording what is on his screen with another device? Just stick your HDMI cable into a recorder, no? What is this trying to achieve, exactly?
Google takes their users to be a bunch of moronic infants. Why remove a feature? Ever?? Especially one that has been working fine for years. Oh right... because you don't want to confuse and upset the fragile minds of your users, you can barely manage to use one button on mouse. OK, so that's not for me.
So... why do they pay taxes, like people? That an artificial entity composed of paper should not be required to pay the productivity penalty that governments impose on humans seems about right to me.
Great idea. After all, what business isn't the government's business?
While we're at it, I'd like to propose a few more regulations about things that piss me off:
Bananas must be yellow, and curved to within specifications to be determined by the USDA
Dumb music should be outlawed. The dumbness of music shall be determined by a special congressional committee of musical experts.
Broccoli should be illegal. I hate that stuff.
Bad movies. Also illegal.
All videos posted online must have closed captions. Oh wait... looks like I'm too late for that one.
Any other transaction between two consenting parties that I personally determine to be offensive.
In spoken language, there is a pause between each element in a list and the following one. The comma is generally understood to represent this pause in writing.
"A [pause] B [pause] and C" would be transcribed as "A, B, and C". I still don't understand why we would want to remove the last comma. Seems kinda arbitrary and... unnatural.
Nobody ever said it wasn't. Of course it is. It's just that literally owning a factory isn't very realistic for most people. Owning many small pieces of other factories surely is.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, now I understand your confusion. In the first instance, I was speaking rhetorically to the litigious leeches who brought this suit, not to you. But I can see how you might have misinterpreted that.
In the second instance, I was speaking under the assumption that you support the premise of this frivolous lawsuit. Am I wrong??
I wasn't aware that I was employing any sort of "rhetorical trick", but I stand by my original assertion: cost drives cost (even if it isn't the one and only thing that does). What could be more obvious?
Now, unless you have something actually novel to bring to this forum (like those oh-so-easy-to-find statistics you mentioned a couple times), I'm going to leave it at this. You may have the last word, if it pleases you.
Since you are a fan of acts, you might try examining the actual record, rather than putting words into my mouth. I said :
I'm sure it would be simplistic to assume that there could be a single cause for the higher cost of higher education, but it does seem reasonable to assume that the cost of labor is a contributing factor. Is my math wrong?
unquote.
I still don't know how anyone could believe otherwise.
As for accusing you personally of bringing lawsuits... well, you'll just have to show me those words, since I can't find them.
Facts are great, but they are our servants, not our masters. Statistics supporting an argument are only useful when people share the same goals. The fact is, we don't. You seem to be aiming for a sort of socialist utopia in which the authority of the state must be invoked to right every perceived wrong, whereas I aim to let people interact freely, minimizing the role of the state and the need for leeches who extract their income from people at gunpoint.
Combine this with voice emulation ... and we've got ourselves a whole new world of alternative facts!
Lyrebird will offer an API to copy the voice of anyone. It will need as little as one minute of audio recording of a speaker to compute a unique key defining her/his voice. This key will then allow to generate anything from its corresponding voice.
Since this so-called discussion is now irretrievable, I guess you won't mind if I join you down there on your level. Flamethrower is now active.
I didn't expect to hear back from you again, but I see that you just don't know when you are beaten. No problem. I'm enjoying the bloodbath.
Let me break it down (again) in terms a monkey could understand. Maybe I can even make it simple enough for your addled mind, but I'm not as conversant in dumdum-speak as you.
- This lawsuit is clearly spurious and baseless. The argument is that the real reason that these valiant IT employees were laid off was that management is racist and ageist, and that cost-cutting is just a transparent excuse to stick it to nice middle-aged white folks. Seriously? I still hold some hope that, even through the haze of your juvenile concepts of righteousness and moral outrage, you might be able to sense that something is weirdly amiss in this legal logic.
- On the concept of principles: Apparently, this idea is news to you. I'm guessing either you don't have any, or that you do, but you have managed to delude yourself into believing that all your deeply held beliefs are directly derived from empirical evidence. What are your values, exactly? Mine are pretty straightforward. It works like this: People should be free to associate, and to dissolve these associations whenever and for whatever reason they see fit. Compelling a relationship to continue against the wishes of either party is counterproductive, unhealthy, and petty. Personally, I never would expect anybody to pay me for my work unless they feel that they that my work is valuable enough to justify my pay. In this particular instance, the world has changed in such a way that, in the estimation of their bosses, the value of the work produced by the disgruntled slobs in question just isn't what it used to be. Bosses can be fools, too, but they are supposed to be responsible for their decisions.
- Clearly, the cost of education in the US has risen in recent decades due to a wide variety of factors. Addressing all the reasons for this rise would take more time than I have, but, as with any enterprise, forcing universities to pay artificially inflated amounts of money for work is just not helpful. You can either pay people a $15/hr. minimum wage, or you can have a free society with a low cost of living, but you can't have it both ways.
Anyway, this whole argument will soon be moot, as robots and AI will soon be taking all those precious jobs. But not to worry! If people like you have your way, there will be plenty of employment far into the future for lawyers, legislators, lobbyists, accountants, auditors, and tax-collectors... you know, all the really useful people.
By the way, you don't live in the US? Good for you, me neither. Why are you frothing at the mouth over something that is of not even distant concern to your life? Some misplaced "workers of the world unite" brand of logic, I take it? If so, then, like all good comrades, you must be reserving the right to income and employment for just your own selected special group of workers, i.e., those who look like you and are members of your special club.
Sorry about all the big words. I'm not so used to talking to people of your intellectual capacity... but you intrigue me! You get gold star just for being amusing.
Now, if you're still alive, please amuse me with your pathetic attempt at a retort. Oh, and I'm still waiting to see those statistics that are so crucial to your argument, as so easy to find.
I take back what I said. You're not a clown at all. You're just a troll.
Oh, before I forget, congratulations on the new job. Who did you sue to get it?
Just one thing... before you waste our time finding actual statistics to back up your argument, I must warn you that any such numbers are very unlikely to convince me. Because principles. Before you tell me that I don't listen to facts, listen to this: You have them too. I'm guessing that I'd be hard-pressed, for example, to find a statistic that would convince you that free speech is not a desirable policy. Or that fascism is actually quite good for the economy. Or whatever your sacred values might hold. Yes, principles matter.
In this case, the principle at work is a simple one, namely that a job is a contract between an employer and an employee. We no longer require the husband's permission in order for the wife to get a divorce, because the agreement ends whenever either party says it does. Compelling one side to maintain the relationship against their better judgement is just wrong.
Besides the little problem of principles, I still don't see what the issue is here. In an economy that is allowed to function normally should provide plenty of opportunity for income, especially in the IT sector in California. Seriously, stop bringing bogus law suits against universities, and try using that energy to get a job instead.
Whether or not the cost of IT is the one-and-only cause of increases in tuition fees is entirely beside the point. IT is a cost, and controlling costs is what organizations do. If your contention is that IT expenses have zero impact on tuition fees, then I'm afraid I don't follow your logic. Pointing at a diverging graph of historical costs (should you find one) would convince me of nothing. It's like saying that wearing a sweater on a hot summer day is not contributing to me being too hot... because it's the sun, dummy! Well yes... there can be more than one cause.
By the way, if statistics about the cost of IT are so readily available, please do take a moment to share your findings with the rest of the class.
Your idea that students be allowed to replace aging IT staff is a fine one, and I would be surprised if it was not considered. If management rejected (or didn't consider) this idea, that would be their prerogative. I still don't see how lawyering up under false pretenses of "discrimination" solves anything.
And I'll even triple down by saying that it was you, not I, who initiated the personal attacks, dear fellow clown.
It's a shame that people like you are so incapable of engaging in a civil discussion. Resorting to name-calling when one runs out of arguments is a good sign that any actual thinking has come to a halt.
I guess you're right. These bosses are clearly just racists who really hate white people in their 40s. Thanks for showing me how their bigotry is so thinly veiled behind a pretense of wanting to minimize IT costs! What a fool I was for thinking people in charge could be motivated by money!
Well, I did look around a bit for a nice graph indicating the cost of IT departments in general (not specifically for university IT departments, or for universities in California), but I can't find any such historical statistics. If you have a source, please feel free to share. Being in IT myself, I'm willing to bet that costs have risen somewhat over the last 20 years.
Just for the record, I have witnessed and been a "victim" of this outsourcing practice first hand. The Indian company that replaced me was totally incompetent, but cheap. I did not, however, go crying to the government to protect "my" job. I simply got another job, and my life went on. From what I've heard since then, my former employer was far more miserably as a result of this decision than I was.
I'm sure it would be simplistic to assume that there could be a single cause for the higher cost of higher education, but it does seem reasonable to assume that the cost of labor is a contributing factor. Is my math wrong?
Let's just indulge a little fantasy here and speculate that it is just barely possible that the actual motivation for outsourcing these jobs was not, in fact, due to their age, skin color, or the length of their tenure, but rather that they are simply more expensive than their Indian counterparts. Can we really take this lawsuit seriously?
We should just let the cost of education continue to rise without bound. Cost cutting measures are just too... costly.
The only winners here will be, as usual, lawyers.
Too bad https://www.searchinternethist... is currently showing nothing more than SHTML Wrapper - 500 Server Error
Indeed, it's an attractive model, but you'll never sell it in the US, where people are married to their Puritan work ethic. So long as work is a value in and of itself, rather than being simply instrumental to producing value, we are screwed. Robots will surely be able to do all those humans' jobs more cheaply, more efficiently, and with less whinging.
As you correctly point out in your example, the "rich" (in this case, Kuwaiti citizens) have known since the beginning of history that wealth does not come from work, but from ownership. As long as people continue to equate job with income, they are screwed.
Anyway, the Kuwaiti model only makes sense in a country where vast natural resources are considered to be the birthright of every citizen. In the US and in most of the world, the available resources are what the people have made of them. It don't believe in confiscatory taxation... but an inflection point is soon approaching, and I fear the worst.
Now I'm extra confused. Am I a communist? No, I am not. Very, very far from it.
No, corporate tax is another concept I never could wrap my head around. What is a corporation, but a pile of paper? What does it mean for a corporation to profit? This sounds about the same as saying that your alarm clock profits from the electricity it uses. In fact, pile of paper don't profit. They only make profit for their clients (i.e., you), employees (also you, for now), their management (maybe you, for now), and shareholders (hopefully you... unless you spent your surplus income on iThings, kitchen upgrades, & such).
As for having no money to invest, I feel you. The single biggest issue for public policy is not "JOBS!" but rather, how to incentivize people to invest, rather than fritter away their savings creating more JOBS! for everyone... which are unsustainable. People who truly can't find a dime to buy the robots might need to be subsidized in some way, but the ownership must still be private.
I'm a little confused by all this. It seems there are people out there who actually want to work for a disinterested boss, at a job that brings little sense of fulfillment, all day, 8 hours (or more) every day, until they either die or manage to save enough money to stop. Can somebody explain to me why anybody considers this life desirable?
I've got a better idea: Own the robots. Invest in the companies that are installing those robots stealing "your" jobs. Then, be happy you don't have to do those jobs.
So... why do they pay income tax, like people? And what means "corporate profit", anyway?
Shareholders, customers, management, employees... these are the people who profit. Corporations are piles of paper. Every dime taxed away from these entities hurts these people. The corporations don't care one lick, since paper doesn't actually have feelings.
Abolish corporate tax. Problem solved. The only people who would be opposed to such an idea would be the corporate tax attorneys, lawyers, accountants, legislators, and judges, and bureaucrats who make their living fighting over this money. Maybe they can all find real jobs. Sounds like a win to me.
I've been using other search engines, and the results are pretty much just as good. I'm sure the good people at Google are well aware that they need to watch their back.
Could somebody please explain to me how any DRM thingy can ever hope to prevent a dedicated individual from simply recording what is on his screen with another device? Just stick your HDMI cable into a recorder, no? What is this trying to achieve, exactly?
Google takes their users to be a bunch of moronic infants. Why remove a feature? Ever?? Especially one that has been working fine for years. Oh right... because you don't want to confuse and upset the fragile minds of your users, you can barely manage to use one button on mouse. OK, so that's not for me.
So... why do they pay taxes, like people? That an artificial entity composed of paper should not be required to pay the productivity penalty that governments impose on humans seems about right to me.
While we're at it, I'd like to propose a few more regulations about things that piss me off:
In spoken language, there is a pause between each element in a list and the following one. The comma is generally understood to represent this pause in writing.
"A [pause] B [pause] and C" would be transcribed as "A, B, and C". I still don't understand why we would want to remove the last comma. Seems kinda arbitrary and... unnatural.
Maybe it's just a professional bias, but in my field, elements of a list are separated by commas. Why should it be otherwise?
viz.:
{ a, b, c }
Too bad they both kinda suck, and only support a subset of these proprietary protocols.
All these companies want to keep their users inside their walled gardens. They will do everything to prevent open access to their valued users.
Nobody ever said it wasn't. Of course it is. It's just that literally owning a factory isn't very realistic for most people. Owning many small pieces of other factories surely is.