Rather than cut staff directly, why not lower everyone's wages by an equal percentage?
Lowering wages increases the problems directly experienced (and thus, likely decreases the productivity) of the people that stay; laying people off, while it is likely to lower morale, has less direct impact on the people you still count on to do work, though it causes more problems for the people you lay off. But, as an employer, those people and their problems aren't your problem any more.
I am generally against protectionism, but in a recession, I don't think there should be ANY H1B visas issued.
H-1B's are a high-end version of guest-worker programs, a means to provide industry with a more-dependent labor pool. Not providing them isn't protectionism, whether in a recession or not.
(Actual protectionism is just as bad during a recession as any other time, as Hoover demonstrated rather thoroughly.)
The results really aren't surprising: as TFA states, most projects use more than one language. So C coming out on top with Java #2 is hardly unsurprising: many extensions built for scripting languages use either C or the primary language for the VM they target (Java for the JVM) in addition to whatever scripting language they are for. And JavaScript being tops among scripting languages also isn't surprising; PHP and Ruby may be popular for web applications, but most PHP and Ruby web apps (and web app frameworks) rely on the use of JavaScript on the client side, and so will often also include JavaScript.
The additional torture pics and vids referenced in the top-level post in this subthread that this whole subthread is about that were ordered released that Congress has viewed, but that have not been released, concern, at least in part, Abu Ghraib, and are "additional" to the ones that were released about Abu Ghraib.
THOSE videos and pictures have already been extensively broadcast
No, they haven't. Some of them have. Some -- that certain members of Congress have been showed privately and that are reportedly more serious than those that have been released publicly -- have not. Hence, the reference that started this thread to additional pictures and videos that have been viewed by Congress but not released.
Sorry, I disagree. Once again, AFTER any investigation is completed.
Your persistent belief that government has the right to shield itself from public accountability indefinitely by not declaring an investigation of its own potential wrongdoing "complete" is noted, but I continue to think that it is both ridiculous on its face and absolutely contrary to the fundamental concept of government of the people.
The new White House website privacy policy promises that the site will not use long-term tracking cookies, complying with a decade old rule prohibiting such user tracking by federal agencies. However, Obama's legal team has quietly exempted YouTube from this rule.
Last I checked, YouTube is not a federal agency. Why do they need a waiver from a rule which prevents federal agencies from using long-term tracking cookies to track users?
Sorry, that is not what I am reading. Some are stating, quite plainly, that they do not deserve any protection. Until people are charged, which I have not seen happening, their identities should be obscured as they may be innocent or found innocent.
There are two possibilities: (1) They are government agents acting lawfully in their official capacity, in which case neither the acts nor their identities deserve protection against public scrutiny and accountability (barring some other reason than "people might not like what they've done"), or (2) They are government agents acting unlawfully and contrary to their official responsibilities, in which case neither their acts nor their identities deserve protection against public scrutiny (again, barring some other reason than "people might not like what they've done").
They are entitled to protection from retaliation in the same way that all citizens are entitled to protection from violent crime, but not in any other way.
[citation needed] I have seen no investigations as yet, only the threat of same.
Then you haven't been paying the slightest bit of attention, which is hardly anyone's fault but your own. The amount of media attention the various investigations and prosecutions received was immense.
I'm only afraid the new cabinet will steamroll this EO to make Obama "look" effective without considering the true risk(s) associated with some of that information.
The "risk" is that the government that is notionally of the people, by the people, and for the people might actually be accountable to the people it is of, by, and for.
The Nuremberg trials predate the experiment I linked. While it's obvious that it's never alright to torture someone, there's nothing wrong with reviewing the level of responsibility of people following orders vs those who issue them given new insight, rather than blindly following a legal precedent half a century old.
The US federal court precedent holding that "the torturer has become, like the pirate and the slave trader before him, hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind", Filártiga v. Peña-Iralais, 630 F.2d 876 (1980), is considerably less than half a century old.
Anyway, its not an issue of relative responsibility; those giving orders cannot be effectively held responsible unless those acting on those orders can be. The ability to bring serious charges against those who execute the policy is an essential tool to hold the bigger fish responsible.
Its also essential to have (which we do) and enforce (whether we will remains to be seen) laws which make the individual torture accountable, especially given the evidence that people will torture if they believe they have the sanction of the relevant authority, because only enforcing that law can demonstrate the illegitimacy of any purported license for torture given by those in positions of apparent authority. And, in fact, without enforcing such laws vigorously, it is not obvious that it is never okay to torture someone. On the contrary, the failure to enforce such laws in the face of clear and notorious violation sends the clear and unmistakeable message that it is okay to torture people sometimes.
We do not try defendants in the court of public opinion we try them in a court of law. Disseminating these photos prior to anyone being accused or charged is wrong, period.
So, every time police release surveillance video of a criminal act to the public, when no particular person has yet been accused or formally charged, its wrong? Or is just that agents of government are specially protected from public scrutiny?
The fact that some feel that due to snippets of information, they deem untried and unconvicted citizens/soldiers unworthy of being protected makes me sick.
No one is saying that any people in these pictures do not deserve the full protection of due process under the Constitution and laws of the United States. What people object to is the invention from whole cloth of a completely new protection that has never been recognized in law or practice for any other people just for these particular agents of the government.
Look at the reactions to just the IDEA of videos and photos. All we need is a face and/or name and these defendant's lives are over regardless of whether they are eventually charged with anything or not.
If the content of the photos is not as described, releasing them would be the only way to make that clear. If they are as described, the people involved are unambiguous hostis humani generis, and the government (in fact, every government) has a positive obligation to bring them to justice -- an obligation that it has a much better time avoiding if it conceals the evidence and thereby conceals its own obligations. And, of course, whether or not they are released, the information which has already come out about their existence and the supposed content without identities tars everyone who is discovered to have served at Abu Ghraib at the time, and only releasing the information can lessen the cloud over the innocent.
BUT, we do not arbitrarily dump evidence into the media before we even investigate the event.
The events at issue have been investigated, supposedly thoroughly, and a handful of people have been charged and convicted. The inforamtion now has bearing on whether or not the government adequately discharged its duties.
In my experience at various government jobs, over half the workers are not doing any work - they just surf the net from 8 to 5.
In my experience in both government and private work, the proportion of workers not doing productive work at any given time, and the proportion that are completely dead weight, are about the same in each environment.
So you can lay them off and still get the same amount of "productive work" accomplished as you did previously.
You can fire people for not doing their job (if you can document it), but lay offs generally aren't targetted. You lose as big a share of the productive workers as the non-productive ones (and the less security you provide, the less likely you are to attract productive workers in the first place, especially at public sector salaries, which tend to be substantially below private sector salaries for jobs requiring similar qualifications.)
Capitalism is by definition ruled by a boom/bust cycle.
No, its not.
There are, empirically, booms and busts that are observed to occur in real economies. Whether they have anything to do with "capitalism", however defined, is far less clear, and certainly not true by defiition for anything but the most bizarre definition.
Well psychology is a real experimental science. Economics isn't.
Yeah, it is. Like other social sciences that deal with group behavior (political science, sociology, etc.), though, it is very hard to establish good controls -- the only controls usually available are statistical controls, and any interesting exploration usually has lots of potential contributing factors to control for, and a smaller universe to test than one would like.
That is why economics is strongly affected by politics.
Well, the inherent difficulty of properly isolating things does provide room for bias to color things, but a bigger reason why economics is strongly tied to politics is that the issues studied by economics have a high degree of political salience, thus controversies in economics is likely to have fairly direct political ramifications.
you ever hear of liberal and conservative chemists? Or even psychologists?
Yes, though neither field has the immediate political ramifications of economics; psychology has more than chemistry, and unsurprisingly its more prominent there. And, of course, with fields whose subject matter has greater relevance to major political controversies, you see it more, e.g., among physical sciences, climatology.
Furthermore, economics doesn't want to acknowledge the findings of psychology, so it is just plain wrong on many things.
This is quite simply not true. The problem is that, while psychology has results which conflict with some of the simplified underpinnings of common economic models (unsurprising, as those underpinnings were never intended to be factual but instead useful aggregate models), there haven't been any clearly superior models of the kind of large-scale behavior that economics studies based on those results.
You know how hard it is to create links to these peer-reviewed journal articles on the internet?
So? Wikipedia citations don't have to be hyperlinks.
Its not at all hard to cite a peer-reviewed journal in a Wikipedia article, however difficult it may be to provide a link. Citations are to be to reliable sources, not necessarily sources that are either free or online.
Actually given the fact the number one cry against protecting their identities is 'we dont do the for people who commit other crimes' distinguishing that there is a different legal code to look at totally follows.
Not without pointing to relevant differences it doesn't.
In a legal context, a corporation is an individual.
In a general legal context a corporation is a "person", not an "individual". There may be some specific legal contexts where "individual" includes "corporation", but generally "individual" would be equivalent to a "natural person".
The police routinely withhold evidence from public dissemination, both to protect the integrity of the investigation and to protect the ability of the prosecutor to seat an untainted jury.
Those are different purposes than the ones being discussed, and could potentially be legitimate grounds for withholding the material at issue. This corner of the thread has been back and forth about a particular offered justification for witholding the material -- that of protection from vigilante justice -- which is what I have been saying would be inconsistent with what we do generally with no apparent justification for the different treatment. I'm not arguing that there is no possible justification for witholding the material, just that the one that I was respondign to seemed deficient.
If you broadcast these pictures over the entire nation exactly how is the defendant to get a fair trial anywhere?
Its worth noting that photos of the abuse at Abu Ghraib with many of the perpetrators (including those who were subsequently tried) not obscured have been broadcast all over the world.
Acts committed by soldiers at war are legally different than civil actions. That's why we have different codes to dictate behavior to treat this like a mugging or rape spits in the face of the fact we have had to establish both National and International laws regarding the conduct of soldiers.
Sure, there are all kinds of differences. No one has yet presented a reason to believe those are relevant to the question at hand, specifically, whether their identities should be obscured to protect them from vigilanteism prior to any potential trial for their acts. Without that, merely saying that they are "legally different" is a giant non-sequitur.
Smoot-Hawley is a tariff act; H-1B visas have nothing to do with tariffs (either the presence or absence of them) and so while Smoot-Hawley means something, its something completely irrelevant to the H-1B visa program.
International trade is good for overall productivity, whether we're talking about commodities or services.
Insofar as that is true as regards productivity (value produced per worker), it is wrong to suggest that therefore the H-1B program must be a net benefit. Even if importing labor under the complete control of capital the way the H-1B program does increase overall productivity, it also increases the population among whom the rewards of that production are distributed, and, by its very nature, increases the degree to which those rewards are concentrated in the hands of capital holders. Additionally, international movement of population without bonds of attachment beyond present employment imposes a variety of externalized costs, which offset, to a certain extent, the aggregate benefit, and insofar as they are not distributed the same as the benefits, increase the particularized harms experienced by those that aren't the capitalists that capture the bulk of the direct rewards.
Uhh, if the government pays a salary of $100,000 and then collects $30,000 in taxes, you can't say that not paying the salary is a loss of $30,000 in taxes.
Yes, you can. Because it is.
It's also a cost savings of $100,000 dollars.
It's also a loss of the productive work the person was being hired to do.
Unless you do additional policy changes, its also quite likely an additional cost imposed on services with income or unemployment-based qualification rules. If you do change policy to present that, you are instead imposing the social cost that those policies were designed to address.
You're not creating wealth by taking the $100,000 from other people as taxes and then giving it to the worker.
If the worker is doing work with a net public benefit, which certainly all public work is intended to be, you are, in fact, creating wealth, in the broadest sense, by doing that.
Sure, if you discount the value of the work done, then paying the worker is net loss, but that's true everywhere, not just in government.
Claiming his spending represents a positive economic activity is kind of silly, since the money was already taken from other people.
All money that pays for any work comes from other people.
Repeat after me: government does not create wealth. Even if it makes some men wealthy.
Repeating this quasi-religious mantra won't magically make it true.
Government can only create wealth if it gets into the business of making & selling something
Government is in the business of making/providing, and exchanging for payment, goods and services. In fact, that's all government does.
which is generally a bad idea for all kinds of reasons, e.g., socialism doesn't work.
Insofar as the phrase "socialism doesn't work" is true, its not relevant, insofar as its relevant, its not true.
To be fair, it was Hoover's fault. Not that he could know;
Certainly, he could have. The protectionist measures that were being debated before the crash of 1929, whose very prospects of passing contributed to the crash, and whose implementation after the crash almost certainly at least deepened the ensuing recession reflected an approach that had been recognized as counterproductive for a long time before Hoover.
most of the techniques we use today to try and mitigate the effects of a long term downturn weren't even invented during Hoover's administration.
Hoover can certainly be blamed (not exclusively mind you, lots of other people, particularly in the Congress of the time, share blame) for the policy decisions that produced the downturn, and that made it a long-term, harsh one.
It wasn't (at that time) recognized that unregulated capitalism was perfectly capable of committing suicide.
Lack of regulation played some role in the collapse (a bigger role in the ineffectual response), but more important in the collapse were particular government actions like Smoot-Hawley, which was very much not "unregulated capitalism", and was widely recognized by economists and even some leading financiers and industrialists as being disastrous when it was proposed.
So yesterday, IBM posted great profits that beat wall street estimates. And today they're doing layoffs? That makes no financial sense to me.
Posted results are the past. Layoffs are based on expectations of the future.
Why should any company lay off people just because "Everyone else is doing it"?
They aren't doing it because "everyone else is doing it", except insofar as the belt-tightening at other firms is one of many reasons that IBM expects less demands for its products and services in the near future.
I never said with hold info I said edit.. Distort appearances and voices.
Editing to obscure information is withholding information, and we don't do that to protect the identity of people who may have perpetrated crimes in any other circumstances to protect their identities. That's not how we protect people against vigilante justice.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, no.
"X has been used for Y" does not demonstrate that "X is suitable for Y".
Lowering wages increases the problems directly experienced (and thus, likely decreases the productivity) of the people that stay; laying people off, while it is likely to lower morale, has less direct impact on the people you still count on to do work, though it causes more problems for the people you lay off. But, as an employer, those people and their problems aren't your problem any more.
H-1B's are a high-end version of guest-worker programs, a means to provide industry with a more-dependent labor pool. Not providing them isn't protectionism, whether in a recession or not.
(Actual protectionism is just as bad during a recession as any other time, as Hoover demonstrated rather thoroughly.)
The results really aren't surprising: as TFA states, most projects use more than one language. So C coming out on top with Java #2 is hardly unsurprising: many extensions built for scripting languages use either C or the primary language for the VM they target (Java for the JVM) in addition to whatever scripting language they are for. And JavaScript being tops among scripting languages also isn't surprising; PHP and Ruby may be popular for web applications, but most PHP and Ruby web apps (and web app frameworks) rely on the use of JavaScript on the client side, and so will often also include JavaScript.
The additional torture pics and vids referenced in the top-level post in this subthread that this whole subthread is about that were ordered released that Congress has viewed, but that have not been released, concern, at least in part, Abu Ghraib, and are "additional" to the ones that were released about Abu Ghraib.
No, they haven't. Some of them have. Some -- that certain members of Congress have been showed privately and that are reportedly more serious than those that have been released publicly -- have not. Hence, the reference that started this thread to additional pictures and videos that have been viewed by Congress but not released.
Your persistent belief that government has the right to shield itself from public accountability indefinitely by not declaring an investigation of its own potential wrongdoing "complete" is noted, but I continue to think that it is both ridiculous on its face and absolutely contrary to the fundamental concept of government of the people.
Last I checked, YouTube is not a federal agency. Why do they need a waiver from a rule which prevents federal agencies from using long-term tracking cookies to track users?
There are two possibilities:
(1) They are government agents acting lawfully in their official capacity, in which case neither the acts nor their identities deserve protection against public scrutiny and accountability (barring some other reason than "people might not like what they've done"), or
(2) They are government agents acting unlawfully and contrary to their official responsibilities, in which case neither their acts nor their identities deserve protection against public scrutiny (again, barring some other reason than "people might not like what they've done").
They are entitled to protection from retaliation in the same way that all citizens are entitled to protection from violent crime, but not in any other way.
Then you haven't been paying the slightest bit of attention, which is hardly anyone's fault but your own. The amount of media attention the various investigations and prosecutions received was immense.
Here's just a few bits:
Military prosecution in Abu Ghraib scandal ends (01/11/2008)
For Abu Ghraib, a limited prosecution (03/29/2006)
The Unlearned Lessons of Abu Ghraib (10/19/2006)
Iraq prison report details lax discipline (5/8/2004)
CIA personnel, civilians cited in abuse (8/20/2004)
Trial Starts in Abu Ghraib Death (5/25/2005)
C.I.A. to Avoid Charges in Most Prisoner Deaths (10/23/2005)
The "risk" is that the government that is notionally of the people, by the people, and for the people might actually be accountable to the people it is of, by, and for.
The US federal court precedent holding that "the torturer has become, like the pirate and the slave trader before him, hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind", Filártiga v. Peña-Iralais, 630 F.2d 876 (1980), is considerably less than half a century old.
Anyway, its not an issue of relative responsibility; those giving orders cannot be effectively held responsible unless those acting on those orders can be. The ability to bring serious charges against those who execute the policy is an essential tool to hold the bigger fish responsible.
Its also essential to have (which we do) and enforce (whether we will remains to be seen) laws which make the individual torture accountable, especially given the evidence that people will torture if they believe they have the sanction of the relevant authority, because only enforcing that law can demonstrate the illegitimacy of any purported license for torture given by those in positions of apparent authority. And, in fact, without enforcing such laws vigorously, it is not obvious that it is never okay to torture someone. On the contrary, the failure to enforce such laws in the face of clear and notorious violation sends the clear and unmistakeable message that it is okay to torture people sometimes.
So, every time police release surveillance video of a criminal act to the public, when no particular person has yet been accused or formally charged, its wrong? Or is just that agents of government are specially protected from public scrutiny?
No one is saying that any people in these pictures do not deserve the full protection of due process under the Constitution and laws of the United States. What people object to is the invention from whole cloth of a completely new protection that has never been recognized in law or practice for any other people just for these particular agents of the government.
If the content of the photos is not as described, releasing them would be the only way to make that clear. If they are as described, the people involved are unambiguous hostis humani generis, and the government (in fact, every government) has a positive obligation to bring them to justice -- an obligation that it has a much better time avoiding if it conceals the evidence and thereby conceals its own obligations. And, of course, whether or not they are released, the information which has already come out about their existence and the supposed content without identities tars everyone who is discovered to have served at Abu Ghraib at the time, and only releasing the information can lessen the cloud over the innocent.
The events at issue have been investigated, supposedly thoroughly, and a handful of people have been charged and convicted. The inforamtion now has bearing on whether or not the government adequately discharged its duties.
In my experience in both government and private work, the proportion of workers not doing productive work at any given time, and the proportion that are completely dead weight, are about the same in each environment.
You can fire people for not doing their job (if you can document it), but lay offs generally aren't targetted. You lose as big a share of the productive workers as the non-productive ones (and the less security you provide, the less likely you are to attract productive workers in the first place, especially at public sector salaries, which tend to be substantially below private sector salaries for jobs requiring similar qualifications.)
Resulting in an almost immediate return to growth and substantial decline from the 25% unemployment Hoover had driven the country to.
Some kind of "compounding".
No, its not.
There are, empirically, booms and busts that are observed to occur in real economies. Whether they have anything to do with "capitalism", however defined, is far less clear, and certainly not true by defiition for anything but the most bizarre definition.
Yeah, it is. Like other social sciences that deal with group behavior (political science, sociology, etc.), though, it is very hard to establish good controls -- the only controls usually available are statistical controls, and any interesting exploration usually has lots of potential contributing factors to control for, and a smaller universe to test than one would like.
Well, the inherent difficulty of properly isolating things does provide room for bias to color things, but a bigger reason why economics is strongly tied to politics is that the issues studied by economics have a high degree of political salience, thus controversies in economics is likely to have fairly direct political ramifications.
Yes, though neither field has the immediate political ramifications of economics; psychology has more than chemistry, and unsurprisingly its more prominent there. And, of course, with fields whose subject matter has greater relevance to major political controversies, you see it more, e.g., among physical sciences, climatology.
This is quite simply not true. The problem is that, while psychology has results which conflict with some of the simplified underpinnings of common economic models (unsurprising, as those underpinnings were never intended to be factual but instead useful aggregate models), there haven't been any clearly superior models of the kind of large-scale behavior that economics studies based on those results.
The system isn't called "capitalism" because it favors labor, you know.
So? Wikipedia citations don't have to be hyperlinks.
Its not at all hard to cite a peer-reviewed journal in a Wikipedia article, however difficult it may be to provide a link. Citations are to be to reliable sources, not necessarily sources that are either free or online.
Not without pointing to relevant differences it doesn't.
In a general legal context a corporation is a "person", not an "individual". There may be some specific legal contexts where "individual" includes "corporation", but generally "individual" would be equivalent to a "natural person".
No, we don't.
Those are different purposes than the ones being discussed, and could potentially be legitimate grounds for withholding the material at issue. This corner of the thread has been back and forth about a particular offered justification for witholding the material -- that of protection from vigilante justice -- which is what I have been saying would be inconsistent with what we do generally with no apparent justification for the different treatment. I'm not arguing that there is no possible justification for witholding the material, just that the one that I was respondign to seemed deficient.
Its worth noting that photos of the abuse at Abu Ghraib with many of the perpetrators (including those who were subsequently tried) not obscured have been broadcast all over the world.
Sure, there are all kinds of differences. No one has yet presented a reason to believe those are relevant to the question at hand, specifically, whether their identities should be obscured to protect them from vigilanteism prior to any potential trial for their acts. Without that, merely saying that they are "legally different" is a giant non-sequitur.
Smoot-Hawley is a tariff act; H-1B visas have nothing to do with tariffs (either the presence or absence of them) and so while Smoot-Hawley means something, its something completely irrelevant to the H-1B visa program.
Insofar as that is true as regards productivity (value produced per worker), it is wrong to suggest that therefore the H-1B program must be a net benefit. Even if importing labor under the complete control of capital the way the H-1B program does increase overall productivity, it also increases the population among whom the rewards of that production are distributed, and, by its very nature, increases the degree to which those rewards are concentrated in the hands of capital holders. Additionally, international movement of population without bonds of attachment beyond present employment imposes a variety of externalized costs, which offset, to a certain extent, the aggregate benefit, and insofar as they are not distributed the same as the benefits, increase the particularized harms experienced by those that aren't the capitalists that capture the bulk of the direct rewards.
Yes, you can. Because it is.
It's also a cost savings of $100,000 dollars.
It's also a loss of the productive work the person was being hired to do.
Unless you do additional policy changes, its also quite likely an additional cost imposed on services with income or unemployment-based qualification rules. If you do change policy to present that, you are instead imposing the social cost that those policies were designed to address.
If the worker is doing work with a net public benefit, which certainly all public work is intended to be, you are, in fact, creating wealth, in the broadest sense, by doing that.
Sure, if you discount the value of the work done, then paying the worker is net loss, but that's true everywhere, not just in government.
All money that pays for any work comes from other people.
Repeating this quasi-religious mantra won't magically make it true.
Government is in the business of making/providing, and exchanging for payment, goods and services. In fact, that's all government does.
Insofar as the phrase "socialism doesn't work" is true, its not relevant, insofar as its relevant, its not true.
Certainly, he could have. The protectionist measures that were being debated before the crash of 1929, whose very prospects of passing contributed to the crash, and whose implementation after the crash almost certainly at least deepened the ensuing recession reflected an approach that had been recognized as counterproductive for a long time before Hoover.
Hoover can certainly be blamed (not exclusively mind you, lots of other people, particularly in the Congress of the time, share blame) for the policy decisions that produced the downturn, and that made it a long-term, harsh one.
Lack of regulation played some role in the collapse (a bigger role in the ineffectual response), but more important in the collapse were particular government actions like Smoot-Hawley, which was very much not "unregulated capitalism", and was widely recognized by economists and even some leading financiers and industrialists as being disastrous when it was proposed.
Posted results are the past. Layoffs are based on expectations of the future.
They aren't doing it because "everyone else is doing it", except insofar as the belt-tightening at other firms is one of many reasons that IBM expects less demands for its products and services in the near future.
Editing to obscure information is withholding information, and we don't do that to protect the identity of people who may have perpetrated crimes in any other circumstances to protect their identities. That's not how we protect people against vigilante justice.