I guess that is why I don't have power outages, and when people in my city do, they get fixed very quickly. We have a public utility that isn't controlled by the City or other government, with a directly elected board that the community fills with engineers.
We have some of the lowest rates in the world, too.
Companies exist to make profit. Public utilities exist to bring utility service to the community, in communities willing to elect engineers anyways.
No, you miss the entire point; fraud is not the default. The default is that they are innocent. Accusing them of fraud, you have to have some reasonable proof about their intent. That their actions look suspicious does not establish anything at all about their intent. It is not a valid basis for claiming that what they did was fraud, certainly not to claim it was clearly so. So if a person says, "gee, that looks like it might have been fraud to me" then that is a reasonable thing to say. If a person says "that is clearly fraud," well no, that is clearly a false accusation, and even slanderous. There has to be something that establishes their intent, for example if they actually did refuse orders for that price.
Selling something at a loss does not establish any mal-intent at all.
If that is the most important thing you took from his talk, I have to say, you don't sound like a team player or a valuable employee
If you can't see why British people, or people from any other country, might mock someone who flew into their home country and called them American then you don't sound like a valueable lifeform;)
Americans would mock him too... "duh"
I just don't think it should trump his own needs. He should use speech that fits his own needs. If the speech is tailored for the people in the room, or for people not in the room, he should decide that based on his own needs. If you don't realize that, you don't sound like a very valued lifeform.
You can't demonstrate that there was no sale unless there is an unfulfilled order, or the seller indicates that they would not have filled orders. If nobody ordered anything, it is just an unknown, and unknowns require giving everybody the benefit of the doubt.
It doesn't matter what I think they would do theoretically. What matters is what did they actually do? If no orders were placed and they say that they would have honored any orders made, well, maybe they would have. I've pointed out mistaken sale prices in stores over a dozen times in my life, and maybe 2 or 3 times the store gave me the price the sticker said, because they were just that honest. The rest of them all said, oh no, that isn't the "real" price, that is just a printing error. The ones who honored the price weren't being fraudulent at all, and before they honored the price, they weren't being fraudulent either. By your claim, you can say that in those real situations they were already being fraudulent before they gave me the posted price, simply because you don't believe them that they will honor it. They probably won't, but they might, and you can't say they didn't honor it without attempting the purchase.
An example of a moral crime. Is it really immoral to fraud a company which systematically refuses to pay its workers anything near a living wage?
If you've asserted that it is fraud, then of course it is immoral to do it. Any defense of the morality has to deny that there was fraud, and claim the rules are simply favorable to people who understand some aspect of it.
The real key from the perspective of the crooks doing it, and the cops if it is not ongoing, is if such order were actually placed. If they manage to find a way to keep orders from being placed that can't be proven as intentional, if they can accidentally or through mild incompetence passively prevent any orders, then it is probably difficult to establish their intent. Obviously in the case where orders were made and canceled by the seller, than that becomes a slam dunk for a prosecutor. Without that, I doubt they go to court unless you bought at least $5000 worth of something.
It is complete and utter fraud, no ifs or buts. The intention of the fake listing is purely to defraud Walmart. This is not a shades of grey situation, it is straight out criminal behavior that should see them if caught be prosecuteded
If you're not going into the ifs and buts, you're going to fail to prove intent at all. You'd in fact have to go there just to make your accusation anything more than raw assertion.
It is in fact all shades of gray, rather than without them. Proving somebody else's intent takes more than simply feeling more strongly that they must be lying.;)
What about a person really did have a big sale at below cost, and really did also buy one from their competitor at a matching price for their own use, because they knew it was below cost? What about a legit competitor who is trying to incite a price war by selling below cost, and then buying from his competitor at the same price, believing his competitor to be somebody who gets more butt-hurt by losing money and who has less stomach for the price war? Obviously that would be stupid if the other guy is Walmart, but stupidity isn't fraud.
This is just a couple seconds worth from a layperson. Actual criminal liability requires a giant stack of "ifs [and] buts." And fraud isn't "strict liability," it requires intent, so it can't be without gray areas. Anything involving intent is mired in gray.
It is fraud if you create a web page purely to deceive Walmart into giving you a discount on a product you had no intention of selling for the price.
It is deeply dishonest, and there is no other excuse for that behaviour.
Yes, if you tell the lawyer suing you, or the cop investigating you, "yeah, I had no intent at all to sell for that price, durhur" then that is fraud.
If you don't say anything at all, how do they prove that your intent was fraudulent, rather than that your limited time promotion just didn't have any takers, and then you reconsidered it?
Just waving your hands and saying "fraud" because you think it is obvious is different than saying it is demonstrable that it is fraud. It might be very difficult to establish criminal intent rather than incompetence. And without a confession, you'd never demonstrate that it was "purely" to deceive.
Removing party affiliation from the ballot would be an excellent first step.
It does nothing at all except lower turnout. If you have single vote winner-takes-all elections, you'll still have political parties controlling everything, and there will be exactly 2 at a time with most of the power. It is just a side-effect of winner-takes-all.
OTOH, you can leave party affiliation on the ballot, and change to preference voting, and then you'd have a wide variety of parties that would all be successful and you'd have different alliances different election cycles.
That all flows from the math, you can do simulations on 3x5 cards with your friends and verify all that. Or write a simple software simulation.
Yeah, the Russians even used them for underground construction, for storing natural gas, etc. It didn't work well overall, but the part of blowing a big hole underground that doesn't disturb the surface, that part worked pretty well.
Exactly this. Everyone needs to read up. Ant nests are no less self-conscious than you or I. There is no way to prove or disprove an internal experience of any intelligent entity. So the best thing to do is to focus on the displayed behavior and not try to second-guess the internal "thoughts" of an AI or an ant's nest, because that way lies madness.
As a logical positivist, I'm ready to reject all questions about consciousness, including claims that humans do or don't have it. Nobody has any clue what the metric is. "I assert I am conscious, therefore I am." "I assert the ant is or isn't conscious, therefore it is or isn't because it didn't disagree."
I can simply program Eliza to tell you she is self aware. How would you test it? By her ability to fool humans into thinking she is human? Is that the metric??
Prove I am not just a complicated electro-chemical pattern that maintains its cohesion entirely due to physical processes.
Evil robots should not be feared because they might become "aware." They should be feared because they might be programmed and/or controlled by evil humans. Same as with all other tools...
Alternatively, European TV sucks just as bad, it is just more of a meme to say it is sophisticated.;)
Also, in 1) you might want to reconsider. What exactly are you measuring; the density of higher education, or its presence? Those are different measures. We know it is wrong because it is not self-consistent. But I don't think any of the things you might have meant are going to prove true. I'm sure many smaller European countries can put out high numbers on education, for mostly historical reasons. But Europe as a whole? That is a bit silly. People come from all over the world to attend US Universities. For real reasons. They are high quality, and there are a lot of them. And the US has a surplus of educated workers in most fields. Even the poorest places in the US have access to quality higher education, including loans and other funding. The best places in Europe have better funding for the poor, but in much of Europe the poor won't have access at all unless they're at the top of their class. In the US, anybody who can graduate high school can get college funding.
As for 2), it is a subjective measure, and I dare you to go around the US asking Americans, "Does it suck to be an American?" You might find out that it doesn't suck at all, Americans are just more willing to shout about whatever things they think could be improved. As for "the need for more distraction" that sounds pretty silly. Is there "more distraction" in the US than in France? Are you sure?
As far as US "TV history" is concerned, you should be advised that the numbers that claim Americans watch [some huge number] of TV are counting all the screens that are turned on in a house. It is true that American households have a lot of background noise, mostly because we have low population density and highly insulated walls in apartments, so people are free to make noise all the time and leave crap on. Just look at the ratings of "successful" US TV shows. Lots of things are considered "successful" and there might even be a European stereotype of Americans all watching something, but then it turns out in the numbers that only 1 in 20 American households had it turned on. Whereas in European ratings, it is much more common for over half a country to be watching the same event. But since Europeans spend less money per square [unit of distance] on housing, they don't leave their TVs on as "background noise."
You can tell it is a French cat because of the silly floppy-hat color pattern, and it tries to stick its tongue in the German's mouth while still on video.
I'm not saying either stereotype is correct, but I think the standard stereotype of Americans is the cowboy that draws out a gun and shoots you as his form of complaint, and the Frenchman whines over his cheese and finishes it off with an impolitic insult.
When I was working in the UK at a wireless product design company, the American CEO of the American corporation that just purchased the company flew in to talk to us. We were all gathered in a big room. In his rambling talk, he referred to all the black people in the room as 'African Americans'.
Stupidity is not reserved for one nation alone.
You interpret it as "stupidity," but you might just be ignorant of his goals and concerns. He might very well care more about how a video or transcript of the event would play in the US than in using accurate terms, or impressing you. It may be that he had light skin, and that dark skinned Americans don't all agree on how they should be referred to. So if part of his talk is to discuss diversity, and he's support to tailor it to who is in the room, and there are dark skinned people in the room, he might be diplomatically constrained; he needs to use a recognizable term, it needs to be an acceptable term, and it needs to be recognizable by an American court as not being discriminatory. He is not supposed to choose his preferred term, or the term he thinks is most accurate. And indeed, in the US there is a history of people using terms known to be offensive, and then trying to hide behind a belief that is the technically accurate term instead of admitting the real reasons.
If that is the most important thing you took from his talk, I have to say, you don't sound like a team player or a valuable employee. And if you think the choice of wording that a foreigner uses in a talk tells you about his intelligence, without even having been a part of the choosing of the word... well, that just shows that stupidity is not reserved for one nation alone.
Only because most of the world lives under socialist regimes disguised as democracy, whether it's the dirty boot heels of dear leader kim, or the 'soft', stagnant, and effeminate, culture that's been grafted onto scandinavia.
As opposed to America where you're living under fascist regimes, state and federal, disguised as democracy.
I'm not, but thanks for your faked concern, I'm sure it makes you feel better about your plight in the world. You can't remove my State's direct democracy by simply believing we don't have it, though you're certainly free to believe whatever you want, and spew it around the internet. That is why we gave you the internet, because we know you're comforted and enriched by your spewing.
Yes, yes, we're known the world over to be blargityblorg by these deep, educated people who have visited us and learned about our culture and history... oh, wait, well, OK so they didn't actually visit... and they don't understand our culture or history... but they're so very educated in their own history, and have deep thoughts about America... well, at least, they have deep feelings about the things that locals say in the local language on the local television about Americans. And those people are all educated, deep-thinking world travelers... oh, they're not?
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say anything that is "known... the world over" is probably ignorant and shallow. Just by numbers; most people are not deep thinkers or well educated. So ignorant and shallow people the world over have opinions about places they know nothing about? Got it!
Only part of the U.S. productivity growth, which has outpaced that of many other developed economies, can be explained by the longer hours Americans are putting in, the ILO said.
The U.S., according to the report, also beats all 27 nations in the European Union, Japan and Switzerland in the amount of wealth created per hour of work - a second key measure of productivity.
Norway, which is not an EU member, generates the most output per working hour, $37.99, a figure inflated by the country's billions of dollars in oil exports and high prices for goods at home. The U.S. is second at $35.63, about a half-dollar ahead of third-placed France.
Yep, that is why we have higher productivity per worker, both per hour, and per year. We get more done per hour, and also work more hours. I'm assuming these "Americans" "fucking off" for 6 hrs on the computer... you saw them on the TV, right? Get back to work!!!
It is a funny article for a few reasons. Did you even read it? Does it claim to refute the France works a significantly shorter week than the US? The answer to both is clearly "no." You googled for a story that says what you wanted to link to, but linked without really reading it.
It claims to be refuting the "myth" of France having a 35 hour work week. That is a very different thing than you said, because they could have a longer-than-35-hours work week and still be well behind the US work week. And indeed, looking at the story, they "bust" the myth by pointing out that salaried white collar workers often work 40 or 45 hrs a week, since they aren't paid by the hour. I guess you didn't consider that salaried US workers might work significantly more than that.
The even have a funny chart that lists the annual hours per worker by Nation. They didn't order the chart, not by hours, nor by name. It seems they just randomly ordered them. They did put France physically above the US on that list, but the list shows the French work 1,476 hours and the Americans work 1,704 hours. That is over 4 hrs per week more. So the link proves the "myth" to be true! Americans do work more hours per week than the French.
It is a hilarious and sarcastic story, but I don't think you got the jokes:
Of course, compared to the hours certain professions tally on a weekly basis, the average worker in Europe doesn’t have it so bad. Take lawyers. According to France’s national bar association (CNB), 44% of lawyers in the country logged more than 55 hours on a weekly basis in 2008. In the United States, surveys show that many attorneys work about 55 to 60 hours per week...
Yep, we just mindlessly build technology for you to adopt. We don't know what it does, or why, we just meditate "Ohm, ohm, ohm," and work 80 hrs a week, and somehow there is a pile of networked computers at the end of the quarter.
I guess it is just an unlikely accident of history that a people so stupid invented so much, and continue to dominate the associated services.
I just really hate the part where those durn Americans forced all the bits through those tubes. Forced them! Who asked the bits if they wanted to go through tubes?
And opening up the network to the masses. Who asked the data if it wants the People looking at it all day? What gives them the right?!
Slashdot Mirror
I guess that is why I don't have power outages, and when people in my city do, they get fixed very quickly. We have a public utility that isn't controlled by the City or other government, with a directly elected board that the community fills with engineers.
We have some of the lowest rates in the world, too.
Companies exist to make profit. Public utilities exist to bring utility service to the community, in communities willing to elect engineers anyways.
No, you miss the entire point; fraud is not the default. The default is that they are innocent. Accusing them of fraud, you have to have some reasonable proof about their intent. That their actions look suspicious does not establish anything at all about their intent. It is not a valid basis for claiming that what they did was fraud, certainly not to claim it was clearly so. So if a person says, "gee, that looks like it might have been fraud to me" then that is a reasonable thing to say. If a person says "that is clearly fraud," well no, that is clearly a false accusation, and even slanderous. There has to be something that establishes their intent, for example if they actually did refuse orders for that price.
Selling something at a loss does not establish any mal-intent at all.
Oh, good, in that case nobody has to pay early termination penalties.
If you can't see why British people, or people from any other country, might mock someone who flew into their home country and called them American then you don't sound like a valueable lifeform ;)
Americans would mock him too... "duh"
I just don't think it should trump his own needs. He should use speech that fits his own needs. If the speech is tailored for the people in the room, or for people not in the room, he should decide that based on his own needs. If you don't realize that, you don't sound like a very valued lifeform.
You can't demonstrate that there was no sale unless there is an unfulfilled order, or the seller indicates that they would not have filled orders. If nobody ordered anything, it is just an unknown, and unknowns require giving everybody the benefit of the doubt.
It doesn't matter what I think they would do theoretically. What matters is what did they actually do? If no orders were placed and they say that they would have honored any orders made, well, maybe they would have. I've pointed out mistaken sale prices in stores over a dozen times in my life, and maybe 2 or 3 times the store gave me the price the sticker said, because they were just that honest. The rest of them all said, oh no, that isn't the "real" price, that is just a printing error. The ones who honored the price weren't being fraudulent at all, and before they honored the price, they weren't being fraudulent either. By your claim, you can say that in those real situations they were already being fraudulent before they gave me the posted price, simply because you don't believe them that they will honor it. They probably won't, but they might, and you can't say they didn't honor it without attempting the purchase.
An example of a moral crime. Is it really immoral to fraud a company which systematically refuses to pay its workers anything near a living wage?
If you've asserted that it is fraud, then of course it is immoral to do it. Any defense of the morality has to deny that there was fraud, and claim the rules are simply favorable to people who understand some aspect of it.
The real key from the perspective of the crooks doing it, and the cops if it is not ongoing, is if such order were actually placed. If they manage to find a way to keep orders from being placed that can't be proven as intentional, if they can accidentally or through mild incompetence passively prevent any orders, then it is probably difficult to establish their intent. Obviously in the case where orders were made and canceled by the seller, than that becomes a slam dunk for a prosecutor. Without that, I doubt they go to court unless you bought at least $5000 worth of something.
It is complete and utter fraud, no ifs or buts. The intention of the fake listing is purely to defraud Walmart. This is not a shades of grey situation, it is straight out criminal behavior that should see them if caught be prosecuteded
If you're not going into the ifs and buts, you're going to fail to prove intent at all. You'd in fact have to go there just to make your accusation anything more than raw assertion.
It is in fact all shades of gray, rather than without them. Proving somebody else's intent takes more than simply feeling more strongly that they must be lying. ;)
What about a person really did have a big sale at below cost, and really did also buy one from their competitor at a matching price for their own use, because they knew it was below cost? What about a legit competitor who is trying to incite a price war by selling below cost, and then buying from his competitor at the same price, believing his competitor to be somebody who gets more butt-hurt by losing money and who has less stomach for the price war? Obviously that would be stupid if the other guy is Walmart, but stupidity isn't fraud.
This is just a couple seconds worth from a layperson. Actual criminal liability requires a giant stack of "ifs [and] buts." And fraud isn't "strict liability," it requires intent, so it can't be without gray areas. Anything involving intent is mired in gray.
It is fraud if you create a web page purely to deceive Walmart into giving you a discount on a product you had no intention of selling for the price.
It is deeply dishonest, and there is no other excuse for that behaviour.
Yes, if you tell the lawyer suing you, or the cop investigating you, "yeah, I had no intent at all to sell for that price, durhur" then that is fraud.
If you don't say anything at all, how do they prove that your intent was fraudulent, rather than that your limited time promotion just didn't have any takers, and then you reconsidered it?
Just waving your hands and saying "fraud" because you think it is obvious is different than saying it is demonstrable that it is fraud. It might be very difficult to establish criminal intent rather than incompetence. And without a confession, you'd never demonstrate that it was "purely" to deceive.
Sure they would, they would just be using an endorsement list from their party, instead of reading it off the ballot.
Removing party affiliation from the ballot would be an excellent first step.
It does nothing at all except lower turnout. If you have single vote winner-takes-all elections, you'll still have political parties controlling everything, and there will be exactly 2 at a time with most of the power. It is just a side-effect of winner-takes-all.
OTOH, you can leave party affiliation on the ballot, and change to preference voting, and then you'd have a wide variety of parties that would all be successful and you'd have different alliances different election cycles.
That all flows from the math, you can do simulations on 3x5 cards with your friends and verify all that. Or write a simple software simulation.
Yeah, the Russians even used them for underground construction, for storing natural gas, etc. It didn't work well overall, but the part of blowing a big hole underground that doesn't disturb the surface, that part worked pretty well.
It's interesting speculation based on the recent history of technological growth.
Machines have a history of blowing up or falling apart, but not of becoming evil and maniacal murderers.
Exactly this. Everyone needs to read up. Ant nests are no less self-conscious than you or I. There is no way to prove or disprove an internal experience of any intelligent entity. So the best thing to do is to focus on the displayed behavior and not try to second-guess the internal "thoughts" of an AI or an ant's nest, because that way lies madness.
As a logical positivist, I'm ready to reject all questions about consciousness, including claims that humans do or don't have it. Nobody has any clue what the metric is. "I assert I am conscious, therefore I am." "I assert the ant is or isn't conscious, therefore it is or isn't because it didn't disagree."
I can simply program Eliza to tell you she is self aware. How would you test it? By her ability to fool humans into thinking she is human? Is that the metric??
Prove I am not just a complicated electro-chemical pattern that maintains its cohesion entirely due to physical processes.
Evil robots should not be feared because they might become "aware." They should be feared because they might be programmed and/or controlled by evil humans. Same as with all other tools...
Alternatively, European TV sucks just as bad, it is just more of a meme to say it is sophisticated. ;)
Also, in 1) you might want to reconsider. What exactly are you measuring; the density of higher education, or its presence? Those are different measures. We know it is wrong because it is not self-consistent. But I don't think any of the things you might have meant are going to prove true. I'm sure many smaller European countries can put out high numbers on education, for mostly historical reasons. But Europe as a whole? That is a bit silly. People come from all over the world to attend US Universities. For real reasons. They are high quality, and there are a lot of them. And the US has a surplus of educated workers in most fields. Even the poorest places in the US have access to quality higher education, including loans and other funding. The best places in Europe have better funding for the poor, but in much of Europe the poor won't have access at all unless they're at the top of their class. In the US, anybody who can graduate high school can get college funding.
As for 2), it is a subjective measure, and I dare you to go around the US asking Americans, "Does it suck to be an American?" You might find out that it doesn't suck at all, Americans are just more willing to shout about whatever things they think could be improved. As for "the need for more distraction" that sounds pretty silly. Is there "more distraction" in the US than in France? Are you sure?
As far as US "TV history" is concerned, you should be advised that the numbers that claim Americans watch [some huge number] of TV are counting all the screens that are turned on in a house. It is true that American households have a lot of background noise, mostly because we have low population density and highly insulated walls in apartments, so people are free to make noise all the time and leave crap on. Just look at the ratings of "successful" US TV shows. Lots of things are considered "successful" and there might even be a European stereotype of Americans all watching something, but then it turns out in the numbers that only 1 in 20 American households had it turned on. Whereas in European ratings, it is much more common for over half a country to be watching the same event. But since Europeans spend less money per square [unit of distance] on housing, they don't leave their TVs on as "background noise."
So... US news is "more vapid... than grumpy cat" and your answer is... an internet meme jpg?
Uhm, yeah. About that. "D'oh!"
Yep, here is one now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You can tell it is a French cat because of the silly floppy-hat color pattern, and it tries to stick its tongue in the German's mouth while still on video.
I'm not saying either stereotype is correct, but I think the standard stereotype of Americans is the cowboy that draws out a gun and shoots you as his form of complaint, and the Frenchman whines over his cheese and finishes it off with an impolitic insult.
When I was working in the UK at a wireless product design company, the American CEO of the American corporation that just purchased the company flew in to talk to us. We were all gathered in a big room. In his rambling talk, he referred to all the black people in the room as 'African Americans'.
Stupidity is not reserved for one nation alone.
You interpret it as "stupidity," but you might just be ignorant of his goals and concerns. He might very well care more about how a video or transcript of the event would play in the US than in using accurate terms, or impressing you. It may be that he had light skin, and that dark skinned Americans don't all agree on how they should be referred to. So if part of his talk is to discuss diversity, and he's support to tailor it to who is in the room, and there are dark skinned people in the room, he might be diplomatically constrained; he needs to use a recognizable term, it needs to be an acceptable term, and it needs to be recognizable by an American court as not being discriminatory. He is not supposed to choose his preferred term, or the term he thinks is most accurate. And indeed, in the US there is a history of people using terms known to be offensive, and then trying to hide behind a belief that is the technically accurate term instead of admitting the real reasons.
If that is the most important thing you took from his talk, I have to say, you don't sound like a team player or a valuable employee. And if you think the choice of wording that a foreigner uses in a talk tells you about his intelligence, without even having been a part of the choosing of the word... well, that just shows that stupidity is not reserved for one nation alone .
Only because most of the world lives under socialist regimes disguised as democracy, whether it's the dirty boot heels of dear leader kim, or the 'soft', stagnant, and effeminate, culture that's been grafted onto scandinavia.
As opposed to America where you're living under fascist regimes, state and federal, disguised as democracy.
I'm not, but thanks for your faked concern, I'm sure it makes you feel better about your plight in the world. You can't remove my State's direct democracy by simply believing we don't have it, though you're certainly free to believe whatever you want, and spew it around the internet. That is why we gave you the internet, because we know you're comforted and enriched by your spewing.
Yes, yes, we're known the world over to be blargityblorg by these deep, educated people who have visited us and learned about our culture and history... oh, wait, well, OK so they didn't actually visit... and they don't understand our culture or history... but they're so very educated in their own history, and have deep thoughts about America... well, at least, they have deep feelings about the things that locals say in the local language on the local television about Americans. And those people are all educated, deep-thinking world travelers... oh, they're not?
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say anything that is "known... the world over" is probably ignorant and shallow. Just by numbers; most people are not deep thinkers or well educated. So ignorant and shallow people the world over have opinions about places they know nothing about? Got it!
Sorry that life doesn't imitate your nationalist stereotypes.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpb... "French workers are ...only marginally less productive than American workers."
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us...
Yep, that is why we have higher productivity per worker, both per hour, and per year. We get more done per hour, and also work more hours. I'm assuming these "Americans" "fucking off" for 6 hrs on the computer... you saw them on the TV, right? Get back to work!!!
It is a funny article for a few reasons. Did you even read it? Does it claim to refute the France works a significantly shorter week than the US? The answer to both is clearly "no." You googled for a story that says what you wanted to link to, but linked without really reading it.
It claims to be refuting the "myth" of France having a 35 hour work week. That is a very different thing than you said, because they could have a longer-than-35-hours work week and still be well behind the US work week. And indeed, looking at the story, they "bust" the myth by pointing out that salaried white collar workers often work 40 or 45 hrs a week, since they aren't paid by the hour. I guess you didn't consider that salaried US workers might work significantly more than that.
The even have a funny chart that lists the annual hours per worker by Nation. They didn't order the chart, not by hours, nor by name. It seems they just randomly ordered them. They did put France physically above the US on that list, but the list shows the French work 1,476 hours and the Americans work 1,704 hours. That is over 4 hrs per week more. So the link proves the "myth" to be true! Americans do work more hours per week than the French.
It is a hilarious and sarcastic story, but I don't think you got the jokes:
LOL, yes, average workers... like lawyers.
Yep, we just mindlessly build technology for you to adopt. We don't know what it does, or why, we just meditate "Ohm, ohm, ohm," and work 80 hrs a week, and somehow there is a pile of networked computers at the end of the quarter.
I guess it is just an unlikely accident of history that a people so stupid invented so much, and continue to dominate the associated services.
I just really hate the part where those durn Americans forced all the bits through those tubes. Forced them! Who asked the bits if they wanted to go through tubes?
And opening up the network to the masses. Who asked the data if it wants the People looking at it all day? What gives them the right?!