The situation in China (admittedly I haven't been there) is that labor laws are not wonderfully enforced. China does not have the centuries of the rule of law that stand behind current western governments, so something being illegal in China is a different concept from it being illegal in the west. Technically, taking bribes and pirating software are illegal over there - both are still endemic and people aren't being shot in any great numbers for them.
True enough. Their low pay is not required for a reasonably priced product, it is desired by the company making it maximizing their profit at the insistence of its shareholders.
So, don't forget the shareholders in your hanging campaign. They are the ones always standing over the shoulders of the businessmen, asking where their profits are and why they aren't going up, up, up...
I don't know how informal you are with your staff, but plenty of places I worked - if the boss demanded a suggestion he would recieve one that was anatomically difficult/impossible.
Idea quotas will just fill your time with nonsense people pulled out of their arses to meet your demands whilst keeping their genuinely good ideas to themselves because they don't think they will benefit from revealing them.
Employees receive a fixed wage. Ideas have variable value. By saying 'innovation is mandatory' you are saying 'for the mediocre money I pay you, I expect an indefinite level of productivity'
The arrogance of employers who believe they own the rights to your soul in exchange for the pitiful money they offer encourages smart people to slack off - and appear as average people for the same money and less stress and feelings of exploitation.
My own position is that anything that destroys commercial content is a good thing -- when big media isn't profitable, we'll potentially get back to real passion and real information.
Me too. I find the idea that artists are owed a living at the expense of my freedom. If you need to get a proper job instead of me giving up my right to freely exchange information with my fellow citizens then TOUGH SHIT.
As a physicist I am quite comfortable arguing the merits of evolution over creationism because I understand the strength of the process that favored the former over the latter. I don't have to see every single experiment performed in that area of research; I know dodgy research would've been (and has been) spotted.
Depends on how you are dressed. If you have the temerity to wear a hoodie, a baseball cap, or the wrong colour skin, you are VERY wary around the police. The UK police are undermanned and under great pressure to produce 'results' - i.e. convictions - so they go for easy collars. Often this involves intimidating someone from a poor background into doing something, however minor, that could constitute resisting arrest or assaulting an officer, and stomping on them for it - despite the fact that the individual would've commited no crime were it not for being approached by the police.
Watch the film 'taking liberties' by the way - it shows two older ladies being accosted by the police for standing on a hill near a military base, with a camera crew.
Muslims do get raided like that, although it is not widespread yet. These things happen in degrees - we are not at totalitarianism yet but we are displaying some characteristics of it, and that in itself is wrong.
What worries me is that all the tools of a police state are there, but not employed yet. The government have powers of arbitrary detention, suppression of public protest, suppression of publication, and so on. They haven't been used to any great degree yet - probably because the civil society we spent centuries developing has a certain inertia to it - but having such laws on the books at all is tempting fate.
This is a futile discussion - classifying all nations into 'police state' and 'not a police state' is oversimplifying a complex issue.
So you have seen Zimbabwe with your own eyes. Have you seen the UK also? If so, could you gauge in your own opinion how far from true freedom the UK is in the direction of Zimbabwe, and if it is truly headed for such a state.
Please don't try to make this a left-right issue; the Tories only ever oppose such plans to gain political traction. Much of the mentality of New Labour is inherited from their ideological forebearers in the Tory party.
The fact that a bunch of old trots and stalinists could so easily switch over to thatcherism to me shows a fundamental similarity; the cynical treatment of man as an economic machine, a belief in political and economic rationalism to the point of total dehumanisation, and a utopian vision that is used to justify any short-term oppression or inequality in the name of some glorious but forever distant future.
...it is going to be left on a train by some retard in the civil service.
I don't know what is worse - totalitarian government collecting information on us all or totalitarian collecting information on us all and then fucking losing it.
Writing this, I do feel perhaps I am exaggerating a bit with the word totalitarian, considering some of the other regimes that have been described as such. So I would be interested to get some perspective from someone who lived in Eastern Europe under communism (was it really 20 years ago? fuck I am getting old) and now lives in the UK - on a scale of 1 to Glorious Peoples Republic Knows What Is Best For All, how buggared are we at the moment?
Thatcher came to power promising to reduce unemployment and inflation using monetarism, and fairly catastrophically. Monetarism was found to be a failure and she quietly u-turned on it, only managing to get inflation under control through massive unemployment - she then fudged the figures by shoving a load of people on incapacity instead. She then took her idiotic market ideology into the NHS, and invented the culture of targets, internal markets, and is responsible along with her successors for the chaos and destruction that ensued.
She was a rabidly ideological, elitist, authoritarian bitch who didn't even succeed by her own standards. She destroyed communities, industries, and crippled public services. Worst PM ever, without a doubt.
Showing that a statistically insignificant number of Java applications failed a test by a proprietary system which nobody is allowed to decompile so they can reproduce the results.
Hmm. Perhaps I am being a crotchety old science traditionalist, but the definition of the word 'research' seems to have changed of late.
The claim that their German subsidiary was taken over by the state is a little shaky; Not only were the same management left in place but they continued to report to Thomas Watson in New York throughout the war. Most importantly, after the war they recovered the profits made selling and maintaining punch card machines for the holocaust.
Welfare systems pay you more for having more kids because kids cost more. When the newspapers say 'Family with 30 children recieve £15,000 a year in benefits' they ignore the fact they've got to support 30 children with that money, and it won't go far.
Any attempt to punish people for having too many children is only punishing children for coming out of the wrong womb, and to me is a vestige of eugenics.
Yet another total fucking retard who equates stealing a physical object with duplicating data. Go fucking die already, the world has moved beyond your childlike understanding of things.
Slashdot Mirror
The situation in China (admittedly I haven't been there) is that labor laws are not wonderfully enforced. China does not have the centuries of the rule of law that stand behind current western governments, so something being illegal in China is a different concept from it being illegal in the west. Technically, taking bribes and pirating software are illegal over there - both are still endemic and people aren't being shot in any great numbers for them.
True enough. Their low pay is not required for a reasonably priced product, it is desired by the company making it maximizing their profit at the insistence of its shareholders.
So, don't forget the shareholders in your hanging campaign. They are the ones always standing over the shoulders of the businessmen, asking where their profits are and why they aren't going up, up, up...
I don't know how informal you are with your staff, but plenty of places I worked - if the boss demanded a suggestion he would recieve one that was anatomically difficult/impossible.
Idea quotas will just fill your time with nonsense people pulled out of their arses to meet your demands whilst keeping their genuinely good ideas to themselves because they don't think they will benefit from revealing them.
I would not work in such a place.
Employees receive a fixed wage. Ideas have variable value. By saying 'innovation is mandatory' you are saying 'for the mediocre money I pay you, I expect an indefinite level of productivity'
The arrogance of employers who believe they own the rights to your soul in exchange for the pitiful money they offer encourages smart people to slack off - and appear as average people for the same money and less stress and feelings of exploitation.
Only because you are arrogant enough to assume that liberty is an 'American' value. Your history says far differently.
Me too. I find the idea that artists are owed a living at the expense of my freedom. If you need to get a proper job instead of me giving up my right to freely exchange information with my fellow citizens then TOUGH SHIT.
In other words "Science - it works bitches"
As a physicist I am quite comfortable arguing the merits of evolution over creationism because I understand the strength of the process that favored the former over the latter. I don't have to see every single experiment performed in that area of research; I know dodgy research would've been (and has been) spotted.
My take on communism, from the words of those who lived under it, was that annoying bureaucrats are quite capable of real oppression.
Depends on how you are dressed. If you have the temerity to wear a hoodie, a baseball cap, or the wrong colour skin, you are VERY wary around the police. The UK police are undermanned and under great pressure to produce 'results' - i.e. convictions - so they go for easy collars. Often this involves intimidating someone from a poor background into doing something, however minor, that could constitute resisting arrest or assaulting an officer, and stomping on them for it - despite the fact that the individual would've commited no crime were it not for being approached by the police.
Watch the film 'taking liberties' by the way - it shows two older ladies being accosted by the police for standing on a hill near a military base, with a camera crew.
Muslims do get raided like that, although it is not widespread yet. These things happen in degrees - we are not at totalitarianism yet but we are displaying some characteristics of it, and that in itself is wrong.
What worries me is that all the tools of a police state are there, but not employed yet. The government have powers of arbitrary detention, suppression of public protest, suppression of publication, and so on. They haven't been used to any great degree yet - probably because the civil society we spent centuries developing has a certain inertia to it - but having such laws on the books at all is tempting fate.
This is a futile discussion - classifying all nations into 'police state' and 'not a police state' is oversimplifying a complex issue.
So you have seen Zimbabwe with your own eyes. Have you seen the UK also? If so, could you gauge in your own opinion how far from true freedom the UK is in the direction of Zimbabwe, and if it is truly headed for such a state.
Please don't try to make this a left-right issue; the Tories only ever oppose such plans to gain political traction. Much of the mentality of New Labour is inherited from their ideological forebearers in the Tory party.
The fact that a bunch of old trots and stalinists could so easily switch over to thatcherism to me shows a fundamental similarity; the cynical treatment of man as an economic machine, a belief in political and economic rationalism to the point of total dehumanisation, and a utopian vision that is used to justify any short-term oppression or inequality in the name of some glorious but forever distant future.
...it is going to be left on a train by some retard in the civil service.
I don't know what is worse - totalitarian government collecting information on us all or totalitarian collecting information on us all and then fucking losing it.
Writing this, I do feel perhaps I am exaggerating a bit with the word totalitarian, considering some of the other regimes that have been described as such. So I would be interested to get some perspective from someone who lived in Eastern Europe under communism (was it really 20 years ago? fuck I am getting old) and now lives in the UK - on a scale of 1 to Glorious Peoples Republic Knows What Is Best For All, how buggared are we at the moment?
Just for the idiotic moderators, "Flamebait" isn't a euphemism for "pointing out facts that are inconvenient for my political ideology"
Doesn't make it any less true
Thatcher came to power promising to reduce unemployment and inflation using monetarism, and fairly catastrophically. Monetarism was found to be a failure and she quietly u-turned on it, only managing to get inflation under control through massive unemployment - she then fudged the figures by shoving a load of people on incapacity instead. She then took her idiotic market ideology into the NHS, and invented the culture of targets, internal markets, and is responsible along with her successors for the chaos and destruction that ensued.
She was a rabidly ideological, elitist, authoritarian bitch who didn't even succeed by her own standards. She destroyed communities, industries, and crippled public services. Worst PM ever, without a doubt.
Showing that a statistically insignificant number of Java applications failed a test by a proprietary system which nobody is allowed to decompile so they can reproduce the results.
Hmm. Perhaps I am being a crotchety old science traditionalist, but the definition of the word 'research' seems to have changed of late.
-We clocked the Pyrenean Ibex at 30mph
-(looking horrified)You cloned a Pyrenean Ibex!?
Somehow, I don't think the Jurassic Park tag is completely accurate...
Frankly, yes. They did have a choice, even if none of the outcomes of that choice were particularly pleasant.
The claim that their German subsidiary was taken over by the state is a little shaky; Not only were the same management left in place but they continued to report to Thomas Watson in New York throughout the war. Most importantly, after the war they recovered the profits made selling and maintaining punch card machines for the holocaust.
Last time they left bodies in their wake, the Allies found most of them...
Welfare systems pay you more for having more kids because kids cost more. When the newspapers say 'Family with 30 children recieve £15,000 a year in benefits' they ignore the fact they've got to support 30 children with that money, and it won't go far.
Any attempt to punish people for having too many children is only punishing children for coming out of the wrong womb, and to me is a vestige of eugenics.
Yet another total fucking retard who equates stealing a physical object with duplicating data. Go fucking die already, the world has moved beyond your childlike understanding of things.
50*52*1000000=£2.6 billion
Banks recieve £400 billion: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7658277.stm
And if you think that the money given to banks is going to their employees, your understanding of capitalism sucks even more than your arithmetic.