Yeah, they voluntarily entered into agreements with companies that conspired to ensure that no one could make more by going to any other company. No, you can't hold out for more. You have a life to live and bills to pay. You have to take what is available, even if it is crap because you gotta eat.

It's the people, goddammit!

They used to actually tell employees in big meetings of engineers where they announced the annual pay raises. First they'd give a powerpoint presentation on their benefits packages, etc., and explain that their HR people had met with HR people from other big engineering employers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere to agree upon job titles and descriptions and pay scales. Finally they'd announce the annual raise and everyone would cheer except me, who didn't like being told "don't bother looking for a better deal, we've seen to it that you won't get one".

I ultimately left HP and went to Fujitsu, a company that wasn't part of the "cartel" and got a pay raise of 50% and kept all my hard earned vacation time to boot. I haven't seen any mention of HP in any of the articles about this yet.

I disagree. Personal responsibility has disappeared. If you are dumb now it is because you didn't have the same opportunity as the smart people. It isn't your fault. Back in the 70's if you were dumb it was because you didn't make an effort to get smarter. Everyone in that classroom had the same opportunity to learn the same stuff. If you didn't learn it you didn't take advantage of the opportunity and as a result, you were offered fewer opportunities.

I do agree about people being told they are special and have unique abilities even when they don't - it's the "everyone who shows up gets a medal" syndrome. Those people go through school, passed along from one grade to the next without learning what they need, all the while being told they are great. Then they finish high school and find out they can't get into college because they didn't learn enough in high school (or even middle school). So they look for a job and can't find anything that pays more than minimum wage and wonder what happened to their specialness.

Standardized testing is an attempt to ensure that everyone learns at least the fundamentals. That dumbs down the classes to the lowest level because they don't want anyone left behind, which ultimately leaves the smarter kids behind because they aren't learning nearly as much as they are capable of learning. All this ultimately leads to the dumbing down of society at large.

the same time the a-holes who start the company do when it finally goes public.

Yes, science is intolerant of stupidity. It has to be or it wouldn't work.

Science requires critical thinking, learning, knowledge (not to be confused with belief, a frequent problem among religious and stupid people). It is based on reason and facts in the form of data. It recognizes the limitations of that data and seeks to improve it through more study, research, and experiment and will quickly throw away old ideas when they are shown to be wrong.

Yes, it is discriminatory. Yes, it is intolerant. These are both characteristics of disciplined intellectual effort and minds. These characteristics have led to all the technological advances that the human race currently enjoys, and many of the miseries (including AGW).

Some time in the last 40 years things changed in the US. When I was in high school in the mid 70s, if you were a dope they told you so, often in front of the rest of the class. Tests were handed out in order from highest to lowest scores so everyone knew who did best and worst. Back then it was understood that some people will never be smart and it was OK because the world needs ditch diggers, too. Kids were often flunked and held back in school when they didn't master the basics. Somewhere in that 40 year period people decided that that was a bad practice. Belief was raised to equal importance with knowledge, or I should say the meaning of knowledge was lost and confused with the meaning of belief, at least among school administrators. Now everyone's opinions have to be respected, even when they are obviously wrong. All critical thinking is gone because it is "discriminatory", as if discriminating between good ideas and bad ideas is a bad thing.

I find it an interesting coincidence that right wing politics and religion have partnered during the same period. A lack of critical thinking is exactly what those groups need most to maintain control of the people who follow them.

The feds have been suppressing weed for a long time. It's a natural cure, and as they say, it's da healin' of da nation!

"Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox lost $400 million worth of bitcoins in February."

The $400M is the same sort of BS number that the software anti pirating people use to generate interest in their cause (example: AutoCAD is widely pirated and costs several thousand dollars- every time it is pirated they count it as a loss of several thousand dollars business, except that most of the pirating is done by people who would never have purchased the software in the first place, so there is no loss of business). The only way there would be $400M worth of bitcoins is if the conversion of dollars to bitcoins minus the bitcoins to dollars conversion left $400M of real money tied up in bitcoins. I don't believe that has ever happened.

The $400M that is quoted is simply based on exchanging all the MtGox bitcoins for real money on the day they went missing, at whatever that exchange rate was. Of course, if someone had tried to convert all those bitcoins to real money in one day the exchange rate would plummet and they'd be lucky to get a tiny fraction of that $400M the press likes to throw around.

Bitcoins are as worthless, maybe more so than beany babies. At least beany babies can keep little kids and pets happy for a little while.

How is not delivering care to people who need it the "intended" result, and whose intention are we talking about?
The whole purpose of health insurance is to deliver care where and when it is needed. If it weren't so there would be no purpose for health insurance at all.

"There is no financial sense (even across the whole society possibly) to keep people alive when that would cost more than you can ever get back from them."

And how would you or anyone else know what you're ever going to be able to "get back" from someone? You're saying that society is better off if we let all the sick and injured suffer and die. Unless of course they are rich enough to pay for their own care. So the rich, who can afford care, should get insurance because we know that some day they'll be able to 'pay back" the cost of their treatment, and the poor should have no care because we likewise know that they will never be able to pay back the cost of treating them. You've got a formula for a truly wonderful society there.

I hope that health insurance covers treatment for your sociopathy. We'd all benefit if you could be cured. Who knows, you might some day even contribute enough to society to repay the cost of all that treatment. I'd be willing to take a chance on you.

I think you mean weight, which is what scales register because here on Earth we have this unavoidable thing called gravity. You can easily convert the weight as measured by a scale, to mass if you really want to. I'll leave it as an exercise for you to do a web search to find the gravitational acceleration on Earth.

" That's the way it usually works in a free market."

And then you use health insurance as an example of how insurance and society's goals are in alignment? You gotta be kidding! The free market brought us to the awful state we were in before Obamacare made a poor attempt to fix it. The insurers were denying coverage to people who were most in need. Theoretically they can't do that any more, but we'll see- they have an army of lawyers working out all the loop-holes they can find and things will probably degenerate to something as bad or worse than it was before.

oil companies make by fluffing the oil with propane. The insurers will catch on, raise their rates, and the problem will correct itself. For once the insurance company interests and those of society at large are aligned.

Comparing beany babies to old stamps or medieval scrolls is just silly. Beany babies were nothing special in any way, they had no historical significance, no utility, no rare or exotic materials, no special workmanship, and were mass produced as fast as they could be sold to "investors". It would be more realistic to compare them to the "rare, limited edition" plates with pictures of Elvis and similar junk that Franklin Mint churns out.

The only difference between beany babies and my poop is that beanie babies were promoted, my poop has not been, at least not yet. Posters like you are making me consider promoting my poop. There may be some money there, if only I can get a few suckers, er, I mean "investors", to recognize its value.

Characterizing an "investment" in bitcoins as a big risk is being very generous. Bitcoin was designed from the start to be a vehicle to steal from those gullible enough to convert real money into it.

I have a better investment idea- send me your money and I absolutely guarantee that you'll get 1/2 of it back. That's a better deal than you'll get with bitcoin! Does bitcoin offer a guaranteed return? Of course not.