Ridiculous. You "re-negotiate" your salary every time you ask for a raise. If your company won't give you a raise, then you should look for work elsewhere. And if you can't find work elsewhere, maybe you should consider forming a union so you have some negotiating power. The shareholders who own your company pooled their resources to increase their leverage, why don't you?

True, but corporations can do the exact same thing to their employees. They can, and they quite frequently do. Why not protect yourself from that?

I'm not the OP, but he's pretty clearly not making an argument about which pats of the total compensation are fixed and which are not; but rather that it doesn't matter whether your compensation is entirely in the form of salary, or partially salary and partially 'benefits'; a cut is a cut, and is grounds for "re-negotiation" using any (legal) means at your disposal.

Of course you didn't--it's not your salary that's being cut. If your employer planned on cutting your salary, and you had the leverage to prevent it, would you use it, or just meekly take the cut?

You know, if you switched to running companies into the ground, you could probably make 10 times your current pay.

Perhaps not. But I don't think the average office suite is as pompous as the average LaTeX user either, so it's still unclear whether intelligence or pomposity is the greater driver of Latex usage.

My brother is doing a PhD in history, and neither he, nor anyone he knows, has any idea what Latex is. But this is Slashdot, so there are good odds that you think Math and Science are the only worthwhile intellectual endeavours

Format copying. The bane of my existence.

I use Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Alt-Shift-F10, then select whichever option (Keep Text Only, usually) from the drop-down context menu. That key-combo (Alt-Shift-F10) is used in Office, Excel, and Visual Studio; and probably others as well.

Care to elaborate on why population density would matter? I think the more immediate problem is that the Estoninan system is built on top of a National ID card, which Canada does not have.

Why tax large corporations more? The wealth they generate will ultimately end up in the hands of shareholders, right? Most of those share holders will be 'the rich', but some of them will be normal people holding shares directly or through mutual funds.

If you were to hire someone to kill another person, you would not be charged with murder, you would be charged with conspiracy to commit murder. In other words, it's not the violence (which the 'hirer' did not commit) that gets you in trouble; it's the intent. Similarly, when people incite violence, they (conceptually) are punished for their intent to cause violence, regardless of the means.

Christ, you're really banging the moral relativism drum today aren't you? :P

I will argue that looting is bad regardless of one's morals, since condemnation is built into the meaning of the word. Someone who wanted to describe the activity, but who thought it was acceptable, would use a different word, like 'confiscate', 'take', 'retrieve', 'gain', 'earn', 'win' etc.

The mindless IT drone looks at the mindless office drone and congratulates himself on his superiority.