I didn't presume he worked harder. I stated is a fact. There are people who work harder, even if you can say in every case "but did they?" The question presumes that there is a burden of proof to be met before they get more than an equal share. The world is full of people who work harder than the vast majority. Calling them criminals is just a footstep down the slippery slope to murdering them. You cannot change human nature just because it's "not fair."

You presume many things to be true in order to support your argument. They are not necessarily true, but they are necessarily speculative. The burden of proof is on you, and you haven't come close to meeting it.

Even those CEOs that fail though, got to where they are by not failing. Pretty much every single one went through that shit phase at least once.

Are they? Doesn't matter. There are people who think they are and are willing to pay them commensurately. Ultimately, "worth" of work is subjective, and determined by demand. Do you think it's worth 10x as much? Irrelevant. Your opinion doesn't matter, because you're not paying them.

There will always be people who do not have the skill to contribute to anything others find meaningful. Life isn't fair, and to those life isn't fair to: deal with it.

(Note, I may sound insensitive, but I have terminal cancer. Life wasn't fair to me, but I deal with it rather than complaining.)

How much do Kremlin astroturfers get paid?

And where exactly are you from? Some of the most accusatory reporting is coming from Europe.

The Ukrainian government isn't prohibiting access to the site. Ukrainian militants are.

I feel like I just read a Soviet era Pravda article.

"And this picture we see the tin pot wearing Johnny Appleseed and distributing Spam to all the starving earthworms in the New York subway system."

... the one that was done with a 'double blind' testing system, I'll pay attention to the results. Until then, there are far too many factors to establish any true cause/effect.

But I do know this ... living on a minimum wage salary has NEVER, in my entire 35 years in the labor force, been a 'living wage'. That's why most people learn new stuff and don't stay in it for more than a few months.

Or until they get motivated enough to find something else so they can move out of their mom's basement.

I have little sympathy for someone that can't find anything but a minimum wage job and then have to stay in it. I remember a few years ago when I saw a sign at a local fast-food place advertising a starting salary over $9/hour, a full $2 higher than the minimum wage at the time. When I looked behind the counter, I understood why, the staff was actually WORKING. The owner could afford the higher salary because he needed fewer people because they worked harder.

People with good attitudes and a willingness to learn don't make minimum wage for very long. People with limited skills who aren't very self-motivated do.

That's called 'competition' and it works very well. Subsidies (that is, paying more for something than it's worth) rarely work in the long term. They become crutches and excuses. The US has a long history of such failures .. student loans (increases tuition costs, created a price spiral, saddled thousands with high debt), housing subsidies (increased house prices and created a bubble), Cash for Clunkers (didn't do a damn thing), farm subsidies (can't get rid of the hidden tax that all US citizens that pay taxes pay for that ends up costing 50% of the population almost 3 times what the actual subsidy would be to them in terms of taxes and national debt), etc.

Too bad we haven't learned from these mistakes..

Notice that the guy who said it is an advertising guy. That's his whole worldview. That's the way he thinks it is and the way he thinks it should be. Meanwhile for the rest of us, we have lots of alternatives. Paid sites, community-supported sites, ad-blocked sites, sites run by people who love what they are running a site about.

Basically this is a little advertiser wanting us to support clubbing a big advertiser, Google. He'd like us to get mad at his competition. What he wouldn't like is for us to start noticing just how much what he is advocating is in his self-interest.

I recommend we all switch to ad-block and screw them all. If some sites die or have to switch funding models, works great for me.

Are you one of the people who pays no taxes?

Hopefully this is tongue-in-cheek, though I know there are actually those out there who wholeheartedly believe such tripe. Why not make execution the punishment for everything? Obviously that will stop crime, and is 100% justifiable.

Even if that's the case, how is any of that worse than what we have now?

They profit from them, but do not derive the same sort of power from them. That's why politicians and cops and prosecutors and corrections officers love criminalization of things everyday people do ... well ... every day.