Oh good grief. 15 years after the DotCon implosion, when industry leaders and Congress responded to the collapse in tech employment by ramping up H-1b guest worker visas, we're supposed to believe this is news?
Except that the company reneges or loopholes you on the back end, like millions of people getting canned just before being able to retire.
Reneges is breach of contract. We have pretty good laws against that. Canned before being able to retire is a poor contract. We have systems to avoid that.
How about the company pays 3 months salary for the first two weeks of work as a contract and if you both like what you got you stick around.
That's like paying for training. I was suggesting the reverse where the employee takes the risk but the company sinks in money. Your system is not a compromise just better for employees completely. Which I'd be in favor of but that would require law.
Why do my modpoints always disappear whenever someone comes up with something worthy of them?
Which raises the cost of college thus ending up in a wash for the most part.
How does reducing interest rates on debt increase college costs?
As for food safety: http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITI...
As for smoking I disagree with you. Testing I don't know what you mean about so far it doesn't look good, major improvement. Why wouldn't Obama get credit for gulf oil compensation? Etc... I don't think you are scoring fairly here. My point being yes they do stuff for the middle class.
Freedom of speech is the freedom to communicate without being harassed by government thugs.
Just because you cannot distribute other people works without their permission doesn't mean you are not free to "communicate", you just have to communicate your own speech.
Whether they're your own words or data is irrelevant.
If is isn't your speech, then why do you think you should have a right to repeat it when the person who did say it says you can't? It is quite relevant if the words are your own or not.
I think it's rather absurd to say that your freedom of speech should be restricted merely because other people don't want you to quote them or transfer data they assembled.
What you think is absurd isn't relevant. The concept of "freedom of speech" is what we're talking about here. If the words belong to someone else, they aren't yours to exercise "freedom of speech" over, they're someone else's. If it isn't your "person, papers, or property", then you can't claim your fourth amendment rights are being violated when the cops confiscate your neighbor's car. You can jump up and down and yell about hey they violated HIS fourth amendment rights, but they didn't violate yours.
Humans make copies of things all the time; it's in their nature.
What a remarkable red herring. Making copies of things has nothing to do with "freedom of speech", especially when it isn't your own speech you are copying, and when the issue isn't copying but distributing.
Tell me how a flat tax of 10% on *everyone's* income starting at the first dime is manipulation.
You are taxing income but not capital gains. Which means you are creating a massive incentive for people to create situations where they take short term loses but build capital in their investment thereby offset their income. So for example it becomes highly profitable to sell my house to a 3rd party before doing extensive home repairs then buy it back while he charges me huge rent fees (i.e. negative income). It becomes the norm for companies to not pay dividends but do stock buybacks. It distorts the market by favoring equity over debt: in investors directly leverage up rather than companies leveraging up.
The other thing is of course you are taxing income but not property. So you are encouraging property to stay underutilized. Japan has traditionally had this problem where very valuable real estate doesn't go to its rational (i.e. highest disposition).
The third thing is you are forcing more direct government intervention. The government right now is able to shift societal resources by offering tax incentives. By getting rid of those you force the government to directly buy things and pass them out which is likely to increase cronyism.
Fourth, the tax you propose isn't very progressive. 10% isn't going to cover the current size of government, it would likely have to be more in the 30-40% range. That's going to hit the lower middle -upper middle class very hard.
Then go for it and show that it's a viable model.
I don't know if it is, yet, because of the successes of the copyright cartel.
Cop out. Nothing in the "copyright cartel" (whatever that is supposed to be) stops you from producing a big-budget motion picture under CC licensing, nor does it stop anyone else. You'll claim that it is a viable model, but when challenged to use it you'll admit that you don't know that it is because nobody else has done it yet. The fact nobody else has done it yet is your excuse it cannot be done.
What does stop people from doing this is the knowledge the people who actually have the money to do such a thing have: that they'd be spending a lot of money and never get it back. They couldn't charge for a DVD of the movie because lots of someone's who didn't have a huge up-front cost of producing the movie could undercut their pricing. Any "merchandising" opportunities would be filled by a similar large number of companies where the costs of developing the characters and advertising the initial concepts didn't need to be recouped from the chachkis. Some people would go to see the movie in theaters, but many more would simply wait for it to appear for free on TV, just like what happens today.
No, it isn't a viable model. THAT'S why nobody has done it yet. Not because of some mythical "copyright cartel" that prevents someone from doing it.
Then what is it when websites are taken down for copyright infringement, or when people are punished for using their own equipment to send data around?
Freedom of speech does not mean the freedom to reproduce the speech of others when those others do not wish you to do so. It means the freedom for YOU to speak YOUR WORDS, not using a copy of a movie produced through a great deal of hard work and much money by someone else.
Then go for it and show that it's a viable model.
I don't know if it is, yet, because of the successes of the copyright cartel.
You can't permanently band people from Steam when all you need to create a new account is an e-mail address. People will just use a new throwaway account for hacking
So what? It still magnifies the cost substantially.
The way to go is to make getting a pass to play online painfully difficult.
I don't think even Valve can get away with that.
If a bunch of dudes 2000+ years ago could talk directly to the Abrahamic God, and one in particular through a burning bush, why not some dude in the modern days through a computer?
Because his OS doesn't have networking?
Try living with a serious mental illness for a while and then get back to us, mkay? It's not as easy as you think.
You're saying that to a slashdotter? YMBNH
Just in the last 6:
Allowed middle class children to stay on their parent's insurance (Obamacare)
Student debt interest decreases via. kicking the banks out...
Rescued the auto industry and thus saved about 1m middle class jobs
Repealed don't ask don't tell (many was an issue for officers so I'm calling that middle class)
Credit card reform
Food safety (a major middle class concern)
Kept up the pressure on smoking (both poor and middle class mainly benefit)
Developed next generation school testing
Gulf Oil spill compensation (many many small businesses)
Huge expansion of broadband to rural America
and I could easily keep going.
Most people don't need their drive to be that fast. We'd all like faster storage, but HDDs are so slow that a fairly slow SSD is still pretty speedy.
"The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception a neccessity." - Oscar Wilde
