People are poor by definition, when we are born, we are born with nothing.Bullshit. Tell that to trust-fund babies. You are so clueless it's not even funny.

They're probably Koch Industries sock-puppets. :/

What's wrong with that? The vast majority of the planet has a far healthier work-life balance than we here in the US have. Time to take your blinkers off.

One could say the same about Carly Fiorina. That didn't stop her from destroying HP. It doesn't logically follow that, just because someone is hired for a certain position, s/he is actually deserving of or qualified for said position.

I agree with everything except the telecommuting bullet-point (with which I am in *qualified* disagreement. My qualification is that working from home should be OK, but only on company-issued hardware, with the restrictions you listed (e.g., disabled USB ports) and I would add the use of something like a Sonicwall connected downstream from your home ISP's gateway.

How about the fact that some analyst over at the NSA may take note of the fact that you might like to read articles critical of said three-letter agency and make a note to flag it for future analysis? By knowing what kinds of articles you like to read on Slash, various intelligence and law-enforcement agencies can compile a lot of blackmail material if you were ever to prove a nuisance down the line.

In fact, only people at the very top of the income distribution should be exempt from overtime pay -- think A-list actors and professional athletes. The vast majority of workers should be paid overtime. *cue bullshit libertarian arguments about how this abrogates free-market capitalism*

Hopefully the phase-in of autonomous vehicles will bring about an end to rush-hour. It's a ridiculous misallocation of resources to have major arteries clogged maybe four hours of the day and underutilised the remaining 20. And all because most businesses cling tenaciously to anachronistic 8a-5p 'business hours' in many parts of the Western world. Flextime and telecommuting should be the rule. The whole convention of set business hours is about nothing more than the PTB controlling the lives of the unwashed masses.

Agreed. And the fact that IE12 will have a new extension engine finally puts it at feature parity with Chrome and Firefox. Microsoft is getting back in the game, and Apple seems to be coming out with ho-hum, me-too tweaks of existing products rather than anything truly new. Stuff happens in cycles. That's what keeps things exciting.

Who on earth would be trying to run a modern release of Windows on pre-2003 hardware, anyway? Stuff of that vintage is only useful for historical curiosity, or at best running a stripped-down Linux distro. Given that CPU's that old had a horrible power/performance ratio, it would be cheaper in the long-run to spend the couple hundred bucks on newer equipment.

Until lemon laws for computer-related products become pervasive, this shit will continue. Manufacturers are able to skirt liability and hide behind nebulous EULA's.

Hierarchy goes hand-in-hand with specialisation of roles in a society. Even in a hunter-gatherer society, the more physically endowed were hunters whilst the frailer members of the band gathered or engaged in child-care; even in pre-agricultural times, larger groups certainly had various factions even if they viewed other factions as peers. As agriculture took hold and a warrior caste developed, the more physically-armed members of society (or those were were under the protection of such) could keep the rabble down via the threat of violence.

Sounds like your ideas on development are just as atavistic and misguided as the ones you have regarding economics. I see a trend here.

Before I work on someone's machine, I ask that person to close all windows that may have sensitive content s/he may not want me to see. This policy establishes a certain amount of trust with the user. Put the onus on the user to determine what s/he considers private and sensitive. Easy-peasy, and it only takes 30 seconds.

Don't worry, there are some of us for whom your irony didn't escape us. :)