I think that is spending good money and cops that would be better spent on preventative work.
Hell, despite the fact that I share the Slashdot hivemind's distaste for police officers, if it reduces the mind-boggling trauma that surely comes from repeatedly looking at child porn, then it's worth it.
That's got to be immensely psychologically damaging.
If you have anchors using items with prominent logos, you aren't doing the news, you are doing advertising. Get out of the news business and become an advertiser.
Moreover, get out of the business of your ad sales people defining how your on-air talent does work. That's only marginally more infuriating than IT deciding how the staff they support/enhance do their work. At least IT has some concern over usability and productivity.
In both cases, when you have widespread contrariness, it's not due to the always present few knuckleheads who are dogmatically resistant to any change, it's due to a higher-up demanding that people change without appropriate training/input on how the change will negatively affect usability/productivity.
Technology is intended to support and enhance productive activity not define how productive activity takes place.
Typical provisions about how you can theoretically create a consumption tax to get around these issues, but what they are saying is the empirical truth. Consumption (or sales) taxes are inherently regressive. This means they disproportionately affect those who earn less money. When you increase a consumption tax from say 5% to 10%, the brunt of the real life effect will be on individuals who have less discretionary income. Those individuals spend more of their income on basic necessities therefore increasing the cost of those basic necessities will have an undue impact on those individuals.
Beyond whether the sub top whatever percent spend more money, since that is an empirical question. If someone earns $20k per year and spends $15k on basic or close to basic necessities on a tax rate of 5% on those necessities (~$14,286 pre tax), when you bump the tax rate to 10%, they now spend ~$15,714 on those same necessities. That's over $700 that the individual cannot now spend toward investing in their future or building a bankroll to insulate themselves from poor rolls at luck in the game of life.
To my non-trained eyes, there are two ways of challenging this accepted wisdom. One empirical question to challenge this accepted wisdom would be whether growth in what is considered basic necessities scale at such a rate that it will balance out the hit of the tax hike. This seems unlikely to me. Yes, the richer spend more on let's say food than the non-rich, but does someone who earns 10x the $20k earner spend 10x on food? Unlikely. The other empirical question that could challenge this accepted wisdom is whether spending on non-necessities for the richer scales up at a rate that would make up for the increase burden on the poor. I doubt this is the case either, but there are plausible stories one could concoct to lend it credibility. If you have more discretionary income, you're more apt to buy a new gadget or eat out a more expensive restaurant than you would otherwise be.
IMO, neither of those empirical questions adequately address the moral question of what is the impact on the poor. Even if it were the case that the person who earns 10x spends 10+x on food, that isn't something the state should really care about. If Joe Millionaire has to switch from the $100 bottle of wine to the $50 bottle of wine it doesn't rival the moral concern the state should show towards Joe Working Poor who is out $700 on the literal basic necessities they need to survive. When you have situations where the state decreases the ability of those struggling to succeed in life, then the state isn't living up to its obligations. But this is admittedly a moral concern, not an empirical one.
A classic Catch 22, customers can't update their browser because it will break all their apps, but vendors can't write modern apps because nobody has a browser that can run them.
May or may not be related to lock in from other products, but at the medical library where I work, our proxy runs into problems with the hospital's computers who use an ultra old version of IE. It didn't crop up until the larger hospital network gobbled up so many clinics and hospitals that had to get a new IP range and we weren't going to automatically parse their new range as being on our network, since it wasn't and definitely a potential copyright liability.
It took the hospital IT ~6mo to acknowledge the problem and eventually tell us to dumb down our proxy to suit their needs since IE6 apparently has a bug where if SSL2 and SSL3 are enabled it won't use the one that works.
I don't do that sort of work, but I sense that there was probably some slight misconfiguration on our IT's end yet the brunt of the blame goes to the hospital who didn't investigate until (a) we finally had a gaggle of heads of departments screaming about not being able to access clinically relevant information and (b) had mostly figured out the problem on our own.
I doubt they'll upgrade any time soon and we'll still get a stream of new employees complaining about us not having IE6 installed on our computers so they can go through their orientation.
ISPs used to advertise contention ratios on ADSL, but they stopped for this reason: your 1:50 contention ratio looks really bad next to your competitor's 1:10 contention ratio, but they don't advertise that the contended link for them is a tenth the speed of yours.
This only matters when there's competition tho...
. That means that researchers and scholars woldwide lost access to a vital research tool. And as a response, and to protect the rest of the world's access, they finally had to cut off MIT's access. He was screwing with people doing medical research. People *die* because cutting edge research gets held back for bonehead reasons.
If we're being precise, JSTOR is mostly a database of humanities journals. If we were talking about Web of Science or Scopus, then sure, perhaps that could've occurred. Even if it were a biomedical oriented database, very, very, very rarely will any doctor involved in point of care service try to find a journal article on anything. They will largely be using point of care oriented databases like Clinical Key which provide actionable information rather than benign background which isn't altogether relevant to a particular patient's needs.
In February 1992, Stella Liebeck ordered a cup of coffee to go from McDonalds. Liebeck was sitting in the passenger seat of her nephew's car, which was pulled over so she could add sugar to her coffee. While removing the cup's lid, Liebeck spilled her hot coffee, burning her legs. It was determined that Liebeck suffered third degree burns on over six percent of her body. Originally, Liebeck sought $20,000 in damages. McDonalds refused to settle out of court. However, they should have. Liebeck was ultimately awarded $200,000 in compensatory damages, which was reduced to $160,000 because she was found to be twenty percent at fault. She was also awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages.
NSFW, but check out these burns and see if they look trivial. Also the documentary Hot Coffee wonderfully explains why this isn't a trivial lawsuit.
In 2003, Richard Schick sued his former employer, the Illinois Department of Public Aid. Schick sought $5 million plus $166,700 in back pay for sexual and disability discrimination. In fact, Shick was so stressed by this discrimination that he robbed a convenience store with a shotgun. A jury felt his pain and awarded him the money he was seeking. The decision was then reversed. Unfortunately, the $303,830 he was still awarded isn't doing him much good during the ten years he's serving for armed robbery.
In scanning through the case, the boss seemed to be a vindictive asshole who had him remove a sleeping bag he had in the break room to deal with sleep apnea, moved the copy machine close to his desk to interfere with his hearing aid, in addition to numerous other complaints. Sure, the dude surely could've done things to combat some of his issues (carpel tunnel can be mitigated with proper exercises), but the boss should probably not be a dick.
To do nothing is to be nothing.
