The truth is, many unions *are* in fact extremely powerful and often self-serving, one of them put Hostess out of business last year, remember?

And nothing of value was lost. Hostess Bakeries had been on the verge of bankruptcy since 2004, also note that it's still in business and making twinkles as we speak. The "Old" Hostess Bakeries used its long-developing bankruptcy to justify defaulting on its pension obligations– for some reason it's bad to stop paying on a loan, but it's okay to break a contract with a pension administrator. Hostess filled the news with stories about "unreasonable union demands" as a fig leaf to avoid talking about their own decades-long mismanagement. They then used the bankruptcy court to shed themselves of their contracted union obligations, and proceeded to sell the brand to a hedge fund.

That said, I do believe the German Amazon workers should get overtime pay if they work overtime.

Right. They just shouldn't get OT through collective bargaining. Rather, Amazon should just give it to them out of the kindness of its heart. You don't think workers have a right to overtime, you think it should be a gift.

The slashdot homage showed me an AdChoices/AdSense banner for GoPro when I checked just now. CNN presently has a very nice background image ad for Volvo presented by Doubleclick, a Google subsidiary.

They buy Apples to save money?

They have a "you spend your own computer budget" policy, coupled with a company store, to save money.

Most 20th century "tyrannies" took power with the support of an armed general population.

Hitler famously banned guns, but what people don't mention is that he only banned guns for Jews, while restrictions for the population in general were relaxed— and this, more than five years after he took power. How could it have been any other way? Before World War II, the SA and SS were nothing more than private citizens engaged in gun clubs with very spiffy outfits. Radical authoritarian governments, from the French Revolution on, have needed the help of armed popular movements in order to disrupt normal political process and intimidate resistance. These movements are pointedly at-will, quasi-organized assemblies of people acting of their own free will who want to kill their neighbors. And while these movements would possibly coordinate with elements of the government, they were never subordinate to it, and authoritarian governments are constantly trying (and failing) to rein in their own hit squads.

Gun control laws in the general case don't seem to correlate with tyranny, it's only when certain classes of people are armed while others are not (wether by law or otherwise) that we've historically seen problems.

The Revolutionary War was about home rule, with specific points of contention over taxing of commodities, and the independence and impartiality of the judicial system. This is why most of the founders were importers, farmers and lawyers, silly.

Britons in the 18th century, with the exception of certain kinds of lese majeste, basically had free speech that any American would recognize.

I think it's kind of ironic that Facebook just applied for a frivolous patent for gathering and analyzing the information, but someone else already holds the frivolous patent for acting upon that information.

I see you've gone with the "vehemence" method of trying to convince people you're right. Normally you wouldn't be worth replying to, but someone else reading this thread might get some benefit.

Two of those "regulations" that makes a company "regulated' is that they a) have to very carefully specify exactly how they're making whatever-it-is, including precisely what's in it, and b) have to demonstrate in scientifically rigorous trials that it actually does more good than harm. So the chances of a REGULATED company selling you bad heart medication are vastly lower than those of an unregulated company doing it. A regulated drug producer can kill you if there's some accident, like a tainted batch. An unregulated one can kill you that way, or if they decided it would be cheaper to put a bit less of the active ingredient in, or change the process, or didn't have a reliable process in the first place, or were wrong about the drug working, or just made up the whole thing in the first place.

Don't think someone would make up imaginary treatments? Google "snake oil" and "homeopathy."

Yup. For the paper I'm reviewing at the moment the journal has helpfully sent a reminder five days after I agreed to review it. I appreciate their effort to reduce review times, but that's a bit ridiculous.

Tenure historically was important for arts and philosophy. The idea was that you could say things that were unpopular in safety because nobody could fire you.

Research professors don't really have terribly meaningful tenure anyway, because if you aren't performing you can't get grants and/or the university may deny you students. Either of those essentially means you're washed up.

You've got the problem right, but I disagree with the solution. We need to dilute professors.

Instead of being a postdoc for ten years and then either leaving broken and broke or scoring the big one (and getting to slave away for another twenty years as junior faculty...) make post doc a two year post-post-graduate thing. After that you become a professor. "Professor" stops meaning "old dude who writes grants" and starts meaning "person who does research and teaches." Grants get broken up into smaller pieces, so instead of one professor being responsible for keeping funding that keeps ten, fifteen or twenty students, post docs and techs fed, each professor gets personal operating funds. Professors have one or two students (or none) and do active research themselves.

The current position of "professor" is really a pretty crappy one that I don't think many who actually like doing science really want (I don't). What they DO want is the ability to apply for funding to support their research, get paid a reasonable wage, and maybe have students.

I've thought of the same thing. Put in the charter that all administrators must be academics in good standing, where good standing means they're doing productive research, as assessed by randomly assigned peer-reviewers.

Me too. I was unwise enough to choose to do longitudinal human research. I'm competing with people whose papers require data from ten mice over a couple of weeks. Or better yet, some Excel jockeying on data somebody else spent time collecting.

I got frustrated once and explained to the project PI (a physician) on a group teleconference once what had been done, and what had yet to be done, for a paper. There was silence, then "uh, that sounds like, uh, a lot of work."

Peer review. Which is how it's supposed to be done, except that the peer reviewers know that the administrators are going to count papers, and anyway, they can't take too much time to do a good job because they have to get some papers published.

The system needs some intelligence. Academic performance should be reviewed by peers rather than by numbers. Just like performance reviews in industry, a bright person or two taking a tour is a lot better than someone looking down the columns in a spreadsheet and seeing "comrade, you haven't made your bi-daily quota!"

Absolutely. Someone else already has the patent on adjusting prices depending on someone's net usage.