As far as I am aware, and I could be wrong, all union membership is voluntary in the United States. Membership in certain trade organizations, like Professional Engineering, is not, but that's another issue entirely. But let us not limit a collectives capabilities to bargain. If they have the strength to negotiate a contract with a corporation that says the company can not hire non-union workers, then more power too them.

Harm is amoral and illegal, and also is no more a side affect of unionization than it is a side affect of any other activity.

Before becoming a software engineer I worked in a Union shop that included in it's compensation performance based reviews (I chose not to be a union member but I was still subject to the same compensation regulations). Seniority is a valid basis, as you shouldn't be keeping people that are not affective, but performance can easily be included as well.

The fuzziness in the normal relationship is what causes compensation to be based off of personal interactions and socialization, rather than based on performance. And though I have spent a lot of time perfecting the art of communication, I disagree with compensation being based on friendliness, when high performing individuals are lesser compensated because they lack certain social skills.

Now I can't prove my competence in a slashdot post, but I am a software engineer that fully supports unionization.

I am fairly compensated, as I do a good job of negotiating what I believe I am worth. But there is more to unionization than compensation. Though I do support collective bargaining (which does not need to be seniority based, and can be performance based).

Unionization can be used as a tool to bring product quality back into the hands of those that produce the product. Having a union to collectively support only quality changes should improve overall product quality.

Unionization is a tool that can be utilized. I would much rather have more tools at my disposal than less (though we need not use every tool for every task).

Just remember that the corporation is bargaining against you, as there goal is to maximize profit, and they are doing it collectively. If you want to even the score you do your bargaining collectively. But corporations have also done a great job to convince the American people that Unions are bad and lazy, so I doubt I'll be changing any minds here.

Lastly, Unionization is fully in-line with Libertarian ideology, even the Neo Libertarians of the US Libertarian party, and the likes of Ron Paul. Collective bargaining is an important tool that allows capitalism to be successful.

That's pretty much how the inhabitants of the alien planet our going to feel when they discover us. Or maybe they already have, but are smart enough to stay away.

If you had read the entire thread you would see that this is the exact thing that I am promoting. The original argument was that someone called it capitalism, someone else said, no it's not. Then someone chimed in to say that the same thing happened with communism, where sovietism, stalinism, and maoism are used as examples of failed communism, even though they were never communist, and never claimed to be communist. They were hardly socialist, and there failures had nothing to do with socialism. This same thing will happen with capitalism.

I'm on your side and wish people would stop blaming the failures on a system because of improper implementation or improper use of a word. More importantly, we should stop worrying about titles and labels and instead focus on the affects of actions. This is not a failure or capitalism, socialism, statism, corporatism, authoritarianism, or what ever ism is the enemy of the moment. This is most likely a failure of regulation (I'll let those that care more than I to fight over it being over or under regulation, though I'd put my money on it just being improper regulation).

I don't think that I would say facebook is a pyramid scheme by definition (though if you use the promise of notoriety or acceptance as your currency then maybe) but it does have the same fatal flaws as a pyramid scheme.

Facebook acquires it's revenue by sale of personal information (direct or aggregate I can't say for sure). This information has continued diminishing returns as each new bit about a person becomes less valuable once you have a significant profile. The only way to continue revenue growth, through sellable information, is to continue to gather fresh information. This can only happen by adding more people's data, not more data on the same people. More people only join if you can give an incentive to the current users to stay as members and/or have them convince their associates to join and share their information. Eventually you run out of new people, and revenue drops do to the aforementioned diminishing returns.

Facebook already knows all this so its not like I'm sharing any big secret, which is exactly why they are looking to double in size now, so that they can bring in enough fresh information (new users) sooner rather than later. The are creating their own stock bubble, and they are well aware of that.

Yet once it does collapse, and it will, the supporters of capitalism will be out explaining about how it was not capitalism that failed, because capitalism was never truly implemented. I won't even say that they would be wrong, but it's the exact same thing that happens on the Communist side of the argument.

I personally don't accept the argument that what we have is good enough so lets not try for better, but that's pretty much was you are saying with your comparison between Capitalism and cleanliness. The system we have right now, be it capitalism, or corporatism, or some ism in between, is not doing as well as possible for the overall well being of humanity. Let us stop worrying about titles and start thinking about how the system can be improved.

I think you just made his point. If you support Capitalism then of course any failures will be labeled as an unrelated economic system. If you are a supporter of Communism then of course any failures will be labeled as also being because of an unrelated system. Corporatism is as equal to capitalism as Stalinism is to Communism.

And so if history has shown us anything, capitalism will be written of as a failure that should never be attempted again, just as communism was. Not because capitalism is a bad idea (my personal opinion aside), but instead because there are nuances to economic systems that need to be understood and refined.

I happen to agree with sentiment, though I'd probably be a little more polite about it. The question is, would you be willing to pay more to have someone do the sorting for you? Maybe two grades of service. I know that I would be willing to pay more to not have to sort the stuff, but I certainly don't want recycling and composting programs to go away.

But since the free market will solve all problems, I have to assume that there is little demand for trash sorting or else someone would be offering the services for a nominal fee.

I disagree about there being subjects that cannot be expressed on slashdot, but we'll just agree to disagree on that one.

The problem with a "Wrong" moderation is that many of the comments are a matter of opinion, and opinions are by definition, never wrong. The best approach to deal with misinformation is to respond and supply supporting evidence to the alternate view. If done correctly the correction to the misinformation will get moderated up and be at least as visible as the incorrect information.

Also try not to confuse moderation with censorship, they are very different. Moderation does not remove the ability to view the content, it simply gives some guidance as to the quality of the content.

This is not actually true under the slashdot moderation system. One of the advantages to this system is that the is no such thin as oblivion. The worst the moderation can get is -1. Anyone can read comments moderated at -1, and in most case those interest in the unpopular opinion will do just that. Those interested in the popular opinion will only see the popular opinion, but even without moderation they will most likely tend toward that. What the group moderation does is allows the group as a whole to point out things of interest, and to suppress things that they believe to detract from the conversation.

Putting moderation into the hands of a select few, like on a traditionally moderated site, does not change this, accept that the opinion that is allowed to be seen is the opinion of the select few, not the community as a whole.

If you notice the moderation system does not have any options for "Right" and "Wrong", and from what I understand, this was done for good reason. The purpose of the moderation system, on slashdot, is not to determine the correctness of a statement but to determine the readability of the statement. If a person moderates a post upward it's because they believe the statement is worth reading, regardless of whether or not the agree with the statement or believe it to be factual.

It's far worse that people use the negative mods such as "Flamebait" and "Troll" to down moderate statements they disagree with. But I think in the overall moderation you will find that this is relatively rare. The slashdot moderation happens at such a high volume, and includes meta moderation, that the group as a whole ends up with the result that the majority agrees with. This, in my opinion, is far better than having a select set of the populous deciding what is or is not important to the rest of us.

Take some time to go back and read some older posts. You will see that the moderation is actually pretty reasonable and accurate. You may not agree with ever bit of moderation, but over all it ends up to be a reasonable representation of the interests of the people that visit Slashdot.

Banging-hot? Maybe to a carpenter, or someone else used to nailing boards. Though the low self-esteem that usually comes along with being underweight does make for girls willing to do some crazy shit to get the attention and approval they never got earlier in life.

He would be a fool to think such a things, since self-education shows a dedication that a college graduate will rarely ever have. The self educated is more likely to be up on recent technologies. In fields like programming, the education system wastes a large portion of the person time on information that is at best not applicable, and at worst detrimental (If you've ever had to deal with a custom implementation of a sort algorithm in a business software project, then you'll understand what I mean).

Yet both the most powerful Jedi's in the series never completed their training. But I guess self-education is your equivalent to the dark side.

I believe this depends on what we are calling the top 1%. In my experience this is not based on income, but based on net worth. I happen to know people who are clearly in the top 1% on both of those measures, yet oddly not the same people. Most of the people I know that are in the top 1% by net worth, have relatively little income, being only that generated by capital gains, which has even been negative at times. Those that I know in the to 1% of income earnings have negative equity, thought that is sure to change over time. Also your measure of 280k a year is not your typical lawyer or doctor. The average pay for a lawyer is around 100k, and doctors around 150k. And that's not taking into account the amount of debt that is accrued to gain such titles.

Point being, entering into the 1% is not necessarily easy, and even if it were, it does not make wealth disparity a viable approach to modern civilization. There are enough resources available for every single person, at least in the United States, to live a comfortable life. There are enough jobs, if we, as a society, chose to provide a living wage for reasonable work. reduce the work day to 6 hours, as some suggest, and you get a 25% increase in jobs. Heck reducing the work day by one hour is enough to eradicate unemployment. If your society does not have enough work for everyone, then the problem is one of distribution, not availability.

You can interpret the Constitution how ever you would like, just understand that if you are not going to take it literally then you have to understand that your interpretation is not the only interpretation, and that your interpretation may not be the correct interpretation, or most valuable interpretation. You have chosen to interpret keep, as ownership, while use is also a perfectly valid interpretation of the word keep (I can keep in my possession, items that I do not own, as is done on nearly all leased items in the world). You have chosen to interpret private property as ownership of private property, where as a valid interpretation would again be based on use (a rental property is private to the person renting, but is not owned by that person).

I don't believe anyone would argue your points on case law, but the issue at hand was constitutionality. There are many examples of case law that have been found to be unconstitutional. There are many examples of case law that is not regulated by the constitution (which really should be up to the states in most cases, but I digress).

Let us also not forget that the constitution is a few years old now, and has quite likely out lived it's usefulness. We have entered into the territory of the dead ruling the living. It's possibly that it might be time for the constitution to be rewritten or replaced. I'm not proposing either, just saying that just because it's in the constitution does not mean it is appropriate for the current generation of citizens.