rick888

"They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization."

really? REALLY?

"They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right."

It's sad to see that people can't take responsibility for their own actions. Taking out a loan for a college degree is a gamble. You are not guaranteed a job and nobody has ever told you that this would be the case.

"They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay."

If I, as a software developer, protested because people on bittorrent are outsourcing my labor (IE: downloading it for free from someone else), how would people from this group respond? They would tell me that I'm not owed a wage and that times are changing. My response to the above is exactly the same.

"They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press."

LOLOLOLOL..sorry I'm still laughing about this one..LOLOLOL. You get more freedom of speech in the US than anywhere else in the world. You can freely say anything you want about any political figure and you won't get arrested. There also isn't any firewall blocking political speech. No newspaper is government-owned as far as I know. The funny thing is that most left-leaning countries are all about more government control..including the press.

I could go on, but I don't want to waste any more time. It's just as I thought: This group is mostly comprised of self-entitled brats. If they were actually fighting for a real cause, I might be interested in taking them even a little seriously.

I just bought my own health insurance because I'm self-employed and I'm only paying $80/month. I can pay $150 and have doctor visits/prescriptions mostly covered.

You must have had lots of health problems in the past or your are lying about that number.

I actually might consider getting a job at Mcdonalds if I was working on a startup (if I could make enough money to survive).

I could zone out and not waste any of my creative energy during the day and work on my own stuff when I got home.

This is a typical response from someone with the social skills of a child. But this seems too common these days..

"a business has never been entitled to the full value of a person's enjoyment of a product"

..and a user has never been entitled to the full enjoyment of a business's product. But it doesn't seem to stop articles like this from being written or large amounts of users to just steal it anyway.

I'm good with this, if you and everyone else who believe this also agrees that if I use your source code in my proprietary app (no matter the license), it's just the "shifting sands of humanity".

"The market."

It does, but when you rely on a subset of the market that will never pay for your stuff anyway, the value is more than just a little skewed.

"Honey badger don't care, and neither do I."

Good. I don't like paying taxes because they are just too expensive..so I don't.

It's funny because when businesses do the same thing with workers (the american programmer is too expensive, so we just decided to hire from India), people get all upset.

"Our economics are traditionally based on finite resources"

The finite resources aren't the final product, but the work that goes into it. Create Adobe Photoshop for me (not copy, but build from scratch).

"this is where the future is heading"

I no longer write applications. Everything I release is a service. In the past, there would have only been a one-time fee for my work, but now everyone needs to pay a monthly fee for it.

This is the result of piracy: monthly fees for everything.

When the guy that wrote the thesis theme for Wordpress was being demonized for violating the GNU license, people used the word "steal" and "theft", even though no code was actually stolen.

It's interesting to me because when something involves free software being used in un-intended ways, many here in the HN community have no problem describing it as theft. However, when it involves copyright violation, there are huge arguments about word usage.

This is just a tactic to make theft more acceptable. When you use nice words like "copyright infringement", people don't associate negativity with it and over time, people don't have a problem with it.

Over the course of the last 10 years, it seems to have worked. It's sad that many from the open source community have to be so hypocritical.

Also,

Identity theft is still called theft, even though your identity is not actually stolen.

I feel bad for these families, but nothing really has changed. The officers are just enforcing existing immigration laws. There are legal ways of getting into the US and more immigrants should use this route in the future or suffer the consequences of getting booted out of the country.

In most other countries in the world, the same thing will happen.

This is why I stopped freelancing and moved onto making my own products. It's not worth the hassle of chasing down clients.

well, the organizers didn't come out and say it was false, now did they. (for some reason my other post is -1)

It's a valid thought. it's popular enough so you know they've seen it, yet they haven't denied it or stopped spreading the propaganda.

well, the organizers didn't come out and say it was false, now did they.

..because the people that are protesting are hugely mis-informed and come off like entitled kids?

After hearing stories about people protesting because they weren't guaranteed a job after college and are now in debt, I can't take the protesters seriously. This and the fact that they don't seem to be protesting for any solid reason.

"If you do not have a tax card, the employer must withhold 60% of your salary for taxes without allowances."

Sounds great. Where can I sign up!

Like communism, it sounds good on paper, but not in reality. Huge taxes creates a generation of people that depend on the system to survive. Over time, the system will eventually collapse because there aren't enough people putting money back into the system.

It also means the government has more control over you. The more money they take, the less freedom you have over your own money. You are also supporting a government monopoly. I'm surprised that all of the people that are against monopolies like Microsoft are fine with the same thing happening with the government.

I also don't see very many startups coming out of Denmark. Why is that?

We still need government controls and taxes, just not to the levels of Denmark.

Is anyone surprised here? Denmark has the highest taxes in the world. It's just one more thing the government wants to control.

..and you are basing an individuals total tax rate based on income tax alone, which doesn't account for the many other taxes that someone has to pay.

I suppose if you made money, didn't live in a house, and didn't spend your money in any way, your tax rate would be 50% in France. This just isn't the case for the average consumer.

"Women own about 40 percent of the private businesses in the United States, according to the Center for Women's Business Research"

Okay, can the women's groups stop complaining then? Or does this number need to be 100% before they will stop complaining about "disparity" and "inequality".

from the actual CEO in the comments:

"Michael, CEO and Founder of Grouper here.

Sam - We set you up on an actual Grouper (of which we've done over 200). You, without warning, arrived with cameras and a fourth person then told the girls you were going to use their real identities in your piece. They promptly stormed out, immediately called us to complain about this (and that you were disrespectful to boot), and demanded a refund (which we of course granted them).

We never showed you our matching process or logistics engine (we gave you a single screen shot of one admin dashboard - off the record).

This is irresponsible journalism.

Also, I would kindly request an apology to the three poor girls (who were actual members who we never met) whose night you ruined.

If anyone has any more questions about Grouper I'd be more than happy to answer them.

- Michael michael@joingrouper.com"

It sounds like the guy that wrote this article is the asshole here.

This doesn't include VAT and increased taxes in other areas, so personal income tax might be 50%, but you are actually paying a much higher rate.

70%+ taxes, no thanks. I thought this was HN, not reddit...

If Obama is your idea of a Republican, I don't want your idea of a Democrat in office...ever.

Are you legally allowed to even do that? Do you store card data yourself?

I have a problem with using merchant startups. If they go out of business, what happens to my clients? If I have thousands of clients, I would not want to be forced to get all of their credit card info again (since I wouldn't be storing any of that info).

Although I hate using the big guys, at least I know they will be around in 5+ years.

I stopped pirating 5 years ago because of all of the streaming services out there (grooveshark, last.fm, pandora), and somethimes youtube.

It's called an opinion. Why has this suddenly become illegal now?

I had the same problem. This is why I feel that it's better to save 6 months-year of salary and quit.

If you are interested in tech, Ann Arbor is really the place to be in Michigan. Lots of startups and also a great university.

Some areas of Detroit are OK, but if you don't know your way around, it can get real bad real fast. I know at least three people that got robbed at gunpoint in the last couple of months.