wfo

>In the US, employees must still be paid minimum wage. Depending on the state, an employer may count tips toward this amount. If an employee reports $0 in tips, the employer must pay them $7.25/hr. While I would like to believe that what you say is true, I find it hard to be true.

Sure this is technically correct according to the way the law is written but it ignores the reality which is that a large group of criminals ignore the law on a daily basis and face no consequences. Wage theft is MASSIVE and widespread across America especially for low wage workers, who often rely on tips (but it even effects high wage workers too!). More money is stolen in the US through wage theft than all other methods combined. Business owners (especially small business owners) steal from their employees by not paying them when they quit (oh I guess we just lost your last paycheck, sorry, we'll get it to you soon I promise), stealing tips, intimidating employees into not reporting wages under the minimum, refusing to pay legally mandated overtime or refusing to allow legally required breaks or a variety of other ways owners can use their power to illegally extract unpaid labor from their employees.

The solution is to abolish tips and require business owners pay their workers fair wages, or help the workers bargain collectively to ensure this themselves.

The skills that get you straight As in school are trying, being organized, dedicated to seeing things through, and being willing to work hard. That's it. It's just a question of priorities.

I think the big answer here is that there is something that causes both not caring about school and succeeding in "innovation" and business. It's called "wealth" and is the most effective predictor of any kind of success.

Americans are always looking for get rich quick schemes. We love to hear the story, "working hard is for suckers, just have a good idea one time and you'll be a billionaire" -- it lets us blame the poor for being poor (the cornerstone of American economic culture) because they obviously just aren't smart enough to come up with a good idea. We like to say "getting As is for suckers, you don't need it" because we want to feel better than those nerds in school who wasted their energy and time trying hard.

Sure that makes sense if when I drive to work I say to myself "I know it's illegal to drive a car because it kills people, but I don't really care who I kill because I want to save a couple of bucks".

And then following that I say "also I'll sell my driving services to hundreds of thousands but lie to them about how I get them to work, because if they knew I was driving they'd balk because they don't want blood on their hands"

And then following that I say "also I'll invest in complex technology to hide my car from the police so that I will never be caught"

With those minor modifications your scenario is a totally reasonable analogy.

Yes, huge swaths of ultra desperate people struggling to survive who rob and mug others is definitely analogous to a tiny cabal of ultra powerful, ultra wealthy publishers that could do any number of things but choose to leech millions off the public good.

You are introducing desperation to the scenario, which is totally inappropriate. Unless you know of some publishing house executives who are struggling to put food on the table or homeless?

Also, are you saying you wouldn't blame the mugger?

Yes, obviously. Far worse. Are you seriously suggesting that intentionally poisoning thousands or millions is less bad than assaulting one? One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic, right? That's literally Stalin discussing mass murder.

If someone has the power to poison a whole nation, with that power comes equal responsibility for their actions. If they act in good faith, we tend to forgive their mistakes, even if they have disastrous consequences. But there's no good faith here. We know he intended to poison them.

There is no serious ethical justification for considering a mugging to be worse. None has been presented here. We just naturally 'feel' that when the powerful commit crimes, these are mistakes (they are not). When the weak commit crimes, they need to be put in their place, because the weak and poor breaking the law is abhorrent to our neoliberal ideology -- the rich are supposed to assault the poor, this is just how things are. The opposite is unthinkable.

With a functioning justice system or government or social structure, with blame comes punishment and consequences that deter future behavior.

If top researchers refused to publish in or advocate their department pay for closed-access journals, they would die.

If the NSF required NSF funding could not be used to generate work that would be published in closed-access journals, they would die.

If the justice department broke up these journals for the public good or we simply made it impossible for certain IP regulations to apply to scientific research, they would die.

All of these actions require first to acknowledge there is a problem, second to blame corporations running closed-access journals, third to destroy them. You can't skip the second step.

>Blaming the publishers is not very useful, they are just acting according to their self interest.

Blaming the person who mugged you at gunpoint is not very useful, he is just acting according to his self interest.

Alternatives are great, but it's ridiculous to reject blaming the people who are responsible for and perpetuate the very bad status quo. They could end it, they just choose not to. We can and should simultaneously advocate to strip them of their power while holding them to account for abusing it.

There are ~20 huge companies each year that pay literally zero taxes [1] (that's for this year, you can go back and find a similar article every year). The lucky ones who manage to hit zero shuffle around every year. The rest of them pay various fractions of their tax rate. Corporate tax on large corporations as a proportion of the taxes collected is the smallest it has ever been in US history.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-10/ten-thing...

This is at least as bad as any violent crime. Almost certainly far, far worse by any ethical metric. The only difference between this and normal violent crime is that this is the kind of horrifying malicious crime rich, powerful people commit while assault or mugging is the crime of choice for the poor and powerless. Compare this vs. a mugging. Intent was worse -- he intended to assault millions instead of just one and also profited off thousands of frauds as well as obstruction of justice (code to hide it from regulators). Consequences and damages were far worse than any violent crime, obviously.

But yes, sentences should be far shorter across the board.

The existence of a reliable objective audit trail is a "problem" that is solved by electronic voting machines. Well, a problem for people who wish to rig elections. Perhaps the ability to untraceably modify millions of votes with the push of a button at an unaccountable private company's headquarters is a feature, not a bug?

Given how obvious and easy to execute this is, it seems impossible to imagine any justification for the change that does not at least consider this an acceptable plausible consequence of the choice.

Yes, the problem is far beyond Cook and it is systemic. People with no investment in the actual work, culture, employees, or purpose of the company (the board and shareholders) are the ones with control over the business. This fundamental disconnect between the people with power and the people who actually do any real work (called capitalism) pushes companies to behave more and more monstrously with no repercussions because "well that's just how it is" -- but that doesn't have to be how it is. Would google employees vote to help authoritarians crackdown on the people in China? I doubt it.

Antitrust activities while still provided for in US law have essentially stopped in the modern era, leading to massive concentration of power and economic disasters associated with monopoly and consolidation (e.g. financial crisis). So a general call to bring that job of the federal government back is certainly a welcome one.

>This is a crime that violates the 5th and 6th amendments, and we should be arresting and prosecuting those who gave the order to violate this man's constitutional rights.

Funny. They can get in line behind John Yoo, J. Edgar Hoover, Henry Kissinger and thousands of others. They'll have to pull Yoo away from the prestigious appointment at UC Berkeley he got as a reward for his crimes, strip the name Hoover got to place on the FBI building for his, and take away the adoration and respect murderous war criminal Kissinger gets from politicians of all stripes first.

There has been an argument going on for some time about whether or not the domestic legal system is capable of handling terrorism cases -- cases have recently been prosecuted in civil courts like the Boston Bombing, etc. Perhaps it's time to think about whether or not the domestic legal system is capable of handling crimes committed by the powerful (rich, politically powerful, etc). The answer is obviously no, but what could we do to make it so? Would that be good?

Well with option 1, you create a whole family of terrorists who will (with some justification) hate and try to destroy the United States for the rest of their lives which will later become the justification for endless war, so if you're someone who profits from or enjoys war and death and misery it sounds pretty good I suppose.

Or to phrase this differently, physicists do not really understand what they are doing. They do some operation because it sometimes happens to produce results that match some physical experiments that they are trying to model. Their derivation rules are due to habit (in the sense of Hume), not due to inference or logic.

Almost certainly, a rigorous formulation will come about later and explain when these derivations should actually hold (rather than just assuming they hold "whenever necessary").

This is actually how a lot of mathematics works: researchers notice some relationship empirically, which gives some intuition and suggests some hypothesis, and then the serious mathematical work is trying to determine exactly what assumptions are necessary and proving it.

You use a different co-op, naturally. You are conflating two solutions I offered, they are distinct and incompatible. A market but with worker controlled firms OR nationalized search. In one case you pick a different firm exactly like today, in the other you vote or petition the government.

>If anti-trust is your concern, make Google smaller. Regulate what % of marketshare they are allowed to control. Don't allow them to purchase any more competitors.

This is one method, but the massive natural monopoly over search and 'gateway to the Internet' isn't something that is particularly well served by market competition, as we can see here. If we break up google, another monopoly will develop. If we prevent monopolies from developing through strict marketshare percentages, companies will hover at the brink of these %s and lobby and bribe politicians to remove the rules. Which is what they have just done in other media markets, recently. So long as you allow the organizations to be driven by private profit, you will have to struggle against the natural market impulse for every company to exert absolute dictatorial control over as much as possible and expand its power, every moment, every year, every election, at all costs.

You should address the root of the problem (capitalism) not all the little symptoms. Require that companies that provide these public goods be run democratically, transparently by their workers as a public co-op. Nationalize them and make them all open source. There are other solutions.

>Even without Title II classification, there are other ways for the government to intervene in anti-competitive behavior (and indeed, they have).

You don't actually believe this will happen or can be relied upon do you? There are ways for them to do it but we are at the mercy of whoever is in charge of the executive that particular year. This administration will never step in. Maybe if we get a new administration and never have a Republican in office again and the Democrats completely restructure their priorities and come out in favor of trust busting in contrast to their decades of moving right and doing favors for corporate power this is a feasible assumption.

Also, maybe ISPs will just choose to leave money on the table after they gut NN and do nothing because they really care about having a free and open Internet /s

Exactly, you've clearly stated my original point -- economic success in countries has nothing to do with the morality of their society or culture or government. Economic success is more often than not luck of the draw and can happen to brutal slave dictatorships as much as free market democracies.

It will never be reasonable, feasible, or worth discussing that e.g. every day users run a linux only locked down desktop and never use their mobile phones. Every time a privacy topic comes up, there is always someone to come in and say "uninstall windows and OSX, delete all of your social media accounts and block the entire Internet, quit your job that requires you to use these devices and services, run your own mail server, if you REALLY care about privacy you'll essentially stop using the Internet, cut yourself off from all of society and make your devices unusable" -- which can offer advice for people looking to do this but adds little to the discussion around tracking, privacy, data security.

If you try to fight against advertisers and privacy-invading trackers and malware alone you will always lose. They are huge companies. They bribe your computer manufacturers to auto-install malware. They infect your operating systems. They have CAs. They have millions to spend on thousands of brilliant engineers who will work around anything you come up with to attack your security and privacy. An answer must be feasible for almost everybody so that we can all enact it collectively, technical or not, or it is no answer at all.

The success of the United States economy was almost entirely built on slave labor. Dubai and Qatar, some of the most economically successful countries in their region, are essentially entirely built on slave labor. It is making a comeback in the US because of how efficient it is in the form of mass incarceration combined with prison labor. The inference 'economic success' -> 'morally good' is, well, horrifying. Slavery is a good counterexample but old since it's so abhorrent countries have mostly abolished it. Sweatshops are another good example.

A healthy work environment is not economically optimal. Not even close. It is optimal to take as much from your employees as possible and to give them as little as possible in return; the opposite of a healthy environment and healthy workforce. Amazon practices this efficiency behind the developer console as much as they do in their warehouses. They just can't treat their developers quite as bad as the warehouse workers have it yet because of a temporary market inefficiency -- a dearth of skilled developers.

The workplace is an area where if we let the market do its work, it causes social and moral catastrophe and forces all but the tiny few at the top to live in complete misery, which is why we fought and died over hundreds of years against optimal economic efficiency for worker protections, unions, weekends, worker's compensation, overtime pay, etc.

>Which economy's future would you bet on?

This isn't a good metric. Countries with slavery, for example, can easily have a stronger economy than free ones. The amount of material goods a society produces is at best tangential to notions of morality or justice.

>we cannot afford to give everyone a $150k education.

We most certainly can, easily, we just choose not to.

We could bomb a few less hospitals a year and pay for every single American to go to college for free. We could make our corporations pay more than zero taxes and do the same.

But you are right about the skyrocketing costs, colleges have bloated massively and for really no reason other than that they have begun to be run as businesses rather than as public-focused academic enterprises.

>I'm at least confident if my ISP started blocking Netflix because they made a deal with Comcast, the hammer of the FCC or FTC would fall on them in short order,

What? What has possibly ever lead you to believe this? The FCC is doing everything in its power against massive popular demand to ensure that Comcast can do exactly this even though everyone is screaming about hating it. Perhaps Netflix would accept paying massive bribes to prevent this from happening, but the current FCC will never step in.

>I have no such confidence that Google or Apple will be forced to allow, say... Gab... ever.

I agree with you here, the monopoly and walled-garden system we use for phones is very bad. Users should have ultimate control over their own machines. And this should perhaps be mandated by law, i.e. mandatory jailbreak switch.

>No consumer outrage nor any movement by the FTC or FCC.

There is no consumer outrage because nobody cares about Gab, it is a niche service for extremist conservatives who were kicked out of other platforms for doxxing, horrifying racism and advocating and organizing violence and genocide. The twelve people who would use it connect through Tor to the daily stormer and are just fine.

If you can't download the Gab app, you can still connect through the web to the service. Iphones don't ban visiting certain websites. Your problem is that Apple controls what you can install on your phone, because the Apple ecosystem is closed and censored, but the web is open. But not for long. If your ISP blocks your connections to the Gab servers, it doesn't even matter what you can put on your phone.

It seems to me you want NN and also something stronger than that, which I'm completely on board with.

Sure, if you trust the OS. But what if the OS itself forces spyware and adware into your machine without your permission and it is not removable, like Windows 10 does...

The ability to control your machine is always good for users in the long run, though you're right it's important to make stupid changes very difficult for less sophisticated users.

Perhaps your bank should control your money so that you don't spend it unwisely? Users are stupid, after all.

Actually, TDS is just fine. They used Tor to get around these restrictions, because if what you are posting online is so disgusting that nobody is willing to host you, yes, you have to use some niche service.

It's just like if you are openly a nazi in real life, you'll find your life is a whole lot harder because everyone hates you and refuses to work with or do business with you. It's called having a society and it's an extremely good thing. If you're so disgusting nobody wants anything to do with you, we are magnanimous in the US; we don't lock you in jail or execute you, it's just a whole lot harder for you to participate in a society that on the whole thinks you are inhuman scum.

It seems to me you are just arguing that multinational corporations should be able to ignore all laws from every country because none of them have the global authority to regulate a global company, which is ridiculous and the opposite of how things have ever worked.

Break the law in the US, get punished in the US. Break the law in the EU, get banned from the EU. Companies have to comply with the law in a country if they want to do business there. Governments beat corporations as they should, every time -- any system in which this is not the case is corporate oligarchy.

Yes censorship by content providers is a (relatively small while Tor exists) problem, and it happens currently in real life. Censorship by ISPs is devastating, competition cannot help, and it is impossible to circumvent and is a real possibility. Because something is not currently happening does not mean we should not be concerned about it, rather, the opposite.

Sure, I agree. But I don't think it's fair to say he has the consent of the governed; rather that our system does not support that notion in any meaningful way. He is using his power against the will of the people explicitly.