finethen wrote:

Laughing Boy wrote:

Thats BAD news? Unions are an idea whos time came and WENT.

-LB

What rubbish. Thats like saying corporations are an idea that came and went. Unions are unsuccessful because of the illegal union-busting that companies like Wal-Mart and McDonalds practice but the National Labor Relations Board refuses to punish.
Now that more americans than ever work in companies like that (i.e, the service industry) unions are a much needed defense.

The article is rubbish too. If unions were a victim of their own success than Wal-Mart wouldn't have had a 6 million person class action sexual discrimination suit against it, and the number one killer of latinos wouldn't be construction related accidents.

Unions are a victim all right, but not of any kind of success.

no your spewing is rubbish. Unions were established at a time when labor laws were lax at best or totally non-existant. Watch "Hoffa" for a history lesson Re: the Teamsters.

Today, because of greedy unions, corporations have no choice but to close plants and ship jobs over seas because the fucking unions are totally unresonable. Look at the airline industry - corporate profit earnings are DOWN and the fucking stupid-ass unions are still striking for a RAISE??? What part of "earnings down" does not compute???

Or lets sum it up like this - take a pay cut or lose a job. You figure out the lesser of the two evils.

-LB

RE: Unions Pay Dearly for Success

bucy wrote:

The bad news is that the figure stood at 7.8 percent — less than a third of the rate of the early 1970's.

Thats BAD news? Unions are an idea whos time came and WENT.

-LB

RE: Unions Pay Dearly for Success

] Intel chief executive Craig Barrett said the United
] States "now has to compete for every job going forward.
] That has not been on the table before. It had been
] assumed we had a lock on white-collar jobs and high-tech
] jobs. That is no longer the case."

They are smarter. They are hungrier. They have a better work ethic. Their dollars go futher, and they are used to having less stuff. Their labor regulations are looser. This isn't about tech jobs, this is about service/knowledge jobs. This is only the beginning. American dominance is over. There are too many skilled people, no one knows how to utilize all of them, and you are far from the most attractive of them. Ever wanted to know what life was like in the 30s? You will.

Tech Firms Defend Moving Jobs Overseas (TechNews.com)

well, i suppose we all saw this coming.

they want their quarter mil out of Apple, Diamond, Cannon, Samsung, Olympus, Phillips, SanDisk, Viking, etc, etc. etc.

my initial reaction was to flip out over this, but decided to do some research on the licenses for, say, HFS+, to make sure i'm not being unfair to microsoft. well, it turns out that apple's HFS+ implementation was made available under their APSL as part of the Darwin core. APSL looks to be fairly commercial friendly though IANAL... even so, Microsoft isn't likely to write a filesystem driver for HFS+ and then make the code available to the public as the APSL requires. I couln't find any details on commercial, proprietary licences.

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
I'm sorry... my BS-O-METER is buried in the red. This reminds me of the Unisys claim that they were suddenly owed royalties by every company that sold software supporting .GIF image files a couple years back. There really need to be laws in place that prevent this "patent squatting" from happening. OH SO convenient for a corporation like M$ or Unisys to bite their lip for X number of YEARS until something is adopted as an industry standard... THEN try to claim they are owed royalties by everyone and their mother? NO. You have a patent? Fine - then you best make dilligent efforts to ENFORCE your CLAIM to that patent from the time you apply for it - that means going after companies that adopt your technology and collecting royalties from the get-go. Let it slide for X amount of time without enforcing it? You lose ****ALL**** rights to your patent and it reverts to the public domain without warning. End of story.

LB

FAT File System Technology and Patent License

] LONDON (AP) -- Eminem stunned tens of thousands of people
] attending a concert in England by giving a necklace
] estimated at $450,000 to one of his fans.

HELL YEA! 'cuz donating half a million dollars to charity where it might do some real good isn't "cool". Gotta make a publicity stunt out of it and give a necklace to a random fan - who will likely end up hawking it anyways and pocketing the cash (wouldn't you?).

Whats next? Confetti cannons filled with $10's and $20's at his concerts??

Laughing Boy

Eminem Gives Fan $450K Gift

A little pricey but definitely unique

Inflatable Church

When Warren Buffet, formerly the richest man in America (he's down to #2 on the list at 30+ BILLION dollars) says this...

] Now the Senate says that dividends should be tax-free to
] recipients. Suppose this measure goes through and the
] directors of Berkshire Hathaway (which does not now pay a
] dividend) therefore decide to pay $1 billion in dividends
] next year. Owning 31 percent of Berkshire, I would
] receive $310 million in additional income, owe not
] another dime in federal tax, and see my tax rate plunge
] to 3 percent.
]
] And our receptionist? She'd still be paying about 30
] percent, which means she would be contributing about 10
] times the proportion of her income that I would to such
] government pursuits as fighting terrorism, waging wars
] and supporting the elderly. Let me repeat the point: Her
] overall federal tax rate would be 10 times what my rate
] would be.

I certainly hope someone is listening.

Dividend Voodoo (washingtonpost.com)