On Wed, 07 Nov 2012 20:56:14 +0000, Stephen wrote:

> 1/	No one wants to stop existing when they die so the believe in a
> religion that promises life after death.

I disagree.  There are some who accept that that is the reality of the 
situation (to the best of anyone's actual knowledge), and are OK with 
that.

> 2/	A lot of people find it hard to "think outside of the box" and
> believe what they are brought up with as a matter of course.

That is true.  That is why the ability to reason and question is so 
important.

> 3/ Lots of people are really STUPID! (Did I say that out loud?)

That certainly is true.

> BTW I think that the talk in this thread (not you) where some people
> discuss just how intelligent/wise you should be before you should be
> allowed to vote, is marching to the sound of the Goose step.

I don't think that's a "Godwin"-worthy comment to make.  Objectively, 
there are ways to measure someone's competence (we do that all the time 
in the courts to determine if someone is 'competent to stand trial'), and 
a measure of competence and understanding of the issues being voted on 
would seem to be a reasonable expectation to set.

In this election, for example, I was unaware that there were two 
positions being voted on for school boards.  As I was in the voting 
booth, it was too late for me to learn something about those issues, so I 
abstained from voting.  Too many people see choices like that and decide 
that their vote doesn't matter anyways, so they pick a choice at random.

I self-determined that I was not competent to cast a vote for those two 
positions, and removed myself from the pool as I was uninformed on those 
candidates' positions.  I would have no problem with having to 
demonstrate working knowledge of the candidates' positions prior to 
casting a vote.

We require demonstrated competence for driving a motor vehicle and for 
many other things we do in our daily lives.  If providing proof of 
citizenship is such a high priority, certainly it seems that providing 
reasonable proof of competence also should be a high priority.

Jim

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On 11/7/2012 12:27 AM, scott wrote:
>> Yeah, well. Even monkeys need to eat, and as things stand, the view, of
>> some of the wackos running, seems to be that it costs too much to buy
>> them bananas, so its, somehow, their own damn fault that they have to
>> eat their own feces. Case in point - My work doesn't pay its lowest
>> level employees more than minimum wages. They, if lucky, get 20-30 hours
>> a week, average, and then only if unionized, and the company just tacked
>> on a $5 a week health care charge, then gave them a 10 cent raise. So..
>> They plan to let everyone work 50 hours to make up the difference? Of
>> course not... And the current contract "explicitly" states that those
>> employees will *never* get a raise, since no one **ever** receives a
>> performance raise either, unless the state raises the minimum.
>
> I guess they find it incredibly hard to find anyone to work for them then?
>
To keep people yes, to find people to hire, no. See, first, its 
considered a "temp" position, which is how they got by with rewriting 
the contract. Second - some people don't do the math, and realize that, 
due to how seniority works, they will actually lose money for the first 
4-5 years, before they end up with enough hours to make up for what they 
lost. This isn't a huge problem, if they went straight from the "temp" 
position, to one of the tiny number of jobs in other departments. If, 
however, you are currently working 32 hours per week, average, and the 
"minimum" that the union requires is 20, you are losing, annually 30% of 
your hours. Given that the raise you get is probably only about 10% over 
your current pay rate, you end up losing 20% of your annual income, for 
how ever long it takes you to either a) get enough raises to make up the 
difference, or b) enough other people quit, so that you now have 
seniority enough to being making the hours needed to break even with 
your prior annual income.

We are dealing with people that can't do math without a calculator. 
Expecting them to actually comprehend why taking a "better" position is 
actually leaving them in worse financial shape is... probably expecting 
a but much...

And, then there is the fact that, in general, the only other options are:

1. Fast food, which *might* pay more in some cases.
2. Restaurants, which don't, unless you can make enough tips to exceed 
the minimum.
3. Nearly every other retail store, who uses a similar scheme to not pay you
4. The few manufacturing places, who use a different scheme, where by 
they make you work 5 days at 10 hours, and give overtime, then cut you 
back to 3 days the next week, so that, in balance, they are actually 
paying fewer people, less money, than if they worked 8 hours a day, 5 
days a week... Again.. Doing them math to prove it is not something most 
people will even bother with.

If everyone is screwing you the same way, or as much, in different ways, 
picking between places to work, unless you are lucky enough to find work 
at the 5% that still give a shit about their employees in the US, is 
kind of like having the option of taking the bullshit burger, the burro 
dropping burrito, or the dog dropping sandwich. Anyone telling you, 
"Just find a better job.", probably needs someone else to set their VCR, 
and has to ask management how to use a calculator to do a price correction.

And, no, I am not kidding. Some places, it really is this bloody stupid now.

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On 11/6/2012 1:49 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Tue, 06 Nov 2012 15:43:36 +0100, Le_Forgeron wrote:
>
>> Le 06/11/2012 15:24, scott a écrit :
>>>> And for countries that have minimal wages, politics should be paid
>>>> only that amount.
>>>
>>> You pay peanuts you get monkeys.
>>
>> Well, if politics want a better salary, they can raise the minimal
>> wages... for everyone.
>
> As well as benefits.  I've always said that (for example) if the US
> government got what those on the bottom end of the scale got for
> healthcare (ie, emergency room visits only when things get really bad),
> those who are the worst off would be better off, because the legislators
> wouldn't put up with that.
>
The halfwit running against Obama actually said, in one case, that 
"government healthcare wasn't necessary, because they could just go to 
the emergency room." I am not sure which assumption in that idiot idea 
was less disturbing, the one by which it was assumed that 'preventing' 
illnesses was a bad thing, but treating everyone only when things got so 
bad it was an emergency was good, or the equally idiotic lack of 
comprehension as to where the fuck the money was coming from, if not the 
same government, to pay for the ***free*** emergency room treatment.

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On 11/6/2012 1:50 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Tue, 06 Nov 2012 08:45:10 -0500, Warp wrote:
>
>> scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
>>> No, you need some sort of intelligence test for the *voters*, otherwise
>>> they will just vote against such leader testing or vote to make it so
>>> easy it's pointless.
>>
>> Who exactly voted for those scientifically illiterate people to be put
>> in the government's scientific committee?
>
> Members of the public voted them into office, but the majority party
> picks who is the chair of the internal committees, and the parties
> themselves select who represents them on the committees.
>
> Jim
>
Worse than that, the parties also determine who runs. Sure, they run a 
"campaign" of sorts, to decide which asshole among the group of assholes 
who support their "current" theory of the universe will actually be on 
the final ticket, but, unless one of them has a lot of extra money from 
some place, the party determines who those assholes will actually be, 
and thus, who has any chance in hell of being on the ticket for the 
position. That this person them goes on to place people with his same 
ideological positions, and/or his parties (need to think about that next 
election...), into key positions, without public say, is about as 
incidental to the reality of the situation as being given the right to 
vote on which mafia business gets to set up in town, all other candidate 
having been summarily rejected before the public even knew a new 
business would open, and expecting, once in place, that you will have 
any chance, at all, of determining who they hired to run Guido's House 
of Bullets.

The fact that you can, in actuality, sometimes convince the Dems that 
they pick was so poor they need to replace them, while it takes a really 
inconvenient, impossible to hide or gloss over, and unrecoverable 
scandal, to cause a Republican member to quit (or a refusal to actually 
follow along with the boss' decision to hold the UN ransom for 30 
bajillion dollars.. Oh, wait, sorry, that is villains, not Republicans, 
I get them confused some times...), for one of their appointed people to 
be fired, shows that at least one side is vaguely less corrupted 
(Luigi's Tea House, perhaps?).

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On 11/6/2012 1:51 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Tue, 06 Nov 2012 08:47:44 -0500, Warp wrote:
>
>> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>>> Not just BoEs, but legislative bodies.  One of our US house of
>>> representatives members on the science committee thinks that evolution
>>> and the big bang theory are "from the devil".
>>
>> The people who appoint completely incompetent people to those positions
>> would certain not want for a completely incompetent person to perform
>> eg. heart surgery on them. I would like to see the politician who allows
>> a witch doctor who thinks that heart problems are caused by evil spirits
>> to perform surgery on them. Yet they put completely incompetent people
>> on the science committee?
>
> Yep.
>
> But then again, we've got at least one representative who believes that
> vaccines cause autism, because an autistic kid's mother told her so once.
>
> Jim
>
Heh, now. This BS wouldn't have lived as long it did, or maybe even have 
happened, without the help of a certain wacko named "Lord Monckton", so...

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On 11/7/2012 2:45 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> We require demonstrated competence for driving a motor vehicle and for
> many other things we do in our daily lives.  If providing proof of
> citizenship is such a high priority, certainly it seems that providing
> reasonable proof of competence also should be a high priority.
>
> Jim
>
Providing proof of citizenship *is* a goosestep priority. In many 
countries you are **required** to have an ID, and to have it up to date, 
and you don't necessarily have to pay for it either. In the US, there 
are like two dozen different ways you could prove you are legal to 
vote/a citizen, but the new voting laws they where trying to shove 
through nearly every place, where targeted at requiring:

1. Ones that cost money, since the government doesn't give them out free.
2. Ones that are hard to get.
3. Ones that take time, which many people don't have, to get.
4. Rules on when, and how, you got some of them, like student IDs, where 
you had to either a) be in the same state as you parent, b) have been 
there at least a year, etc. for the ID to count, even if you had one.

All of it was designed to target people that worked, didn't have the 
time to jump the hoops, didn't have the money to do so, or who *tended* 
to be liberal, like college students who didn't just attend the same 
place their parents did, but moved to other states, to get what they saw 
as a better education. It was all, 100%, directed at undermining certain 
voters. And that wasn't even the most blatant BS. Second to the top: 
Changing how votes where counted, or states where redistricted, often in 
completely opposite ways. For example, winner takes all in a state that 
tended to have a lot of liberal districts, but where the Republicans 
where all concentrated in a smaller number of areas, then setting it up 
as, "Each district vote counts towards its candidate", where there where 
lots of conservative areas, but the highest concentration of actual 
"people" was in liberal cities. Top of the list: The real voter fraud 
that took place, where one guy registering voters was actually caught 
throwing out applications for non-Republican voters, but turning in all 
the ones that where registering Republican.

Bets on the same people that came up with this shit having a complete 
epileptic fit, if someone told them, "You have to show you are competent 
for this job to take it, not just have a lot of support from people with 
similar mental health problems." (Yeah, I said it...)

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On Wed, 07 Nov 2012 19:43:25 -0800, Patrick Elliott wrote:

> The halfwit running against Obama actually said, in one case, that
> "government healthcare wasn't necessary, because they could just go to
> the emergency room."

Which of course was why I used that example. ;)

Jim

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On Wed, 07 Nov 2012 20:03:10 -0800, Patrick Elliott wrote:

>> But then again, we've got at least one representative who believes that
>> vaccines cause autism, because an autistic kid's mother told her so
>> once.
>>
> Heh, now. This BS wouldn't have lived as long it did, or maybe even have
> happened, without the help of a certain wacko named "Lord Monckton",
> so...

Yeah, but the peeps in my "home" district (where I've not lived in 18 
years now) seem to keep wanting to reelect Bachmann.  I've no idea why.  
Maybe it's so the comedians have *some* fodder to go after.

Jim

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> There is, in fact, a psychological phenomenon behind all this. I wrote an
> article about that very subject here:
>
> http://grindedgear.blogspot.fi/2012/10/people-are-really-bad-at-grasping.html

Example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy

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>> I guess they find it incredibly hard to find anyone to work for them
>> then?
>>
> To keep people yes, to find people to hire, no.

So people do often find something better once they realise the situation 
with this employer? My guess would be then the employer takes advantage 
of new employees who don't have experience with the pay structure. It's 
one of those mistakes we all make once and then never again.

My previous employer did something mildly comparable with our pensions. 
The workforce was mostly young graduates with little experience that 
didn't really realise the implications of what they were agreeing too. 
There were a handful of more experienced people who started to kick up a 
fuss (particularly my manager that had been through exactly the same 
with a previous employer) but their voices were drowned out.

> We are dealing with people that can't do math without a calculator.
> Expecting them to actually comprehend why taking a "better" position is
> actually leaving them in worse financial shape is... probably expecting
> a but much...

You don't need to be a math genius or know how to use a calculator to 
ask "how much will you pay into my bank account each week/month if I 
take this 'better' position?". If they can't manage asking something 
like that with their job then how do they manage with dealing with 
utility companies etc.?

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