I want to see *one* major US sport take a real hardline approach and make all the others look bad.

What if, for example, the NHL started a new and more rigorous doping testing program. Frequent random tests, and if you ever test positive (with verified results), you forfeit the rest your contract, all of your records / statistics are invalidated, and you are never allowed to play for the league again. Teams would still be charged with the salary cap hit from any of their players who test positive, so they would be encouraged to enforce the system also.

Just think about how that could be marketed for any sport that had the guts to initiate it. Put up images of Barry Bonds and insult MLB for allowing his (and other dopers) records and statistics to stand. Then fade out and pop up with "But here in the {NHL / NFL / NBA / whatever}, cheaters NEVER WIN."

I think that would generate a lot of interest / revenue for whatever sport got the ball rolling.

Not a prank, it's a con.

He claims to be donating all his own cash, but in reality has taken a lot of donations and his money in the campaign is 'loaned'. The campaign hosts lavish events in Trump's facilities, paying full price (or more). He and everyone in his family is getting a salary from campaign funds (which is unusual for the candidate).

The guy's broke (again) and saw this as a good way to raise his profile and some quick cash.

overworked into a stupor Where was this in the story?

I'm not here to bitch at you I just don't get the argument you make.

You then implied that these workers have to work 2 to 3 jobs ( hence stupor) just to make ends meet because those at the top are making too much.

What about the guy ( gal) at the top making fat stacks. I agree it does rub me wrong but still how does it directly hurt the minimum wage employee?


If the employee has has / develops skills he makes more. According to you logic this would be like robbing his fellow workmates, stealing money that can go towards them.

If you started you own company struggled to make ends meet and slowly built up a company should you not receive the fruits of you labor?

When you have an entry position what should you pay? Dishwasher should not be making 30K /yr ( 15$/hr). This is what you are generally saying.

My Boss had a 5 Million bonus and salary hike to near 4 million. Yes this pisses me off but it does not correlate to what I make.
Even if you took that and spread it across all employees ( 300k) it would only be about 30 bucks each.


Would you rather just see a cap of salaries to 1 Million?

They what if you suddenly became the next Gates or Jobs would you want to be paid what you are worth?

If you are going to go to 15$/hr why not more? Some could argue that this is too low? What about the company that made all salaries 70K the other year? 15$/hr seems pretty stingy.

I'm left wondering if this isn't maybe a case of the WNT pay being based on average pay for professional women soccer players. I would assume that the national team's pay for them would be based on that market to an extent. I suspect the pay they get from the national team is to meant cover any shortfalls incurred by missing time with their regular clubs. I'm speculating without knowing how different their regular club salaries are as compared with men.

To be fair, there's going to be some prep-time in crafting these speeches. But even if we pretend that there's a total of 9 hours of prep and writing time, it's still a stupidly high hourly rate. And it's not as if she's hurting for cash from her salary as a government official.

Why the hell is a cop getting paid $200k a year? At best, they should be paid US median salary which is a small fraction of that.

I would argue that automation still isn't the job killer #1. Plain old political decisions, such as sound finance, deficit hawkery, and austerity lead by a mile in this category. Neither is being addressed properly, but I find it hard to focus on the employment effects of automation when the Eurozone, for instance, runs at >10% unemployment strictly due to policies enacted by (non-)elected officials. We don't need technology to cause mass unemployment, humans can do that all on their own.

Additionally, even the amount of work available is a matter of perspective. Within the current system, the number of jobs with a decent salary is already dwarfed by the number of people looking for one. The amount of work to be done, on the other hand, is not.

Case in point: our (read: German) national railroad company is short-staffed by about 80.000-100.000 people, last I checked; our healthcare system is short-staffed by at least 200.000 people, probably a lot more; law enforcement is short by about 50.000; education is short by at least 20.000. Let's not even talk about infrastructure or ecological maintenance/regeneration. These are not open positions though, because nobody is willing/able to pay the bill.

So while I agree that we should be discussing how to deal with technological change, a more pressing matter is either to alter the system or to at least take back control over the vast sums of dead currency floating around in the financial nirvana or on Stephen Schwarzman's bank accounts. First stop: full employment. Then, gradually, guaranteed basic income when automation does, in fact, cause mass unemployment.

Finally, I don't think automation will do as quick as sweep as some presume. The quality of software in commercial machines is quite absymal in many cases, since it was written in the normal fashion: do it now, do it quickly, here's five bucks. Efficiency improvements generally come at the price of QA, and it shows. Europe's most modern railway control center is nearby, and it never went online -- Bombardier cut corners and never had the proper railway expertise to begin with. Meanwhile, the center build in '53 is working just fine, and so are the switches put in place when Wilhelm II was running the show.

Edit: That said, I'm thrilled to see mind-numbing labour being replaced by machines. Can't happen quickly enough.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-obscene-salaries-encourage-contempt-for-the-simple-dignity-of-a-job-well-done-1.2449165

I think the little gem in here they mention briefly is that this is really one of the only ways to battle the big guys (Google/Facebook/Netflix/etc., at least in my locale). It's well known that top talent will go there for a big payday (the little guys are basically paying for training and filtering out the low performers), however I have seen many times employees stick at a lower salary job that is far more flexible with their time.

You do not HAVE to talk to a police officer. You MAY have to show ID depending on the state, but in most cases you do NOT have to show ID unless you are driving or were recently driving a vehicle. At the time he began walking he was not currently being detained for a crime.

If you follow the video link, you will see there is an abundance of information, including legal statements from the state AG that indicate that the officers had NO LEGAL CAUSE to arrest or detain the person filming and were incorrect in charging him with OoJ.

What happened here is that the cop got pissed that someone was filming him, decided he wanted to toss his weight around a bit, and then got further pissed off when his posturing was ignored. He is a cop, damnit, and people should quake in their boots when he is talking to them.

That is the problem with our police officers today. They have this idea that they are special and should be treated as such, when in reality they are simply public servants, OUR servants. We pay their salary to, thoeretically, protect and serve us. We do not pay them so we can serve them and kneel at their beck and call.

There are still officers out there that believe that way, but they are scared or unwilling to out the majority who do not. Until they do, they are no better in the end. For instance, the SGT who showed up on scene could have said that this was incorrect procedure, apologized, and punished the fucker who started it. But no, gotta stick to the thin blue line and back up the fuckup who got pissed about being filmed. Now they all get in trouble, more respect is lost for police, and the county will likely get sued. All because one guy got pissy about being filmed.

No other profession has the kind of power and interaction with society that police officers do. When cops abuse that power and goof around on the job, it has major effects on peoples lives.

So yes, damn straight they need to be criticized and even generalized because this shit happens way too often and there isn't usually evidence left behind to tell the whole story.

If your fellow officers would stop acting like power hungry douchebags, then they wouldn't receive so much scrutiny from the public...you know, the people that pay your salaries.

Let's make sure this is clear...this isn't the actions of one or two officers that were having an abnormally stressful day. This was an entire department abusing their authority. Sorry, "the actions of a few" defense goes out the window when you have an entire team acting the way they were.

It's funny because they are better than the current NYPD because you can at least fire them. Consider that the family members of murdered NYPD victims are forced to pay the salary of the perpetrators.

Yes, that's one of my problems with police, lax recruitment. They should do a better job screening applicants, far too many bullies make it through the process. The image they present only attracts the wrong kind of people, and even screens out better applicants (allegedly for anyone over 110 IQ for instance). The right kind of person wouldn't be accepted in the current cop culture (as this story illustrates clearly), and the right kind of people also wouldn't want to associate with them.

I think some officers do make that much on salary, but quite true it's not many. When you count the benefits they get though, they are not under paid in most cases. Most get free medical, life insurance, retirement, many other 'freebies', and incredible overtime, so looking at only base salary is not an honest assessment.
Where I live, $200000 is probably more than 5 times the average pay rate...in some areas it may be the average pay rate. In high cost of living areas, I agree, it would be right to pay them better, (but conversely, that means those in Detroit should be paid less for a more dangerous job...how to reconcile that?) but we should DEMAND better performance everywhere, with zero tolerance for abuse.

EDIT: It seems we could retrain ex-military for the job. They've proven they are willing to take MORE dangerous jobs for far less money ($20-30K last I heard). That's a possible win win, vets get a good job program, we get an improving police force...as long as the retraining and testing is thorough.

The cop's job is to catch people speeding and give them tickets. Seems to be exactly what he did.

The corruptibility of those in public office would be substantially reduced if the general expectation were that they would openly enjoy any extra-organisational perquisites available to them while continuing to perform their office in an objective fashion.

What's more, from a utilitarian perspective the value of the service provided to that cop probably dramatically exceeds the cost to the public purse of a few minutes of his salaried time lost. As an overall result, society has made a profit on the transaction. If anything, therefore, it would have been irresponsible of him to decline the opportunity to, shall we say, mouth-holster his pink pork pistol.