241–250 of 250 posts
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I took State Farm to small claims court. They paid to upgrade it to general division at the last possible moment, which significantly increases the logistics and complexity of the case. I think they did it as an intimidation tactic. Corporations are horrible.
What was the result?
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The US stands alone in consumer arbitration. In most countries consumer arbitration is either heavily regulated, or non binding. In EU pre-dispute binding consumer arbitration clauses are considered unfair terms. American Exceptionalism in Consumer Arbitration https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2265556
The fact arbitration is a standard clause in every contract or terms of service proves it benefits nobody but the business. It's all about making consumers renounce their right to proper legal recourse. Why can corporations make people renounce their rights to begin with? Why even give people rights when every company will put a clause in their contracts that says "oh those are nice but please leave them at the door…
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The fact arbitration is a standard clause in every contract or terms of service proves it benefits nobody but the business. It's all about making consumers renounce their right to proper legal recourse. Why can corporations make people renounce their rights to begin with? Why even give people rights when every company will put a clause in their contracts that says "oh those are nice but please leave them at the door…
It's because the USian view has come to see rights as axiomatic primitives to be layered on top of rather than context-free qualitative assertions. This is regressive due to complexity-induced contradiction, but here we are. It's similar to how with Turing completeness you can implement a low level interpreter on top of a high level language, eschewing the high level language's fancy constructs.
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What was the result?
They settled the morning of the hearing for exactly as much money as I asked for before I took them to court. They admitted that the attorney alone cost much more than the settlement. Not to mention the court fees they had to pay.
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A lot of the challenges come out of the specifics of the laws surrounding unions. They were written in a much rougher era, where corporations and unions were very much in direct opposition. If we could re-write those laws, we could open the door to much more cooperative relationships between unions that the current laws do not allow. Unfortunately, there's no sign of the republican and democratic parties getting toge…
"much more cooperative relationships between unions" Sure, cooperation sounds good in theory, but don't we have examples (in the US) of where management of a company and management of their union ended up very friendly at the expense of the workers? I'm pretty sure I read about stuff like that in the context of the recent automotive union corruption scandals.
I say try it maybe in one state and see how it goes.
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A union may protect your rights, but they do ask for some in return - often the ability to work at non-union jobs. The point is, you're still "signing away your rights". You're agreeing that you won't do certain things that are within your right to do, as a condition to employment. Arbitration is ubiquitous because even at the cost of hundreds of dollars per hour arbitration is a lot cheaper and faster than going to…
I briefly worked as a field service engineer before becoming a programmer. The job that I worked was non-union but many (all?) of the electricians where in the local union. Do you know how that works with the idea that by joining a union you are giving up your right to work non-union jobs? I'm not trying to say that you are wrong, I just don't know enough to know if that was a special case or if there are certain cir…
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Right, but over air broadcast hasn't been a primary mode of media consumption for decades at this point. The "censorship" on cable broadcasts you refer to are private companies keeping their content advertiser friendly not government restrictions.
Your response has little to do with the post. The FCC is a government agency, correct? so when it issues fines for "free speech"... "Between 1990 and 2004, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued fines totalling $2.5 million to radio licensees for airing material it deemed indecent from The Howard Stern Show, the highest amount of any American radio show. " "On April 8, 2004, Clear Channel was fined $27,50…
Any of these publishers could sell tapes or dvds of these shows and face no fines whatsoever. Similarly, they could air them on the internet or on cable television that is not subject to public control of content. There's no restrictions on the content itself, there's restriction on the use of publicly owned bandwidth.
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A lot of the challenges come out of the specifics of the laws surrounding unions. They were written in a much rougher era, where corporations and unions were very much in direct opposition. If we could re-write those laws, we could open the door to much more cooperative relationships between unions that the current laws do not allow. Unfortunately, there's no sign of the republican and democratic parties getting toge…
"much more cooperative relationships between unions" Sure, cooperation sounds good in theory, but don't we have examples (in the US) of where management of a company and management of their union ended up very friendly at the expense of the workers? I'm pretty sure I read about stuff like that in the context of the recent automotive union corruption scandals.
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State Farm is a mutual company. That means that the policyholders (i.e. you) actually own it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Farm
Why do the policyholders pay for so much TV advertising to get new policyholders? Increase in volume lowers overheads and spreads the risk pool, but surely not to the extent of the TV spending.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_prob...
Just a distributed denial of service attack. It is amazing how so few systems are inherently robust to DDOS.