I don't understand the contract structure for permalancing, but there's got to be a way to organize these folks and make Viacom feel the pain.

michaelduff

One trait conservatives seem to share is a boundless capacity to ignore anything transpiring outside of U.S. borders.

TheLorax

Sorry, I haven't had time to reply to your post. It's just...see: I'm not at a heated personal computer but at work, with internet access provided by my employer, a German-owned company that provides me with such other gratifying amenities as health care--including vision and dental-- a contribution matching 401K, paid sick and maternity leave, four weeks of paid vacation a year (not including the week between Christmas and New Year's), and what else? hmmm...oh, all the free books I can handle. That said, I don't think that reality negates my right to stick up for others who can't.

So that finger up my ass? Well, it's done pleasuring myself, and now its shit-stained nail is pointing in your direction.

Call me in ten years when your university-subsidized plan runs out and the best job you can get is teaching a half-hour "Intro to Economic Theory" class at the Learning Annex. Huh. Do they offer health care to visiting professors? I wonder.

Brawndo

@if_i_only_had_a_heart: You seem cool, I enjoyed your comment.

binc07

you claim to know economics but you are clearly as ignorant as a doorstop

"I caution strongly against these populist declarations of FREE HEALTH FOR ALL" -- puhleeeeze.

a society can pay upfront in preventive costs or it can pay later in greater costs for greater sickness; as the system stands now, the providers and those with insurance pay for all the uninsured who wind up seeking more healthcare later when they are more ill than if they had preventive care sooner; the providers

if you had even half a clue rather than a sadly limited ability to spew textbook aphorisms, you would know that

god, didn't they teach you how to think wherever it was that you went to school? apparently not; just how to be an annoying parrot.

government bad.
free market good.
poor people bad.
repeat.

get a clue.

if_i_only_had_a_heart

Carol Gardens

I wouldn't worry as much about the comment priviledges as I would about credibility.

Look, I understand that I sound like an insensitive supercapitalist. I'm not; I sympathize with those that lack health care. But in the interest of the majority of those of us that do, I caution strongly against these populist declarations of FREE HEALTH FOR ALL.

It must sound like a panacea, it really must, but none of you "free health care" advocates are considering the consequences. The telling thing is usually how swiftly the consequences are dismissed, because you actively refuse to consider them.

As for you fucking people with the internet health care sob stories, stop. Crying about your personal challenges receiving health care from your heated desk on your personal computer hooked to the fucking internet does not arouse populist sentiment in me. How fraudulent can you get? Who is the real privileged douche here? Point that finger up your ass.

ADismalScience

maevemealone

I don't know what kind of right-wing publications you seem to be getting your information from, but when it comes to healthcare you have a complete backwards supercapitalist view of how the system is set up. First of all, making medical attention and prescription drugs affordable to people who actually need them wouldn't create more of a demand in relation to the number of people receiveing them. Furthermore, the reason that meds are so fucking expensive are not because we go to the doctor expecting medication for minor ills. It's expensive because they are largely unregulated and the companies spend and inordinate amount of money on R&D, which they call research and developement, a fancy word for marketing. That is why we have such crazy names like Ambien, and Abilify. And that direct-to consumer-advertising (which does not exist in other countries) is why the top 3 out 5 meds are for fat people; because people got to the doctor after seeing the ad for Lipitor, Cymbalta, and whatever other drug that would alleviate a symptom they believe that they have. I could go on and on here like a nutjob, but when it comes to spreading the kind of misleading, ultimately insidious kind of blabber you're say about healthcare I can't just stand by and do nothing.

I'll risk my stupid commenter privileges for the chance to call you a privileged asshole that has never been in a situation where you've had to forege necessary medication or attention because the only job you've been abel to land in the past three years can't afford to provide health insurance.

Brawndo

Carol Gardens

pissy elliott

Moff

tuffgirl

edisdead

check_please

UnRed

Moff

This is the classiac Keynesian argument that the upfront costs are justified by downstream savings. Since it's never clear what the benefit of the upfront expenditure is, I find this argument sorely lacking in applications.

ADismalScience

No, see, shareholders still have the power to sell if they lack confidence in the majority shareholder's leadership. This pressures Redstone to sell, because the price will go into freefall. Shareholders always have the power.

ADismalScience

vulturesquadron

... as a grand old wizard once said, that's not EVEN wrong

a dollar of preventive care can save 10k of ICU care, but in the current system where managed care is exactly equal to the denial care and the plans all maximize short term profit, they just keep moving the chairs and hoping someone else will pay the bills when the diabetic patient who could have been educated and maintained and treated with low cost regular care comes in thru the ER and instead has a 50k amputation for gangrene

it's an expensive system that produces bad outcomes because the externalities of preventive care are seen only as a cost and not as a benefit by the bottom line plans; the doctors and the hospitals are getting as screwed as the patients; the useless bastards making billions in the plans are the ones tht need to be shut down asap; they are the true drag on the system, not utilization

got it? the private insurers are cost centers who are there to (a) maximize profits and (b) deny care

get rid of them and more people get cheaper better care immediately

done deal

if_i_only_had_a_heart

the worse employers treat workers, the more foundation there will be for unionizing and/or for government regulation

child labor laws were written and passed becuz employers thought that working kids 14 hours a day was just fine

workplace safety laws were written and passed becuz employers thought that sending workers into factories w/o protective gear was cheaper and therefore better

if employers want to keep unions and the govt out, they could try treating workers fairly humanely and decently

if employers want unions and gov regulation, they can strip mine the labor pool until someone makes them stop

if_i_only_had_a_heart

Oh, wait...

princepumpkinbeepster

Moff

Carol Gardens

Fair enough. I'll actually concede a point and say that the moral high ground belongs to Gawker and the permalancers. The economics of the situation, however, still leave me on Viacom's side generally.

@crookedE:

No. The for-profit nature is why we have generic drugs. I would say that the patent system definitely contributes to the cost, but that's essentially a tax we pay for innovation.

All of that conceded, make no mistake: the single most important driving factor in health-care costs is demand. Our demand for health care products and services is unprecedented, and much of it is self-inflicted.

ADismalScience

crookedE

Hey, Viacom surely might not listen! And the permalancers might do well to be careful not to come off as entitled to the benefits they'd like. But there's no reason for them not to make a fuss. This country was founded -- I love starting sentences that way -- on making a fuss!

Moff

Fly Life

Well, trust me, the free market applies more accountability than any other system. It just applies it towards companies, which use the board-shareholder system to distribute it amongst the workforce. I agree with you 100% that this isn't done well in many cases, because shareholders aren't great at their job. Laziness and inefficiency infect socialist societies, however, because they have a complete lack of the creative destruction that tears down the edifices of these horrible, bureaucratic corporations to replace them with more agile competitors.

Viacom's dying. The grunts may feel it first, and that sucks, but in the end everyone will get theirs.

ADismalScience

Ideally, I agree with you.

Operationally, the mission of social responsibility is obviously not being imparted by the shareholders. Keep in mind that the board is elected by them - they could elect socially conscious leaders as easily as they elect Chainsaw X.

ADismalScience

That's where the free market breaks down: accountability. Aggressive cost management is necessary sometimes, of course -- but the costs that get managed never seem to affect the real decision-makers. At worst, a CEO might be asked to resign...and given a nice golden parachute that could have bought rudimentary insurance for a whole pack of peons.

Moff

"...the public shareholders...own 88% of the combined $48 billion market value of CBS and Viacom, even though their voting stake is a mere 20%."

(FORBES)

Carol Gardens

pissy elliott

pissy elliott

They don't have the right job, though. That's the real smarm of the argument - the poors aren't worth insuring, because they can be easily replaced by a poor that doesn't have AIDS/Cancer/etc.

Please let's not debate this again but:

The dirty secret of the health care debate is that it's incredibly expensive. This is because we are:

* Fat - 3 of the 5 best-selling drugs are for blood pressure/cholesterol

* Addicted to antidepressants, stimulants, etc.

* Programmed with an expectation to visit the doctor and receive medication for even minor ills

EVEN IF we pay for health care nationally, the moral hazard and the health hazard of socialized care is that it reinforces the bad behaviors that cause health care costs to spiral. The consequence will be price caps, which result in undersupply and excess demand. Then you get lines out the door - ask a Canadian if they can get a checkup for the sniffles or a Brit if they can get into a dentists' office ever. I only support socialized medicine for immediately life-threatening injuries or illness for this reason. Economics are inescapable; that's why it's a dismal science.

ADismalScience

Could THAT have something to do with declining interest in their product?

Goodbye, Commenters!

That said, I don't buy into the whole "People are just another resource who should be used or abused based on the bottom line" as a philosophy -- I understand it's a reality in many companies, but it doesn't have to be. The Viacom brass and their shareholders determine these policies. There's nothing wrong with the permalancers saying, "Hey, this is fucked up! You should treat your low-level employees better." I mean, outside of the shittiness of the new benefits plan, the dishonesty (trying to get the permalancers to sign a contract before they hold the meeting about said contract) isn't cool. I'm not a liberal -- I don't think the government should be stepping in to tell Viacom what to do here -- but I do think employers should be implicitly expected not to lie to the people they employ, and to handle them with care, just as there's an explicit expectation that employees should handle the work they do for the employer with care.

Sorry, but if we keep writing off the big guy treating the little guy like shit not as "inhumane cockmastery" but as "the market in action," this world isn't going to get any better. (And I won't even get into how if MTV treated these people better, it seems likely that they'd become more useful to MTV.)

Moff

pissy elliott

I guess it really doesn't make a difference.

contradicto

iplaudius

The Real JR

Fair enough. But think of it this way: ultimately, all that matters to a network is that people watch the shows, because advertising follows popular content.

If Viacom isn't profiting, it's because people aren't watching the shows. Given the lineup, I find their troubles completely unsurprising. When this happens, your shareholders obligate the board to increase their equity by limiting costs and increasing revenues.

With TV viewership on an inexorable decline, much like newspaper circulation, it becomes difficult to increase revenues. I'm sure smart people in that company are trying to find ways to do so on the internet and stuff, but it's hard to think of ways to do it on the boob tube. That means all those PA assistants etc. can't contribute to the bottom line in the way they used to. You aren't driving growth with the good work done by the grunts; you're doing it with new areas of the company.

Therefore, that area of the business is going to be aggressively cost-managed. That exposes a lot of people to hardship because nonessential positions are going to be eliminated, benefits will diminish, and perks will decrease. But the worst thing is that it makes the day-to-day less talent-centric, so if the job is desirable it's hard to justify good salaries and benefits. It exposes a huge underlying problem in the media industry: the value of work is hard to describe, the value of talent is seemingly inscrutable, and people are willing to trust a fresh, enthusiastic horde of recent Communications majors over an established vet with hard-to-quantify value and lots of salary demands.

ADismalScience

pissy elliott

DrFeelgood

ninety_nine

Carol Gardens

The Real JR

Some of My Best Friends Are People

gefilte_fish_blues

Rocco Siffredi

The Real JR

contradicto

meerkat

LikeKilled

pissy elliott

crookedE

mcginstein

ijustwanttolaugh

They're already doing that.

Competition is why they aren't valued employees. They do a job that thousands of kids are dying to do; that's a huge drag on their value as employees. The only way to justify a salary in such an environment is to have amazing talent, and judging by the quality level of the programming I don't think they do. So fire them and get a new crew or cut costs!

I don't understand the sympathy in reporting.

ADismalScience

Most people who have received their deal agreement, are not at all happy with the new pay setup. Saying that in many cases they will be receiving a 20% pay cut, during weeks that they don't work the additional 10 hours of overtime (to meet the 50 hour work week).

ScrewedByTheMan

thenewnewthing

Thinking ahead eh? But, awesome stickers. Rather than thinking outside the box, they just flipped it. Time-saving. Godspeed, future friends!

whokilledallthemandelas

Carol Gardens

When a Hendrick's Gin roadblock sweeps down!

Goodbye, Commenters!

Carol Gardens

pissy elliott

Gayyker

LolCait

Tammany_Fall

IndianSlipper

mathnet