Camil Stoenescu's blog

”In motivarea cererii reclamantii arata ca, in data de 06 august, data stabilita pentru plata salariului aferent lunii iulie, au luat la cunostinta faptul ca le-au fost diminuate unilateral salariile cu 25%.

Salariul reprezinta o componenta a dreptului la munca si reprezinta contraprestatia angajatorului in raport cu munca prestata de catre angajat in baza raportului de munca. Efectele raportului de munca se concretizeaza in obligatii de ambele parti, iar una din  obligatiile esentiale ale angajatorului este plata salariului pentru munca prestata, asa cum a fost el stabilit prin  contractului individual de munca.

 

Contractul individual de munca este conventia prin care se materializeaza vointa angajatorului si a viitorului salariat de a intra intr-un raport juridic de munca. In aceasta conventie, negociata si liber consimtita, sunt prevazute in limitele stabilite de legislatie si de contractele colective de munca, toate elementele necesare pentru cunoasterea conditiilor de desfasurare si de incetare a raportului de munca, drepturile, obligatiile si raspunderile ambelor parti.

 

Salariul reprezinta unul dintre drepturile asupra caruia cele doua parti ale raportului juridic de munca au convenit si l-au prevazut in mod expres in continutul contractului, in conformitate cu dispozitiile art. 17 alin. 2, coroborat cu art. 3 din acelasi articol.

 

Un tert fata de acest contract individual de munca nu poate interveni pentru a modifica acordul partilor semnatare. Statul, tert raportat la contractul individual de munca, incheiat intre angajator si salariat, nu poate modifica ceea ce partile au stabilit, respectiv nu poate diminua salariile acestora in mod direct, prin  edictarea unei legi in  acest sens, caci protectia juridica a raportului juridic de munca stabilit contractual este acelasi atat pentru personalul bugetar, cat si pentru cel incadrat la angajatori privati. Nu se poate vorbi de o protectie a legii mai mare in cazul angajatilor privati.”

Decizia Tribunalului Vâlcea, din 14 noiembrie 2010, care a declarat ilegală tăierile salariilor bugetarilor cu 25% (de aici).

În traducere liberă și într-o logică halucinantă, statul este terț față de el însuși, căci primăriile nu sunt nimic altceva decât reprezentantele statului în teritoriu. Cu alte cuvinte, când e vorba de luat, statul devine terț. Când e vorba de achitat salarii și pompat bani în bugetele locale ale primăriile, e parte din sistem. Curat constituțional! În interpretare originală, legea e bună și ni se aplică doar când ne este favorabilă. Când același „stat” crește unilateral salariul minim pe economie, toată lumea râde, cântă și danseză. Când taie din salarii, statul își pierde, brusc, prerogativele de politică fiscală pe care le deține în orice țară din lume.

Două concluzii se nasc, pe cale logică, din această sentință:

• privatizarea întregii administrații locale, cu toate consecințele de rigoare;
• federalizarea României: fondurile colectate la nivel local rămân la nivel local;

Mă îndoiesc că domnii judecători de la Tribunalul Vâlcea s-au gândit atât de departe, dat fiind și conflictul de interese în care aceștia se găsesc. În aceste condiții, nu înțeleg ce rost mai au facultățile de drept din România. Ar putea fi la fel de bine suplinite cu succes de către facultățile de literatură, mai precis eseistică și proză de ficțiune.

PS  Justețea economică a micșorărilor salariale operate de către actualul guvern constituie o temă separată.

The Human Development Index (or HDI) is a measure created to capture the level of development of a country. The HDI is made of three indexes: one for health, one for income, and one for education. Because of its tripartite nature, the same value of HDI can be obtained by substituting one indicator for another, for instance by increasing education and reducing life expectancy. The HDI tree is a visualization that allows comparison of HDI for different countries without the need to aggregate them into a single number, helping avoid the substitutability implied by the HDI definition.

Din Forbes.

Nu am comparat România cu Norvegia, Germania, Elveția sau Finlanda, ci cu „omologii” noștri din Europa de Est, foste țări comuniste la fel ca și noi: Bulgaria, Ungaria, Cehia, Slovacia, Polonia. Rezultatele se pot vedea mai jos:

Concluziile le trage fiecare.

De citit:

[…]

Already attention is shifting to Spain. Making up around a tenth of the European economy it is of an entirely different order to plucky Portugal and little Ireland. The Spanish government says it doesn’t need a bailout (a statement that is now mandatory fare for finance ministers but seems not to make much difference). And the central bank pointed on Tuesday to the health of Spain’s powerful banking sector.

 

Spain is supposed to be the firewall in the euro zone. In theory, bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal can be borne, but if Spain were to need a rescue then the crisis tips into the territory in which it is conceivable that the euro zone could blow up.

 

Spain is the line it is said that German taxpayers will not cross. If they balked at assisting Spain and a German government did not participate then the euro starts to break up. It is hard to see such an eventuality having anything less than horrendous implications, including default, chaos and widespread penury.

 

Can the crisis be stopped short of Madrid, the euro saved and terrible consequences avoided?

[…]

Sometimes big ideas fail. And history suggests that right up until the moment that they do, very large numbers of people will maintain that failure is unthinkable.

 

Perhaps that is not about to happen in terms of European togetherness, and the crisis will slow down with order restored. But what is holding together the euro zone today? It is now no longer the dreams of an elite determined to construct a rival to the U.S. that could parley on equal terms with the emerging powers. Today it is being held together by simple fear of the alternative.

Din Wall Street Journal. Și, în același timp, Angela Merkel e tot mai sceptică în ceea ce privește moneda unică europeană. Oda Bucuriei sună tot mai stins.

Timpul incertitudinii, timpul schimbării:

Câteva concluzii generale:

• Recently announced policies can make a difference, but fall well short of what is needed for a secure & sustainable energy future;
• China and other emerging economies will shape the global energy
  future;
• Gas is set to play a key role in meeting the world’s energy needs; Unconventional gas accounts for 35% of the increase in global supply to 2035, with new non-US producers emerging;
• Lack of ambition in Copenhagen has increased the cost of achieving the 2°C goal & made it less likely to happen; unless commitments are fully implemented by 2020, it will be all but impossible to achieve the goal;
• The age of cheap oil is over, though policy action could bring lower international prices than would otherwise be the case;
• Renewables are entering the mainstream, but long-term support is needed to boost their competitiveness;
• Getting the prices right, by phasing-out fossil-fuel subsidies, is the single most effective measure to cut energy demand.

Extrase din World Energy Outlook 2010.

Mai multe detalii despre resursele de cărbune și fezabilitatea lor pe termen lung, aici.

One day in 2007, Dr. Giulio Tononi lay on a hospital stretcher as an anesthesiologist prepared him for surgery. For Dr. Tononi, it was a moment of intellectual exhilaration. He is a distinguished chair in consciousness science at the University of Wisconsin, and for much of his life he has been developing a theory of consciousness. Lying in the hospital, Dr. Tononi finally had a chance to become his own experiment.

The anesthesiologist was preparing to give Dr. Tononi one drug to render him unconscious, and another one to block muscle movements. Dr. Tononi suggested the anesthesiologist first tie a band around his arm to keep out the muscle-blocking drug. The anesthesiologist could then ask Dr. Tononi to lift his finger from time to time, so they could mark the moment he lost awareness.

 

The anesthesiologist did not share Dr. Tononi’s excitement. “He could not have been less interested,” Dr. Tononi recalled. “He just said, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ and put me to sleep. He was thinking, ‘This guy must be out of his mind.’ ”

 

Dr. Tononi was not offended. Consciousness has long been the province of philosophers, and most doctors steer clear of their abstract speculations. After all, debating the finer points of what it is like to be a brain floating in a vat does not tell you how much anesthetic to give a patient.

 

But Dr. Tononi’s theory is, potentially, very different. He and his colleagues are translating the poetry of our conscious experiences into the precise language of mathematics. To do so, they are adapting information theory, a branch of science originally applied to computers and telecommunications. If Dr. Tononi is right, he and his colleagues may be able to build a “consciousness meter” that doctors can use to measure consciousness as easily as they measure blood pressure and body temperature. Perhaps then his anesthesiologist will become interested.

 

“I love his ideas,” said Christof Koch, an expert on consciousness at Caltech. “It’s the only really promising fundamental theory of consciousness.”

Articolul integral din New York Times, aici.

Informații suplimentare – aici și aici.

O lectură instructivă:

Everywhere there is a feeling that the world is in flux, that we are on the brink of a historic transition, and that the world will be fundamentally changed somehow in the next few generations. The pace of technological change is accelerating, and we are all swept up in it. Think of all of the indispensable things in your daily life you have only learned to use in the past decade or so. Email, Google, instant messaging and mobile phones spring to mind immediately, but there’s also hybrid car technology, curbside recycling and social networking sites like Facebook. All have found widespread application only since the mid-1990s, and yet today we can’t imagine living without them. Trying to imagine what the world will be like at the close of the 21st century is nearly impossible.

With all of these amazing technological advances, though, has come a great deal of ancillary baggage. The unprecedented rise in chronic disease in westernized societies is perhaps the most obvious example. I say westernized, rather than western, because we are now well aware of the growing incidence of heart disease, diabetes and plain-old obesity in the developing world, particularly in places such as India and China. As they become more like us, they are taking on many of our worst attributes as well. Psychological disorders such as depression and anxiety are also on the rise, and drugs to treat these disorders are now the most widely prescribed in the United States. This seemingly inexorable march toward western unhealthiness made me wonder why it happened in the first place. Is there some sort of fatal mismatch between western culture and our biology that is making us ill? And if there is such a mismatch, how did our present culture come to dominate? Surely we are the masters of our own fate, and we created the culture that is best suited to us, rather than the other way around?

The answer to this was a long time in coming. It took me on a global quest to discover the similarities between what happened thousands of years ago and what is happening now, as we face what promises to be another turning apparent point in our evolution. During the course of researching of my first book, The Journey of Man, I was struck by the effects of the agricultural lifestyle on humans living 10,000 years ago in the Middle East. It turns out that early farmers were actually less healthy than the surrounding hunter-gatherer populations. So why did the farmers ‘win’ so resoundingly, to the extent that virtually no one on Earth today lives as a hunter-gatherer? The answer, like most insights into major historical events, is somewhat complicated, but reveals a simple pattern in human history that seems to repeat itself again and again: necessity is the mother of invention.

The changes as we settled down into villages and then cities wrought havoc on our biology, adapted as it was to millions of years of leading a semi-nomadic existence as hunter-gatherers. Instead of modifying the culture to suit our physiology, though, we seem to have adapted biologically to the prevailing culture. The signals of this are still visible in our DNA, and we are still in the process of adapting to it. It is likely that we have changed more at the DNA level in the past 10,000 years than we did in the previous 100,000. This acceleration in the rate of evolutionary change is unprecedented in the history of our species.

De aici.

John Searle argumentează, în „Minds, Brains and Programs”, de ce inteligența artificială este doar un vis frumos, încă. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy rezumă foarte bine problema:

Work in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has produced computer programs that can beat the world chess champion, and programs with which one can converse in natural language. Our experience shows that playing chess and carrying on a conversation are activities that require understanding and intelligence. Does computer prowess at chess and conversation then show that computers can understand and be intelligent? Will further development result in digital computers that fully match or even exceed human intelligence? Alan Turing (1950), one of the pioneer theoreticians of computing, believed the answer to these questions was “yes”. Turing proposed what is now known as “The Turing Test”: if a computer can pass for human in online chat, we should grant that it is intelligent. Later workers in AI claimed that computers already understood at least some natural language. Beginning in 1980, philosopher John Searle introduced a short and widely-discussed argument intended to show conclusively that it is impossible for digital computers to understand language or think.

Searle argues that a good way to test a theory of mind, say a theory that holds that understanding can be created by doing such and such, is to imagine what it would be like to do what the theory says would create understanding. Searle (1999) summarized the Chinese Room argument concisely:

„Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.”

Searle goes on to say, “The point of the argument is this: if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have.”

Searle develops broader implications of his argument. Searle also aims to refute the functionalist approach to understanding minds, especially that form of functionalism known as the Computational Theory of Mind, that treats minds as information processing systems. As a result of its scope, as well as Searle’s clear and forceful writing style, the Chinese Room argument has probably been the most widely discussed philosophical argument in cognitive science to appear in the in the past 25 years. By 1991 computer scientist Pat Hayes had defined Cognitive Science as the ongoing research project of refuting Searle’s argument. Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker (1997) pointed out that by the mid-1990s well over 100 articles had been published on Searle’s thought experiment—and that discussion of it was so pervasive on the Internet that Pinker found it a compelling reason to remove his name from all Internet discussion lists.[…]

Sau, în propriile cuvinte ale autorului, din articolul de mai sus:

This article can be viewed as an attempt to explore the consequences of two propositions. (1) Intentionality in human beings (and animals) is a product of causal features of the brain I assume this is an empirical fact about the actual causal relations between mental processes and brains It says simply that certain brain processes are sufficient for intentionality. (2) Instantiating a computer program is never by itself a sufficient condition of intentionality The main argument of this paper is directed at establishing this claim The form of the argument is to show how a human agent could instantiate the program and still not have the relevant intentionality. These two propositions have the following consequences (3) The explanation of how the brain produces intentionality cannot be that it does it by instantiating a computer program. This is a strict logical consequence of 1 and 2. (4) Any mechanism capable of producing intentionality must have causal powers equal to those of the brain. This is meant to be a trivial consequence of 1. (5) Any attempt literally to create intentionality artificially (strong AI) could not succeed just by designing programs but would have to duplicate the causal powers of the human
brain. This follows from 2 and 4.

În industria constructoare de mașini avem zeci de mărci concurente pe piață, de la BMW la Dacia și de la Lexus la Renault. La fel și în ceea ce privește mărcile de telefoane mobile, sau de haine, sau de cosmetice, sau de bere. Practic, în cam toate ramurile și domeniile există o competiție acerbă, fără lideri categorici. Cu excepția Internetului. Aici competiția – sau lipsa ei – ascultă de alte legi, adesea facilitând apariția unor cvasimonopoluri. Pe merit sau nu, contează mai puțin. Imaginați-vă cum și-ar putea desfășura optim activitatea utilizatorul mediu de Internet, dacă s-ar lipsi de MS Windows, MS Office, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter sau Skype. Ar fi dificil, dacă nu chiar imposibil în anumite situații…

The Internet has long been held up as a model for what the free market is supposed to look like—competition in its purest form. So why does it look increasingly like a Monopoly board? Most of the major sectors today are controlled by one dominant company or an oligopoly. Google "owns" search; Facebook, social networking; eBay rules auctions; Apple dominates online content delivery; Amazon, retail; and so on.

There are digital Kashmirs, disputed territories that remain anyone’s game, like digital publishing. But the dominions of major firms have enjoyed surprisingly secure borders over the last five years, their core markets secure. Microsoft’s Bing, launched last year by a giant with $40 billion in cash on hand, has captured a mere 3.25% of query volume (Google retains 83%). Still, no one expects Google Buzz to seriously encroach on Facebook’s market, or, for that matter, Skype to take over from Twitter. Though the border incursions do keep dominant firms on their toes, they have largely foundered as business ventures.

Today’s Internet borders will probably change eventually, especially as new markets appear. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we are living in an age of large information monopolies. Could it be that the free market on the Internet actually tends toward monopolies? Could it even be that demand, of all things, is actually winnowing the online free market—that Americans, so diverse and individualistic, actually love these monopolies?

The history of American information firms suggests that the answer to both questions is "yes." Over the long haul, competition has been the exception, monopoly the rule. Apart from brief periods of openness created by new inventions or antitrust breakups, every medium, starting with the telegraph, has eventually proved to be a case study in monopoly. In fact, many of those firms are still around, if not quite as powerful as they once were, including AT&T, Paramount and NBC.

Internet industries develop pretty much like any other industry that depends on a network: A single firm can dominate the market if the product becomes more valuable to each user as the number of users rises. Such networks have a natural tendency to grow, and that growth leads to dominance. That was the key to Western Union’s telegraph monopoly in the 19th century and to the telephone monopoly of its successor, AT&T. The Bell lines simply reached more people than anyone else’s, so ever more customers came to depend on them in a feedback loop of expanding market share. The more customers they reached, the more impervious the firm became to challengers.

De aici.

Nu va fi nicio problemă dacă voi începe direct cu cea mai importantă dintre concluzii: cei mai bogați 1% dintre americani dețin 34.6% din întreaga avuție privată, iar următorii 19% – 50.5%, ceea ce înseamnă că 20% din populație deține 85% din totalul bogăției/avuției; restul de 80% își împart beneficiile rămase (adică 15%):

In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one’s home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.7%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2010).

Pentru majoritatea americanilor, locuințele sunt principala avere pe care aceștia o dețin:

For the vast majority of Americans, their homes are by far the most significant wealth they possess. Figure 3 comes from the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances (via Wolff, 2010) and compares the median income, total wealth (net worth, which is marketable assets minus debt), and non-home wealth (which earlier we called financial wealth) of White, Black, and Hispanic households in the U.S.[…]

And for all Americans, things are getting worse: as the projections to July 2009 by Wolff (2010) make clear, the last few years have seen a huge loss in housing wealth for most families, making the gap between the rich and the rest of America even greater, and increasing the number of households with no marketable assets from 18.6% to 24.1%.

În ceea ce privește contextul istoric, foarte puține s-au schimbat în distribuția bogăției de-a lungul ultimelor două secole de istorie americană:

Numerous studies show that the wealth distribution has been extremely concentrated throughout American history, with the top 1% already owning 40-50% in large port cities like Boston, New York, and Charleston in the 19th century. It was very stable over the course of the 20th century, although there were small declines in the aftermath of the New Deal and World II, when most people were working and could save a little money. There were progressive income tax rates, too, which took some money from the rich to help with government services.

Then there was a further decline, or flattening, in the 1970s, but this time in good part due to a fall in stock prices, meaning that the rich lost some of the value in their stocks. By the late 1980s, however, the wealth distribution was almost as concentrated as it had been in 1929, when the top 1% had 44.2% of all wealth. It has continued to edge up since that time, with a slight decline from 1998 to 2001, before the economy crashed in the late 2000s and little people got pushed down again. Table 3 and Figure 4 present the details from 1922 through 2007.

Situația este aproximativ la fel și în restul lumii:

With those caveats in mind, we can still safely say that the top 10% of the world’s adults control about 85% of global household wealth — defined very broadly as all assets (not just financial assets), minus debts. That compares with a figure of 69.8% for the top 10% for the United States. The only industrialized democracy with a higher concentration of wealth in the top 10% than the United States is Switzerland at 71.3%. For the figures for several other Northern European countries and Canada, all of which are based on high-quality data, see Table 4.

Cât despre relația – cât se poate de evidentă – dintre bogăție și putere, orice discuții suplimentare sunt inutile:

First, wealth can be seen as a "resource" that is very useful in exercising power. That’s obvious when we think of donations to political parties, payments to lobbyists, and grants to experts who are employed to think up new policies beneficial to the wealthy. Wealth also can be useful in shaping the general social environment to the benefit of the wealthy, whether through hiring public relations firms or donating money for universities, museums, music halls, and art galleries.

Second, certain kinds of wealth, such as stock ownership, can be used to control corporations, which of course have a major impact on how the society functions. Tables 5a and 5b show what the distribution of stock ownership looks like. Note how the top one percent’s share of stock equity increased (and the bottom 80 percent’s share decreased) between 2001 and 2007.

Third, just as wealth can lead to power, so too can power lead to wealth. Those who control a government can use their position to feather their own nests, whether that means a favorable land deal for relatives at the local level or a huge federal government contract for a new corporation run by friends who will hire you when you leave government. If we take a larger historical sweep and look cross-nationally, we are well aware that the leaders of conquering armies often grab enormous wealth, and that some religious leaders use their positions to acquire wealth.

 

There’s a fourth way that wealth and power relate. For research purposes, the wealth distribution can be seen as the main "value distribution" within the general power indicator I call "who benefits." What follows in the next three paragraphs is a little long-winded, I realize, but it needs to be said because some social scientists — primarily pluralists — argue that who wins and who loses in a variety of policy conflicts is the only valid power indicator (Dahl, 1957, 1958; Polsby, 1980). And philosophical discussions don’t even mention wealth or other power indicators (Lukes, 2005). (If you have heard it all before, or can do without it, feel free to skip ahead to the last paragraph of this section)

 

Here’s the argument: if we assume that most people would like to have as great a share as possible of the things that are valued in the society, then we can infer that those who have the most goodies are the most powerful. Although some value distributions may be unintended outcomes that do not really reflect power, as pluralists are quick to tell us, the general distribution of valued experiences and objects within a society still can be viewed as the most publicly visible and stable outcome of the operation of power.

Evoluția veniturilor:

The rising concentration of income can be seen in a special New York Times analysis of an Internal Revenue Service report on income in 2004. Although overall income had grown by 27% since 1979, 33% of the gains went to the top 1%. Meanwhile, the bottom 60% were making less: about 95 cents for each dollar they made in 1979. The next 20% – those between the 60th and 80th rungs of the income ladder — made $1.02 for each dollar they earned in 1979. Furthermore, the Times author concludes that only the top 5% made significant gains ($1.53 for each 1979 dollar). Most amazing of all, the top 0.1% — that’s one-tenth of one percent — had more combined pre-tax income than the poorest 120 million people (Johnston, 2006).

But the increase in what is going to the few at the top did not level off, even with all that. As of 2007, income inequality in the United States was at an all-time high for the past 95 years, with the top 0.01% — that’s one-hundredth of one percent — receiving 6% of all U.S. wages, which is double what it was for that tiny slice in 2000; the top 10% received 49.7%, the highest since 1917 (Saez, 2009). However, in an analysis of 2008 tax returns for the top 0.2% — that is, those whose income tax returns reported $1,000,000 or more in income (mostly from individuals, but nearly a third from couples) — it was found that they received 13% of all income, down slightly from 16.1% in 2007 due to the decline in payoffs from financial assets (Norris, 2010).

Another way that income can be used as a power indicator is by comparing average CEO annual pay to average factory worker pay, something that has been done for many years byBusiness Week and, later, the Associated Press. The ratio of CEO pay to factory worker pay rose from 42:1 in 1960 to as high as 531:1 in 2000, at the height of the stock market bubble, when CEOs were cashing in big stock options. It was at 411:1 in 2005 and 344:1 in 2007, according to research by United for a Fair Economy. By way of comparison, the same ratio is about 25:1 in Europe. The changes in the American ratio from 1960 to 2007 are displayed in Figure 6, which is based on data from several hundred of the largest corporations.

Although some of the information I’ve relied upon to create this section on executives’ vs. workers’ pay is a few years old now, the AFL/CIO provides up-to-date information on CEO salaries at their Web site. There, you can learn that the median compensation for CEO’s in allindustries as of early 2010 is $3.9 million; it’s $10.6 million for the companies listed in Standard and Poor’s 500, and $19.8 million for the companies listed in the Dow-Jones Industrial Average. Since the median worker’s pay is about $36,000, then you can quickly calculate that CEOs in general make 100 times as much as the workers, that CEO’s of S&P 500 firms make almost 300 times as much, and that CEOs at the Dow-Jones companies make 550 times as much.

Detalii suplimentare – aici.