Any attempt by citizens to communicate and organize outside of sanctioned government channels will be seen as a threat to security. Welcome to the future.
But there is no future there; that's the way it's ALLWAYS HAS BEEN.
For centuries, postal services has been run by kings, and telephone networks (wired or not) are always under the oversight of some governmental-entity.
That's not the one I'm thinking of, unfortunately (though it is another one I like). I'm quite certain the quote I have in mind does specifically reference the number of people 10 men can kill. It was bandied about plenty immediately after 9/11.
That's chickenshit compared to the number of people killed by the crew of Enola Gay...
More often, flash mobs have no discernible purpose at all. Last August about 40 people gathered at the Place des Arts in Montreal to toss rubber ducks in a fountain and quack.
Ahh, the mysteries of what goes on in the little brains of law-enforcement officers...
That's not what the theory of capitalism says. Capitalism says that capital follows need, and corporations had better keep their feet moving if they don't want their bottom line to look like DeCaprio's private parts after he plunged.
My mail server at home is a 166 Mhz Pentium MMX that I think is overclocked to 200 Mhz. It's currently running Debian but I actually, believe it or not, have Gentoo installed on a separate partition.
You must have started the installation a few years ago...
Currently, the USA is hopelessly hooked-on automobiles. It is not conceivable that anyone would be able to live a comfortable life without an automobile.
In addition of being quite destructive to the environment and making the US dependent on foreign oils, the automobile addiction is a prime source of economic disadvantage, because of the cost of operating an automobile (both the individual and the collective & social cost) is forcing salaries to be higher than in countries the USA is competing against.
The recent outflux of high-tech jobs to third-world countries because salaries over there are cheaper is certainly a cause of the obligation for employers to subsidize the indispensable automobiles of their workers.
Emerging countries want in some way or other to equal the US standard of living; this includes the obligatory automobile. Now, being quite doubtful that the planet Earth would be incapable of sustaining the BILLION additionnal automobiles that would be needed if China and India would raise their standard of living to match the US, it is quite obvious that, just for the reason of being the example everyone else wants to emulate, the USA would have to significantly decrease it's dependence on automobiles.
What does the green party intend to do towards this inescapable goal?
This is EXACTLY what happened to the US automobile industry in the 1970s. The US government raised import tariffs on Japanese cars. How did Detroit react? They raised their cars' prices to match the cost of Japanese cars + import tariff! So the US government's "helpful" tariff only helped Detroit executives to make more money.
Hey, it's certainly not the government's fault if Detroit was stupid enough to price it's cars like the higher-quality japanese jobs...
To be fair, not even half of "us yankees" believe that public service funding is a sinister idea. While our conservatives tend to be more so than their counterparts in Great Britain and elsewhere, we also have our share of moderates and liberals who believe in the value of governmental spending for the public good, to varying extents.
Yeah. Let's see who benefits from trade barriers. Do consumers benefit ? No, they have to pay higher prices. Do in-country business owners benefit ? Yes, their competition was just hamstringed. Wow. You got it exactly backwards.
What good to a country it is when consumers send money out of a given country? Look at the US trade deficit.
Look at how Spain became economically backeards after it stole all the south-american gold. The same thing will happen to the US...
All economics is based on human nature because the actions of humans combine to make the economy. If you don't understand basic human nature, you can't understand basic economics.
Here are the basic principles of human nature you miss :
insulate people from the effects of their inefficiency and THEY WILL NEVER LEARN TO BE MORE EFFICIENT.
One man's inefficiency is another man's way of life. US capitalists fail to see this by tying to shove down their culture down the throat of the rest of the planet through free-trade agreements.
more money BEFORE good results NEVER LEADS TO BETTER RESULTS LATER, in salaries or government programs.
If the good results brought more money, I'd agree with you, alas it is not the case. The standard of life has been dwindling for the middle class of all the countries involved.
If you were able to race against a bunch of people who had to wear lead shoes (analogous to tarriffs) when you didn't, would you try as hard to compete ? Salaries are nice, but when I get the salary someone who outdid me should have gotten, that doesn't lead me to conclude I should try harder. It leads me to conclude that the politicians are useful idiots I need to cultivate.
And what is the point of competing more? Make more widgets? What if no one can buy the widgets because they've become nouveaux pauvres thanks to the new improved (for whom?) economy????
Assuming that government throwing money at the problem of competitiveness will help is absurd. Look at the effectiveness of nearly any government program. Why do public schools turn out morons when trillions of dollars have been spent on education ? Because more and more money is shovelled at it when it fails in order to "help it out" instead of waiting to shovel more money after it produces good results.
Public schools turn-out morons because the bourgeois have no use for an educated population. A moronic population will dutifully do what it's told without question, and buy whatever shit the bourgeois throws at them so they can be cool.
It's no surprise that the bourgeois send their offspring to private schools, because there, they can have better edcation that tells them how to become leaders and screw the population for their own benefit!
Let's look at the logic of Ford in your example: give money, get it back, lose a car. Net loss: one car, net gain: absolutely nothing. Ford succeeded by becoming so EFFICIENT it could offer LOW-PRICED cars and the masses (that didn't work for him) could buy lots of them.
Nevertheless, FORD doubled or tripled their worker's salaries SO THEY COULD BUY THE WIDGETS. Nowadays, the companies are cutting salaries and benefit that the workers cannot afford the widgets anymore. It's getting to the point that there will be no middle-class left to buy the goddammed widgets, leaving the bourgois up the creek!
You deride people who disagree as myopic. Let me spell it out for you :
You aren't insulated -> you have to actually outdo your competitors -> you get more efficient to do this -> yo
blockquote> Clearly you have no understanding of international business. You can't just impose tariffs, especially if you are within a free-trade zone (such as Mexico/US). If you impose tariffs on them they can impose tariffs on you (not necessarily for the same goods). All tariffs do is reduce the trade between countries (or groups of countries)
Of course other countries can impose tariffs!!! That's called levelling the playing field!!! The idea is to let governments act for the BEST INTEREST OF THEIR CONSTITUENTS!!!!
When countries are able to offer lower wages they do so generally because the standards of living are lower. When products can be produced for less, that country has a competitive advantage in producing those products.
Perhaps, but they are more reliant on external capital, as they are unable to raise the proper capital themselves.
While sometimes, lax environmental laws or other legal matters make it unfair for some countries generally the cheaper production costs should be utilized. In situations where there is unfair competition tariffs can be imposed in that case, according to a NAFTA or WTO agreement.
The problem is that the standard of living of the populations are NOT covered by the agreements; in that, governments have FAILED to protect the interests of their populations.
I'd rather not mention your disrespect of MBAs at this point, as I'm getting one (after working as a software engineer for a while) and there are plenty of MBAs without the greed you suggest.
The fact is, the MBAs have a disproportionate influence, and that influcence is **ALWAYS** towards the bottom-line, wich is all too often contrary to the long-term benefit of the populations affected by the decisions of the too-big companies they work for.
Also, many of them are extremely intelligent, and you would be best off not underestimating them just because you lack the capacity to understand what they do.
Their main capacity is not hard to understand: how to squeeze the most profits from any given situation. Doing otherwise would be a dereliction of duty for them.
As for the idea that free-trade only benefits the company owners, you are wrong there too. Free trade benefits:
Yes, company ownersThe economy in general, as more money is available for investmentThe global economy as there is more money available for innovationConsumers, who get cheaper products
Most importantly, it helps the new workers who would otherwise be unemployed
They only have to look-out for themselves.
Society is not the economy alone. There are many things besides the economy, all things being just as important as the economy itself. Therefore, anything who only looks AT the economy can be quite destructive for society in general.
What good are consumers who cannot afford the goods produced by the bourgeois? At one point, the bourgeois will be SOL without any middle-class consumers to buy their shit! Again, this is proof of the blatant shortsightedness of the bourgeois and their MBA minions!!!!
What new workers? Lemme guess why you're getting an MBA. Because employment's tight for a software engineer? (Or maybe you are a lousy software engineer?)
What's more selfish? Moving your employment offshore to get your investors money, or trying to justify your high paying job when someone living in poverty could do just as good a job (situational) for much less money?
This is taking advantage of poverty. In the book of anybody with a sense of ethics, this is despicable.
But, of course, we expect an MBA to find this perfectly allright.
That's pretty cool! Here in the U.S., we had to pay per minute for contemporary services on Compuserve. With prices as high as $0.20 per minute, it's no wonder that Compu$erve was primarily reserved for businesses! But to have hundreds of pages of text information pushed to your television set at no (excluding television tax) cost? That's amazing!
You see, public entreprises (that belong to the State) aren't always bad... Public service is exactly what it says: service for the public, and not a sinister plot by the Government to enslave the population, as you yankees seem to be happy to believe so easily...
Conservative leader Michael Howard said it was a first-class public service. Ceefax began as an experimental service of 30 pages but now has 1,000 pages.
Something must be wrong with this guy. Conservatives always want to abolish public services...
What a brilliant idea: let's increase the cost of goods to poor people in the West and shovel even more of their money to unproductive government workers through the new taxes.
This is ***EXACTLY*** what governments were doing before the widespread free-trade treaties of the last 15-20 years. Remember those times where nearly everyone made a decent living for a reasonable amount of work and when a man could support one family with one job, and when people weren't crushed by 60 hour-weeks because half the people don't work and the other half work for two???
...that this is just the fault of the patent system, it is a flaw in the
legal system, and it is a flaw in the community. ...
I feel sorry for the USPTO. They obviously lack technical expertise, and can't afford the salaries to attain it. If they were getting feedback on what patents were downright bad from the court system, they could train and evolve to start granting more deserved patents.
You are right (on the first point) and wrong; the USPTO **HAS** the technical expertise, it's just that their hands are tied by the legal procedures, and it's the deep-pocketed clients who patent stuff that pour all the money they want into legal proceedings.
This is excellent news indeed. A close friend worked for PriceWaterhouseCooper until recently, and eventually left because he couldn't keep living with the mentality that cared about nothing but money. I guess this is not unique to PWC, but is a tendency that will tend to afflict all big companies.
Hellooo??? nothing but money is the frigging point for **ALL** companies, big or small.
It's worse in a small company, because in a big one, you have some leeway to hide somewhere. You don't have that when your boss ***OWNS*** the whoe damn place and can be everywhere and know all that happens.
The upside (every cloud comes with a silver lining attached) is that there are no meetings in small companies...:)
The only reason he seems to be able to get away with this is that it is not a political issue, because the Dutch media not understanding software patents is not giving it any attention. The infection in the feet of our prime minister is far more interesting. (The latest rumours are that it was a rather serious infection, which might have killed him.)
Infection in the feet? Does it impairs his mental abilities???
Breaktrough 6: Develop a strategic response to job migration to low-wage countries
Economic growth and employment can be seriously affected by the
accelerated job migration to low-wage countries. The EU needs to develop a
strategic response.
duh? Well, how about CUSTOMS TARIFFS designed to bring the price of low wages countries products more in line with those in the high wages coutries??? If a country pays jack shit to it's workers, the tarrifs go back in the importing country's government's pockets who can then use it to help increase that country's competitivity. But if it pays it's workers better, in turn, THEY BECOME MORE COMPETITIVE, because the receiving countries' tarrifs drop, and the extra price they are able to get for their products stays in the exporting country as profits, instead of tariffs in the importing country!!!
Geee whizz, in the last century, Henry Ford generated quite a commotion when he raised his worker's pay; that enabled them to BUY automobiles, which propelled Ford at the forefront of the industry!
But nowadays, bourgeois have no more foresight, and the swarms of MBAs they fatly pay have no more common-sense than a brain-dead sponge (with or without square pants), so they keep doing everything in the name of ultra-myopic short-sight. Free-trade only benefits the company owners, for the rest of the population, it means a steady decrease in the standard of living!
Slashdot Mirror
But there is no future there; that's the way it's ALLWAYS HAS BEEN .
For centuries, postal services has been run by kings, and telephone networks (wired or not) are always under the oversight of some governmental-entity.Who else is not surprised?
And security always includes usage policies.
In addition of being quite destructive to the environment and making the US dependent on foreign oils, the automobile addiction is a prime source of economic disadvantage, because of the cost of operating an automobile (both the individual and the collective & social cost) is forcing salaries to be higher than in countries the USA is competing against.
The recent outflux of high-tech jobs to third-world countries because salaries over there are cheaper is certainly a cause of the obligation for employers to subsidize the indispensable automobiles of their workers.
Emerging countries want in some way or other to equal the US standard of living; this includes the obligatory automobile. Now, being quite doubtful that the planet Earth would be incapable of sustaining the BILLION additionnal automobiles that would be needed if China and India would raise their standard of living to match the US, it is quite obvious that, just for the reason of being the example everyone else wants to emulate, the USA would have to significantly decrease it's dependence on automobiles.
What does the green party intend to do towards this inescapable goal?
What good to a country it is when consumers send money out of a given country? Look at the US trade deficit.
Look at how Spain became economically backeards after it stole all the south-american gold. The same thing will happen to the US...
One man's inefficiency is another man's way of life. US capitalists fail to see this by tying to shove down their culture down the throat of the rest of the planet through free-trade agreements.
If the good results brought more money, I'd agree with you, alas it is not the case. The standard of life has been dwindling for the middle class of all the countries involved.
And what is the point of competing more? Make more widgets? What if no one can buy the widgets because they've become nouveaux pauvres thanks to the new improved (for whom?) economy????
Public schools turn-out morons because the bourgeois have no use for an educated population. A moronic population will dutifully do what it's told without question, and buy whatever shit the bourgeois throws at them so they can be cool.
It's no surprise that the bourgeois send their offspring to private schools, because there, they can have better edcation that tells them how to become leaders and screw the population for their own benefit!
Nevertheless, FORD doubled or tripled their worker's salaries SO THEY COULD BUY THE WIDGETS. Nowadays, the companies are cutting salaries and benefit that the workers cannot afford the widgets anymore. It's getting to the point that there will be no middle-class left to buy the goddammed widgets, leaving the bourgois up the creek!
Of course other countries can impose tariffs!!! That's called levelling the playing field !!! The idea is to let governments act for the BEST INTEREST OF THEIR CONSTITUENTS!!!!
Perhaps, but they are more reliant on external capital, as they are unable to raise the proper capital themselves.
The problem is that the standard of living of the populations are NOT covered by the agreements; in that, governments have FAILED to protect the interests of their populations.
The fact is, the MBAs have a disproportionate influence, and that influcence is **ALWAYS** towards the bottom-line, wich is all too often contrary to the long-term benefit of the populations affected by the decisions of the too-big companies they work for.
Their main capacity is not hard to understand: how to squeeze the most profits from any given situation. Doing otherwise would be a dereliction of duty for them.
This is taking advantage of poverty. In the book of anybody with a sense of ethics, this is despicable.
But, of course, we expect an MBA to find this perfectly allright.You see, public entreprises (that belong to the State) aren't always bad... Public service is exactly what it says: service for the public, and not a sinister plot by the Government to enslave the population, as you yankees seem to be happy to believe so easily...
And where is Compu$erve, nowadays????It's worse in a small company, because in a big one, you have some leeway to hide somewhere. You don't have that when your boss ***OWNS*** the whoe damn place and can be everywhere and know all that happens.
The upside (every cloud comes with a silver lining attached) is that there are no meetings in small companies...duh? Well, how about CUSTOMS TARIFFS designed to bring the price of low wages countries products more in line with those in the high wages coutries??? If a country pays jack shit to it's workers, the tarrifs go back in the importing country's government's pockets who can then use it to help increase that country's competitivity. But if it pays it's workers better, in turn, THEY BECOME MORE COMPETITIVE, because the receiving countries' tarrifs drop, and the extra price they are able to get for their products stays in the exporting country as profits, instead of tariffs in the importing country!!!
Geee whizz, in the last century, Henry Ford generated quite a commotion when he raised his worker's pay; that enabled them to BUY automobiles, which propelled Ford at the forefront of the industry!
But nowadays, bourgeois have no more foresight, and the swarms of MBAs they fatly pay have no more common-sense than a brain-dead sponge (with or without square pants), so they keep doing everything in the name of ultra-myopic short-sight. Free-trade only benefits the company owners, for the rest of the population, it means a steady decrease in the standard of living!