I know one woman who is intensely religious, trained to be a minister, has two evangelical missionary parents, and who absolutely insists that premarital sex is fine in Christianity, and, contrary to popular belief, is not banned anywhere in the Bible. I've also been told by Christians studying Christian theology that, whilst they would probably not personally encourage premarital sex, they would also not forbid or condemn it, since it is not banned in the Bible.
I also know one Orthodox Christian who has told me that premarital sex is banned in the Bible, because it is classified as committing adultery on your future wife/husband. It's a bit of a stretch... most Christians would reject the idea that sleeping with your girlfriend is cheating on someone you've not even met yet.
It appears that is compliant with WTO rules, so yeah that's probably fine, since it's entirely voluntary. Companies aren't forced to share technology , they choose to do it to gain access to a huge new market.
That is an interesting comment, shame it was posted anonymously. The book McMafia has similar interesting perspectives on the rise of global organised crime after the fall of the USSR, it really is remarkable how quickly the crimelords managed to exert their hold over a society once the government was weakened. Unfortunately history has shown that individuals rarely often don't have the resources to stand up to either warlords or organised crime, even when they have unrestricted ownership of firearms. See, for example, Somalia, Afghanistan, ex-USSR countries, any of the African/S.American/Middle East countries that fell to dictators. Too many people forget that owning, or even carrying, a gun won't stop you being shot in the back by a determined assassin. And if you piss off the Mafia type gangs, then will just have you killed. Of course, the government and its police is just a big gang too, but at least they have rules and regulations, and it's the only gang that you will ever get to exert any influence over as a normal citizen.
Yes, it is an interesting point but it relies on some assumptions that may not be valid:
Assumption: Loaning money to some students puts a significant enough amount of money into the system to cause the cost of education to rise for everyone.
Consequence: Take money out of the system. Money available to education institutes falls, but they manage to provide a similar level of education with lower costs. Costs fall for all students.
Alternative consequence #1: Money available to education institutes falls, and the level of education falls. People complain that U.S. educated scientists, doctors etc. are not as good as they were. U.S. competitiveness falls, imports more foreigners to keep up.
Alternative consequence #2: The reduction in federal loan money is not significant enough to cause a drop in education costs. The high cost is driven by wealthy students, families who have saved for many years, etc. and not by students on loans. No change.
Alternative consequence #3: Large numbers of intelligent young people can't get an education, and can't get a job, become disillusioned with the state, vote for political candidate who offers free education based on successful models in other places (e.g. Europe).
Which is in essence what the complaint is about. The Chinese government is not playing by the same rules the rest of the world is playing by.
This complaint is about the Chinese investing $30 billion in solar energy subsidies. How much have Germany and the U.S. invested in green energy subsidies? More in absolute terms, much more in per-capita terms (but, interestingly, still less than the subsidies for oil or nuclear power).
The Chinese government hands cash to their panel manufacturers to lower their prices so they can put our manufacturers out of business.
The Chinese government wants to encourage domestic use of cheap, renewable energy because they have no long-standing strategic interests in the Middle East but will soon be importing 70% of their oil from countries that are allied to the U.S. That is just one reason, in addition to all of the usual reasons that reliance on foreign oil is a problem.
The Chinese government actually subsidizes very few industries - unless you count pegging the currency against the dollar, which is another issue. The real reason Chinese goods are cheaper is that the average Chinese factory worker gets paid about $200 a week for around 100 hours of work. That's $0.50 an hour. That kind of price advantage is enough to ensure dominance in most fields of manufacturing.
There is also an important reason why China wants to promote the solar industry - the sustainable energy industry is of strategic importance to the Chinese. By 2015, 70% of China's oil imports will come from the Middle East oil - a region where U.S. interests have historically been dominant and where China has had no long-standing strategic interests. Simply put, the Chinese want to avoid becoming overly reliant on oil supplies from governments that are allied with the U.S..
This article makes an obvious point regarding government subsidies: "China floated $30 billion in subsidies to its solar sector? Wow, that’s so totally unfair. Why, the US would never stand for such a thing! That’s why Obama included almost $40 billion in green-sector subsidies as part of his 2009 Porkulus package, of which $17 billion has already been spent. And let’s not forget that over a half-billion dollars of that money got spent specifically on Solyndra alone." So, subsidies are okay when the U.S. does it, but bad when China does it?
If I remember correctly, you could build OpenOffice on Gentoo with -pipe and various other performance tuning flags, and the hardware requirement was only a minimum of 512MB. And every other package, including big stuff like the kernel and KDE, could be built with only 64MB... though 256MB was recommended.
I would guess the default Android build is optimized for the Google Android team, and so speed is the most important factor; they probably use a build server with multiple processors and big memory and don't waste engineering time on optimizing for anything else. I would also guess that there probably aren't that many people outside of Google who build their own Android images.
Looking at those specs, maybe it's about time to think about switching Android to a modular architecture. There is no reason why the complete build needs to be made in one go. It's like running Gentoo and compiling the entire system from source when you really just want to upgrade an application. Or like the old OpenOffice days, when they bundled everything, so compiling it required compiling every library that it depended on, plus compiling Python and everything else that was embedded. Building/distributing a whole new system image and whacking it over a partition seems crazy in this day and age. What Android needs is something like.deb packaging and a proper package repository, honestly I'm surprised the Cyanogen guys haven't done it yet, it would make their job of getting rapid and incremental updates out much easier.
I never said free - I said inexpensive. I am well aware that there's no such thing as a "free" phone. But you can buy sim-free with no contract, in which case the prices are directly comparable. And for many network providers, you can compare the same tariff with different "free" phones to figure out the actual cost difference.
Thank you for taking the time to reply. I actually think a Ron Paul government would be an interesting experiment, but most people are going to find his proposals too radical. You are correct in that many of the functions of agencies like the NOAA would still be carried out; most probably, surveying would become a responsibility of the navy, weather would be commercial or DoD, climate (now controversial) will be done by academia, fisheries - hmm without regulation this would lead to overfishing and rapid depletion of stocks, so not sure about that. But for the other stuff, yes, if it's important then someone will probably fund it. But dismantling large institutions has to be done with care - there will be a lot of organizations who rely on the existing functions that the institution provides, and they will need time to adapt.
I am sceptical of the official story about all the so-called "gains" in Afghanistan. This graph is partly the reason. PR men from the military tell us we are winning and have broken the Taliban. The figures tell us that we have had more casualties in the last 12 months than any other 12 month period since the war began. If we have broken the Taliban, shouldn't coalition casualties have gone down?
He proposes holding DoD budget steady to restore to 2006 levels, not exactly what I would call "slashing" when compared to his approach to other Departments (ie. get rid of them).. though ending war budget will have some effect at $100b/yr that is only 50 days of total military spending. No proposed cuts to other things like CIA & NSA black budget, maybe he is waiting to see what the budget actually is, though I suspect he already has some idea and could comment on cuts there if he wanted to.. but still, he does propose bigger cuts than others.
See my other reply. I worded the original post badly... I did understand he wants to "cut" military adventurism but not "slash" the budget, the difference being his budget returns the military to 2006 levels, whereas if he slashed it by dropping entire divisions and programs the country could save a fortune. It seems his proposals are much harsher on the other Departments than on the Department of Defense, and he doesn't appear to have any policy on budget cuts to the "black budget" CIA, NSA etc.
Good points! I was actually aware of his general position against military interventionism. What I meant is, he seems to be quite radical about completely dropping spending for various Departments but his DoD and DHS cuts are a conservative 15%-20% (restore to 2006 levels) and I don't see anything about cutting funding for NSA, CIA etc. and expenditure on these dwarfs the departments that he proposes cutting completely. The 15%-20% reduction only returns military spending to its 2006 levels, which is still way higher than any other nation. So, given the potential massive savings, why doesn't he propose slashing the military budget, eliminating entire programs and departments in the same way as he wants to do with other areas of the government?
It has nothing to do with the 'american dream' and everything to do with the fact that $200/month is not enough to pay rent on a shoe box even in rural America, let alone own a car
These are part of the "dream" though. Factory workers in China do not earn enough to pay rent. They literally eat, sleep and work in the factory. They don't earn enough to buy a car, either. They don't get to choose what food to eat. And they have no health insurance. American corporations could slash costs by adopting the Chinese factory model, but are Americans willing to work under those conditions? No, they want higher quality of life.
Minimum wage is $290/week (figuring 30 hours per week), so we aren't really that much higher realistically.
Chinese factory workers routinely do 12 hours a day with no weekends. 100 hours a week is considered normal. So for U.S. worker $290 a week for 30 hours=$9.66/hour. Chinese worker $50 per week for 100 hours=$0.5/hour. That makes the U.S. worker 20 times more expensive, and that's before taking into account lower per employee tax and insurance costs in China.
Energy Department's $5-billion Office of Science = 2.5 days of the military
$4.5-billion National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration = 2.25 days of the military
$750-million National Institute of Standards and Technology = 9 hours of the military
$1.1-billion U.S. Geological Survey = 13 hours of the military
(Based on Forbe's estimate of the cost of being U.S. military policy being $2 billion per day If you want units solely in terms of the war in Afghanistan, that figure is $300 million per day. Adjust for other wars etc. War: it isn't cheap.)
I wonder why Ron Paul doesn't talk about slashing the military budget, it would appear the potential savings are enormous?
Wait, don't tell me you actually believe a grass-roots revolution led by the poor to topple an authoritarian leadership and it's elite minority is somehow sponsoring the interests of the powerful few?
It certainly benefits someone. Is anyone naive enough to believe that military intervention anywhere, by any nation, is not motivated by self-interest? If you truly believe that there has been an instance of selfless military intervention, then I would ask you to really study what actually occurred, because, from a perspective of basic economics, it is highly unlikely that a government is going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars pursuing a war as a selfless act, i.e. one that they do not believe will benefit them in any way. Of course, that benefit to "the powerful few" may not be one that benefits the people of the nation that they rule e.g. war can be used to enable corporate expansion, access to natural resources, or just to shift large amounts of money from tax payers to the military industrial complex.
Remember the Bonus Army, where tanks were used in the streets of Washington D.C. to crush a non-violent protest by army veterans? Remember the Business Plot, where a few very powerful capitalists plotted to overthrow the U.S. government? Remember Major General Smedley Butler, a Republican who turned against the military industrial complex and authored War is a Racket?"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
There are obviously people who profit from war, and I'm not convinced that has ever changed. However, sometimes this can coincide with the interests of the people; hopefully Libya will turn out to be one of those times.
Actually, liberals have pretty much been unified in their stance against supporting dictatorship regimes, who murder their citizens and fail to respect basic human rights. Unlike some, othergroups. Watch The War On Democracy and then show me a single liberal who supports overthrowing democratic governments. Show me a single liberal who is against basic human rights. In every case I can think of, liberals have opposed supporting these regimes, whilst those on the right-wing have often argued otherwise (though sometimes they do admit they got it wrong)
Uh, you do realize that actually the Muslim Brotherhood hates [wikipedia.org] "western culture" and the U.S., right?
The issue is much more complex than "hating western culture", though there are some that do. Some hate their own rulers, who crushed any calls for political reform and civil rights with pure violence. Some hate the West because for decades the West was seen as backers of those despotic rulers; the West supplied military aid and weapons to the regimes of dictators, who went on to use those weapons against the people. Would you dislike China if they gave military weaponry to Al-Qaeda, who in turn used this weaponry against U.S. citizens? You would partly blame China for attacks using these weapons, right? And in the same way, there are many who partly blame the West for the injustices they have suffered. But, equally, there are many who recognise that the freedoms and democracy that those in the West have, are the same freedoms that they want for themselves. In particular, the Mu
They have also publicly stated that they would like to wage warfare on the west?
Citation? Their public policy is non-violence, and has been since the beginning. This is a stance that has been criticised by other Islamist groups. Certainly, there have been members of the group that have committed violence, but this is true of any large group of humans.
I guess that could actually have one positive effect. It could finally dispel the idea that everyone can or should go to college (or that a college degree should be considered a prerequisite for any white collar job).
The issue is that the number of blue collar jobs is drying up. Watch The China Question or any similar documentary... the jobs that can be off-shored will be off-shored. Salary in China for manual labour is $200 a month. What is the media U.S. blue collar monthly salary? $2500? That is a huge inequality. The U.S. is going to continue losing blue collar jobs until either the U.S. salary drops closer to $200, or the Chinese salary rises (which is slowly happening, but remember they still have hundreds of millions of people living in poverty who would be happy to take those $200/month factory jobs).
The real problem for the U.S. is that people are not politically willing to let wages drop to $200/month (or to have inflation devalue the currency so current wages are equivalent of $200). They are not willing to have thousands of teenage girls kept in factories where they do nothing except eat, sleep and work for $200. This is politically unacceptable. U.S. citizens have been sold on the "American Dream" and they want high quality of life. The other thing that is politically unacceptable is for the top class (i.e. CEOs and bankers) to be making hundreds of times more than the average blue collar worker. This system works for China because they do not have democracy. Elsewhere in the world, voters are simply going to reject this model and vote to tax the top class harder. Income disparity at a national level is one of the main drivers of civil and social unrest. People do not mind so much knowing that foreigners have a higher salary than theirs. But people really object to seeing others within their own country receiving a salary many times more than their own. This seems to be true regardless of nationality or personal political ideology.
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I know one woman who is intensely religious, trained to be a minister, has two evangelical missionary parents, and who absolutely insists that premarital sex is fine in Christianity, and, contrary to popular belief, is not banned anywhere in the Bible. I've also been told by Christians studying Christian theology that, whilst they would probably not personally encourage premarital sex, they would also not forbid or condemn it, since it is not banned in the Bible.
I also know one Orthodox Christian who has told me that premarital sex is banned in the Bible, because it is classified as committing adultery on your future wife/husband. It's a bit of a stretch... most Christians would reject the idea that sleeping with your girlfriend is cheating on someone you've not even met yet.
In fact, I'm pretty sure we're the first species on the planet to conduct a census to determine if our numbers were getting out of hand.
We don't have a census, we have a population estimate. A census is an enumeration of individuals.
It appears that is compliant with WTO rules, so yeah that's probably fine, since it's entirely voluntary. Companies aren't forced to share technology , they choose to do it to gain access to a huge new market.
That is an interesting comment, shame it was posted anonymously. The book McMafia has similar interesting perspectives on the rise of global organised crime after the fall of the USSR, it really is remarkable how quickly the crimelords managed to exert their hold over a society once the government was weakened. Unfortunately history has shown that individuals rarely often don't have the resources to stand up to either warlords or organised crime, even when they have unrestricted ownership of firearms. See, for example, Somalia, Afghanistan, ex-USSR countries, any of the African/S.American/Middle East countries that fell to dictators. Too many people forget that owning, or even carrying, a gun won't stop you being shot in the back by a determined assassin. And if you piss off the Mafia type gangs, then will just have you killed. Of course, the government and its police is just a big gang too, but at least they have rules and regulations, and it's the only gang that you will ever get to exert any influence over as a normal citizen.
Yes, it is an interesting point but it relies on some assumptions that may not be valid:
Assumption: Loaning money to some students puts a significant enough amount of money into the system to cause the cost of education to rise for everyone.
Consequence: Take money out of the system. Money available to education institutes falls, but they manage to provide a similar level of education with lower costs. Costs fall for all students.
Alternative consequence #1: Money available to education institutes falls, and the level of education falls. People complain that U.S. educated scientists, doctors etc. are not as good as they were. U.S. competitiveness falls, imports more foreigners to keep up.
Alternative consequence #2: The reduction in federal loan money is not significant enough to cause a drop in education costs. The high cost is driven by wealthy students, families who have saved for many years, etc. and not by students on loans. No change.
Alternative consequence #3: Large numbers of intelligent young people can't get an education, and can't get a job, become disillusioned with the state, vote for political candidate who offers free education based on successful models in other places (e.g. Europe).
Which is in essence what the complaint is about. The Chinese government is not playing by the same rules the rest of the world is playing by.
This complaint is about the Chinese investing $30 billion in solar energy subsidies. How much have Germany and the U.S. invested in green energy subsidies? More in absolute terms, much more in per-capita terms (but, interestingly, still less than the subsidies for oil or nuclear power).
The Chinese government hands cash to their panel manufacturers to lower their prices so they can put our manufacturers out of business.
The Chinese government wants to encourage domestic use of cheap, renewable energy because they have no long-standing strategic interests in the Middle East but will soon be importing 70% of their oil from countries that are allied to the U.S. That is just one reason, in addition to all of the usual reasons that reliance on foreign oil is a problem.
The Chinese government actually subsidizes very few industries - unless you count pegging the currency against the dollar, which is another issue. The real reason Chinese goods are cheaper is that the average Chinese factory worker gets paid about $200 a week for around 100 hours of work. That's $0.50 an hour. That kind of price advantage is enough to ensure dominance in most fields of manufacturing.
There is also an important reason why China wants to promote the solar industry - the sustainable energy industry is of strategic importance to the Chinese. By 2015, 70% of China's oil imports will come from the Middle East oil - a region where U.S. interests have historically been dominant and where China has had no long-standing strategic interests. Simply put, the Chinese want to avoid becoming overly reliant on oil supplies from governments that are allied with the U.S..
This article makes an obvious point regarding government subsidies: "China floated $30 billion in subsidies to its solar sector? Wow, that’s so totally unfair. Why, the US would never stand for such a thing! That’s why Obama included almost $40 billion in green-sector subsidies as part of his 2009 Porkulus package, of which $17 billion has already been spent. And let’s not forget that over a half-billion dollars of that money got spent specifically on Solyndra alone." So, subsidies are okay when the U.S. does it, but bad when China does it?
If I remember correctly, you could build OpenOffice on Gentoo with -pipe and various other performance tuning flags, and the hardware requirement was only a minimum of 512MB. And every other package, including big stuff like the kernel and KDE, could be built with only 64MB... though 256MB was recommended.
I would guess the default Android build is optimized for the Google Android team, and so speed is the most important factor; they probably use a build server with multiple processors and big memory and don't waste engineering time on optimizing for anything else. I would also guess that there probably aren't that many people outside of Google who build their own Android images.
Looking at those specs, maybe it's about time to think about switching Android to a modular architecture. There is no reason why the complete build needs to be made in one go. It's like running Gentoo and compiling the entire system from source when you really just want to upgrade an application. Or like the old OpenOffice days, when they bundled everything, so compiling it required compiling every library that it depended on, plus compiling Python and everything else that was embedded. Building/distributing a whole new system image and whacking it over a partition seems crazy in this day and age. What Android needs is something like .deb packaging and a proper package repository, honestly I'm surprised the Cyanogen guys haven't done it yet, it would make their job of getting rapid and incremental updates out much easier.
I never said free - I said inexpensive. I am well aware that there's no such thing as a "free" phone. But you can buy sim-free with no contract, in which case the prices are directly comparable. And for many network providers, you can compare the same tariff with different "free" phones to figure out the actual cost difference.
Thank you for taking the time to reply. I actually think a Ron Paul government would be an interesting experiment, but most people are going to find his proposals too radical. You are correct in that many of the functions of agencies like the NOAA would still be carried out; most probably, surveying would become a responsibility of the navy, weather would be commercial or DoD, climate (now controversial) will be done by academia, fisheries - hmm without regulation this would lead to overfishing and rapid depletion of stocks, so not sure about that. But for the other stuff, yes, if it's important then someone will probably fund it. But dismantling large institutions has to be done with care - there will be a lot of organizations who rely on the existing functions that the institution provides, and they will need time to adapt.
I am sceptical of the official story about all the so-called "gains" in Afghanistan. This graph is partly the reason. PR men from the military tell us we are winning and have broken the Taliban. The figures tell us that we have had more casualties in the last 12 months than any other 12 month period since the war began. If we have broken the Taliban, shouldn't coalition casualties have gone down?
He proposes holding DoD budget steady to restore to 2006 levels, not exactly what I would call "slashing" when compared to his approach to other Departments (ie. get rid of them).. though ending war budget will have some effect at $100b/yr that is only 50 days of total military spending. No proposed cuts to other things like CIA & NSA black budget, maybe he is waiting to see what the budget actually is, though I suspect he already has some idea and could comment on cuts there if he wanted to.. but still, he does propose bigger cuts than others.
"holding steady" is not the same as "slashing".
"Holding steady" is not the same as "slashing"
you pay to rent every month
Oh, you mean it's actually an upfront sale linked to a contractual credit agreement which you must pay regular installments on? That isn't free.
See my other reply. I worded the original post badly... I did understand he wants to "cut" military adventurism but not "slash" the budget, the difference being his budget returns the military to 2006 levels, whereas if he slashed it by dropping entire divisions and programs the country could save a fortune. It seems his proposals are much harsher on the other Departments than on the Department of Defense, and he doesn't appear to have any policy on budget cuts to the "black budget" CIA, NSA etc.
Good points! I was actually aware of his general position against military interventionism. What I meant is, he seems to be quite radical about completely dropping spending for various Departments but his DoD and DHS cuts are a conservative 15%-20% (restore to 2006 levels) and I don't see anything about cutting funding for NSA, CIA etc. and expenditure on these dwarfs the departments that he proposes cutting completely. The 15%-20% reduction only returns military spending to its 2006 levels, which is still way higher than any other nation. So, given the potential massive savings, why doesn't he propose slashing the military budget, eliminating entire programs and departments in the same way as he wants to do with other areas of the government?
It has nothing to do with the 'american dream' and everything to do with the fact that $200/month is not enough to pay rent on a shoe box even in rural America, let alone own a car
These are part of the "dream" though. Factory workers in China do not earn enough to pay rent. They literally eat, sleep and work in the factory. They don't earn enough to buy a car, either. They don't get to choose what food to eat. And they have no health insurance. American corporations could slash costs by adopting the Chinese factory model, but are Americans willing to work under those conditions? No, they want higher quality of life.
Minimum wage is $290/week (figuring 30 hours per week), so we aren't really that much higher realistically.
Chinese factory workers routinely do 12 hours a day with no weekends. 100 hours a week is considered normal. So for U.S. worker $290 a week for 30 hours=$9.66/hour. Chinese worker $50 per week for 100 hours=$0.5/hour. That makes the U.S. worker 20 times more expensive, and that's before taking into account lower per employee tax and insurance costs in China.
(Based on Forbe's estimate of the cost of being U.S. military policy being $2 billion per day If you want units solely in terms of the war in Afghanistan, that figure is $300 million per day. Adjust for other wars etc. War: it isn't cheap.)
I wonder why Ron Paul doesn't talk about slashing the military budget, it would appear the potential savings are enormous?
Wait, don't tell me you actually believe a grass-roots revolution led by the poor to topple an authoritarian leadership and it's elite minority is somehow sponsoring the interests of the powerful few?
It certainly benefits someone. Is anyone naive enough to believe that military intervention anywhere, by any nation, is not motivated by self-interest? If you truly believe that there has been an instance of selfless military intervention, then I would ask you to really study what actually occurred, because, from a perspective of basic economics, it is highly unlikely that a government is going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars pursuing a war as a selfless act, i.e. one that they do not believe will benefit them in any way. Of course, that benefit to "the powerful few" may not be one that benefits the people of the nation that they rule e.g. war can be used to enable corporate expansion, access to natural resources, or just to shift large amounts of money from tax payers to the military industrial complex.
Remember the Bonus Army, where tanks were used in the streets of Washington D.C. to crush a non-violent protest by army veterans? Remember the Business Plot, where a few very powerful capitalists plotted to overthrow the U.S. government? Remember Major General Smedley Butler, a Republican who turned against the military industrial complex and authored War is a Racket? "War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
There are obviously people who profit from war, and I'm not convinced that has ever changed. However, sometimes this can coincide with the interests of the people; hopefully Libya will turn out to be one of those times.
Actually, liberals have pretty much been unified in their stance against supporting dictatorship regimes, who murder their citizens and fail to respect basic human rights. Unlike some, other groups. Watch The War On Democracy and then show me a single liberal who supports overthrowing democratic governments. Show me a single liberal who is against basic human rights. In every case I can think of, liberals have opposed supporting these regimes, whilst those on the right-wing have often argued otherwise (though sometimes they do admit they got it wrong)
Uh, you do realize that actually the Muslim Brotherhood hates [wikipedia.org] "western culture" and the U.S., right?
The issue is much more complex than "hating western culture", though there are some that do. Some hate their own rulers, who crushed any calls for political reform and civil rights with pure violence. Some hate the West because for decades the West was seen as backers of those despotic rulers; the West supplied military aid and weapons to the regimes of dictators, who went on to use those weapons against the people. Would you dislike China if they gave military weaponry to Al-Qaeda, who in turn used this weaponry against U.S. citizens? You would partly blame China for attacks using these weapons, right? And in the same way, there are many who partly blame the West for the injustices they have suffered. But, equally, there are many who recognise that the freedoms and democracy that those in the West have, are the same freedoms that they want for themselves. In particular, the Mu
They have also publicly stated that they would like to wage warfare on the west?
Citation? Their public policy is non-violence, and has been since the beginning. This is a stance that has been criticised by other Islamist groups. Certainly, there have been members of the group that have committed violence, but this is true of any large group of humans.
I guess that could actually have one positive effect. It could finally dispel the idea that everyone can or should go to college (or that a college degree should be considered a prerequisite for any white collar job).
The issue is that the number of blue collar jobs is drying up. Watch The China Question or any similar documentary... the jobs that can be off-shored will be off-shored. Salary in China for manual labour is $200 a month. What is the media U.S. blue collar monthly salary? $2500? That is a huge inequality. The U.S. is going to continue losing blue collar jobs until either the U.S. salary drops closer to $200, or the Chinese salary rises (which is slowly happening, but remember they still have hundreds of millions of people living in poverty who would be happy to take those $200/month factory jobs).
The real problem for the U.S. is that people are not politically willing to let wages drop to $200/month (or to have inflation devalue the currency so current wages are equivalent of $200). They are not willing to have thousands of teenage girls kept in factories where they do nothing except eat, sleep and work for $200. This is politically unacceptable. U.S. citizens have been sold on the "American Dream" and they want high quality of life. The other thing that is politically unacceptable is for the top class (i.e. CEOs and bankers) to be making hundreds of times more than the average blue collar worker. This system works for China because they do not have democracy. Elsewhere in the world, voters are simply going to reject this model and vote to tax the top class harder. Income disparity at a national level is one of the main drivers of civil and social unrest. People do not mind so much knowing that foreigners have a higher salary than theirs. But people really object to seeing others within their own country receiving a salary many times more than their own. This seems to be true regardless of nationality or personal political ideology.