You live in a fantasy world. Capitalism brought us the standard of living that we have and it is finally being allowed do the same in China and other places around the world that finally overthrew the collectivist scum who held back the enormous creative energy that only competition among free people can unleash. If unions truly wanted to help the workers they would be protesting in Washington, Beijing and other places where the corrupt ruling class is setting unfair rules to benefit themselves and their cronies and not calling for strikes against companies which are the source of wealth for all of us. Foxconn offers wages far in excess of average wages in China which is why people are queuing up to apply for a job there.
Chinese worker: $350/month. Chinese robot (if the article is correct): $175/month. Unionized US worker including benefits and taxes: $4000/month for doing a worse job slower.
20,000,000 iPhone users in the US paying 4x price for their phone so that 2000 can get jobs: priceless
I doubt that you can prove that this is the norm. In any case, that is beside the point, My point is that fracking can is in most cases being done perfectly safely and that it is not an inherently highly polluting activity (the amount of actual water that has to be treated or stored is pretty small), and that hysteria surrounding it is completely unjustified. Like I said in my initial post, if the environmentalists had applied the same standard to coal mining, regularoil drilling, refining etc and a million other industrial activities, and, God forbid, were successful in banning them every time they found a potential environmental issue, we would not have anywhere near the living standard that we have and in fact would probably still be engaged in subsistence agriculture.
No matter what, why the hell should they not pay to clean their own waste up?
This is getting silly. Of course they should. The fact of the case may be completely different but lets work with what you said. They claim they effectively outsourced the cleanup of the water to the waste water company. The waste water company denies that their contract covers that. Ok so far?
So how does this have anything to do with the fracking process as opposed to any other industrial activity that produces waste (which includes most of them) and where one or more companies involved are engaged in a legal dispute while trying to wiggle their way out of having to pay for the cleanup? The environmentalist groups, last I heard, are calling for fracking to be banned, which brings us back to my point, that there is nothing different or special about fracking. In fact the amount of polluted water that has to be dealt with per site is not even that large. You point to one case where a company is allegedly trying to pass on the cleanup costs to someone else, I can point to you 100 cases where that is not the case.
they dumped the waste water off at a water treatment plant meant for human waste not industrial waste. The water was not properly treated and ended up in our reservoir that our drinking water comes from. What would you call that?
A multimillion dollar lawsuit. So you are saying that a specific company heavily polluted your drinking water and you can prove it? And you are not besieged by lawyers camping on your front lawn hoping for a percentage of the large damages that you are likely going to be entitled to? Where do you live? China?
It is not meaningless in the context of the conversation, which is about how much the company must pay those workers, versus how much it must pay a US worker to do the same or probably worse job. An equivalent US worker would cost the company at least 10-15 times as much when you include salary, benefits, taxes and increased overall cost of doing business in US (rent, supplies etc).
Do you even have any understanding about how fracking works? How exactly does the fracking externalize the costs to the rest of the society? What makes you think that being in favor of fracking means that I am also in favor of those companies causing harm to other people and not paying for it? Or are you yet another liberal moron who overheard the word 'externalities' somewhere by chance and now grabs on to it in every conversation regardless of the subject.
Don't be apologizing for "defending" fracking. There is nothing wrong with it any more than there is with a million other industrial or mining procedures on which the civilization depends and which would have been equally attacked had the environmentalist movement been around when they were invented.
Given that the average monthly salary at Foxconn is $350 and the working conditions are miserable and that this is still considered a great job in China where there are waiting lists just to apply, there is still some way to go until US workers are competitive to their Chinese counterparts.
I have worked at many places to know women are generally discriminated against based on wage.
Are you sure of that or is it just your impression? I can believe that there is a bias among certain people, but I also know that studies were made that disputed the claim that women make less then men on average. The key is comparing apples to apples i.e. not just comparing people doing the same job, but comparing people with the same number of years of full time experience of comparable quality. Comparing workers of the same age in the same job fail because women take more time off in their careers to raise children and therefore have on average less work experience than men. Comparing overall years of experience also fails because women work part time much more often than men. Sounds obvious but a lot of studies that "show" that women are discriminated against actually suffer from one or both of the above problems.
This guy is completely 100% irrelevant to anything that's happening in the Middle East. Go to youtube and in one minute you can find a dozen anti-Islam videos made by various random people. When certain extremist groups in the Middle East want to incite violence for their own political purposes, they will find a catalyst easily enough, just like with Mohammed cartoons etc, it doesn't matter what that catalyst is. The biggest issue here for me is that the administration is still talking about the stupid irrelevant film instead of the fact that the Libya attack was obviously a planned and successful Al Qaeda operation to assassinate a US ambassador and that we didn't do enough to prevent it. But that wouldn't look good, would it, so better to focus everybody's attention on a particular US citizen and make him take the blame. Shameful.
It's irrelevant because the percentage of Muslims who consider USA enemy depends on to what extent it is in the political interest of Muslim clerics to make us the enemy, not on how many drone attacks we launched. At the bottom of it, the problem is Islam, an ideology that seeks to dominate and by design cannot peacefully coexist with any other.
Absolutely wrong. There is an incredible variety of small breweries that make great beer and you can find many of them even at your average grocery store. Go to a specialty liqueur store and you can multiply that variety by 10 or more.
Before 1979 it was illegal to make beer in small batches (no joke) and this is where American beer got the bad reputation because only a handful of big companies were able to make beer (Bud, Coors, Miller....) and thanks to the government obtained control of the market and brought the quality way down. Since that was repealed there was an explosion of home brewing which then expanded into small business and microbreweries so that today there are over 1,400 breweries in the US making every possible type and flavor of beer imaginable.
I would actually go so far as to say that the American beer is now the best in the world as evidenced by the international competitions where the US beers dominate.
Just trying to make sure I understand the definition of "far right".
There is no definition possible without the context. You can't put even the US parties on a simple one dimensional axis and there are only two of them. And what about Libertarian party, are the right or left? If you have to have a simple chart that maps out political opinions I prefer this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Political_chart.svg Basically I think we need up and down as well as left and right.
For things as important as broadband, we should deal with our fellows as family and take care of those who just live in the wrong place.
First of all, hi Woz if that's really you:) I don't know about your family, but in mine we don't force everybody to help less fortunate country dwellers get broadband where they live, especially since they don't help us, city dwellers, pay our rent and other higher costs of living. There are pros and cons to living in the middle of nowhere, and yet for some reasons the cons (high cost of mail delivery, higher cost of phone, electricity, water and now broadband hookups etc) need to be subsidized by us even though the overall cost of living is still MUCH lower than say in NYC. Can they also treat me like family and pay half of my $2000/month rent?
BTW, Ahmadinejad has won the next election by a landslide, take their word for it.
No he hasn't because his final term is up soon and he can't run again. That doesn't matter though as he is just a disposable puppet, the real power lies with the Supreme Leader who doesn't need to concern himself with silly things like elections.
And 1% would give everybody a monthly income of 800. And why stop there? A 25% tax would give everybody 20,000 euro a MONTH and everybody will be filthy rich and nobody will have to work ever again. You, Sir, are a genius!
Ah, so you belong to the school of thought that holds that if only human nature wasn't in the way, and if everybody just did what you want them to do, the world would be a wonderful place. Well, I guess we are only up to hundred billion examples that show that people act based on incentives, so obviously you need some more evidence before you actually start believing it. The only way to get people to not do something that can be profitable to them, but harmful to the society is to make it not possible for them to do so. They are not idiotic, short sighted, greedy bastards, they are just humans and if this particular company didn't do it, another one would.
Pretty much all mainstream and big media is conservative on Economics any more.
It may seem that way but only if your own views are slightly to the left of Lenin. The reality is that the mainstream media is still Keynesian, i.e. in favor of heavy government intervention. NYT still has the discredited loon Krugman as their economics expert for God's sake, how supply side is that? The only real pro-capitalism program that I know of is Stossel on Fox Business channel and that's hardly mainstream media.
They are better than battleships for beating up on hilariously outmatched little countries, since their range is longer; but that, along with saber rattling, is all they've been used for for quite some time.
That's what all US military technology has been used for for quite some time. Last I checked we haven't gone to war with China or Russia recently, and the rest of the world (not counting our allies) is pretty much made up of hilariously outmatched little countries.
You know, to us in the rest of the world, there is no noticeable difference between Obama and Bush.
Lucky for you and your little bitch country which, let me try a wild guess here, depends on the USA for its defense. I am guessing that because most of the countries that don't are the kind of countries where people are either too poor or too oppressed to be posting on slashdot.
It's the government of Argentina that is "gaming the system" by artificially increasing the price of dollars. Smart people are realizing that socialist policies are going to bring high inflation as they always do and wipe away people's life savings in the name of social justice .
Slashdot Mirror
You live in a fantasy world. Capitalism brought us the standard of living that we have and it is finally being allowed do the same in China and other places around the world that finally overthrew the collectivist scum who held back the enormous creative energy that only competition among free people can unleash. If unions truly wanted to help the workers they would be protesting in Washington, Beijing and other places where the corrupt ruling class is setting unfair rules to benefit themselves and their cronies and not calling for strikes against companies which are the source of wealth for all of us. Foxconn offers wages far in excess of average wages in China which is why people are queuing up to apply for a job there.
Chinese worker: $350/month.
Chinese robot (if the article is correct): $175/month.
Unionized US worker including benefits and taxes: $4000/month for doing a worse job slower.
20,000,000 iPhone users in the US paying 4x price for their phone so that 2000 can get jobs: priceless
I doubt that you can prove that this is the norm. In any case, that is beside the point, My point is that fracking can is in most cases being done perfectly safely and that it is not an inherently highly polluting activity (the amount of actual water that has to be treated or stored is pretty small), and that hysteria surrounding it is completely unjustified. Like I said in my initial post, if the environmentalists had applied the same standard to coal mining, regularoil drilling, refining etc and a million other industrial activities, and, God forbid, were successful in banning them every time they found a potential environmental issue, we would not have anywhere near the living standard that we have and in fact would probably still be engaged in subsistence agriculture.
No matter what, why the hell should they not pay to clean their own waste up?
This is getting silly. Of course they should. The fact of the case may be completely different but lets work with what you said. They claim they effectively outsourced the cleanup of the water to the waste water company. The waste water company denies that their contract covers that. Ok so far?
So how does this have anything to do with the fracking process as opposed to any other industrial activity that produces waste (which includes most of them) and where one or more companies involved are engaged in a legal dispute while trying to wiggle their way out of having to pay for the cleanup? The environmentalist groups, last I heard, are calling for fracking to be banned, which brings us back to my point, that there is nothing different or special about fracking. In fact the amount of polluted water that has to be dealt with per site is not even that large. You point to one case where a company is allegedly trying to pass on the cleanup costs to someone else, I can point to you 100 cases where that is not the case.
they dumped the waste water off at a water treatment plant meant for human waste not industrial waste. The water was not properly treated and ended up in our reservoir that our drinking water comes from. What would you call that?
A multimillion dollar lawsuit. So you are saying that a specific company heavily polluted your drinking water and you can prove it? And you are not besieged by lawyers camping on your front lawn hoping for a percentage of the large damages that you are likely going to be entitled to? Where do you live? China?
It is not meaningless in the context of the conversation, which is about how much the company must pay those workers, versus how much it must pay a US worker to do the same or probably worse job. An equivalent US worker would cost the company at least 10-15 times as much when you include salary, benefits, taxes and increased overall cost of doing business in US (rent, supplies etc).
Do you even have any understanding about how fracking works? How exactly does the fracking externalize the costs to the rest of the society? What makes you think that being in favor of fracking means that I am also in favor of those companies causing harm to other people and not paying for it? Or are you yet another liberal moron who overheard the word 'externalities' somewhere by chance and now grabs on to it in every conversation regardless of the subject.
Don't be apologizing for "defending" fracking. There is nothing wrong with it any more than there is with a million other industrial or mining procedures on which the civilization depends and which would have been equally attacked had the environmentalist movement been around when they were invented.
Given that the average monthly salary at Foxconn is $350 and the working conditions are miserable and that this is still considered a great job in China where there are waiting lists just to apply, there is still some way to go until US workers are competitive to their Chinese counterparts.
I have worked at many places to know women are generally discriminated against based on wage.
Are you sure of that or is it just your impression? I can believe that there is a bias among certain people, but I also know that studies were made that disputed the claim that women make less then men on average. The key is comparing apples to apples i.e. not just comparing people doing the same job, but comparing people with the same number of years of full time experience of comparable quality. Comparing workers of the same age in the same job fail because women take more time off in their careers to raise children and therefore have on average less work experience than men. Comparing overall years of experience also fails because women work part time much more often than men. Sounds obvious but a lot of studies that "show" that women are discriminated against actually suffer from one or both of the above problems.
This guy is completely 100% irrelevant to anything that's happening in the Middle East. Go to youtube and in one minute you can find a dozen anti-Islam videos made by various random people. When certain extremist groups in the Middle East want to incite violence for their own political purposes, they will find a catalyst easily enough, just like with Mohammed cartoons etc, it doesn't matter what that catalyst is. The biggest issue here for me is that the administration is still talking about the stupid irrelevant film instead of the fact that the Libya attack was obviously a planned and successful Al Qaeda operation to assassinate a US ambassador and that we didn't do enough to prevent it. But that wouldn't look good, would it, so better to focus everybody's attention on a particular US citizen and make him take the blame. Shameful.
It's irrelevant because the percentage of Muslims who consider USA enemy depends on to what extent it is in the political interest of Muslim clerics to make us the enemy, not on how many drone attacks we launched. At the bottom of it, the problem is Islam, an ideology that seeks to dominate and by design cannot peacefully coexist with any other.
Absolutely wrong. There is an incredible variety of small breweries that make great beer and you can find many of them even at your average grocery store. Go to a specialty liqueur store and you can multiply that variety by 10 or more.
Before 1979 it was illegal to make beer in small batches (no joke) and this is where American beer got the bad reputation because only a handful of big companies were able to make beer (Bud, Coors, Miller....) and thanks to the government obtained control of the market and brought the quality way down. Since that was repealed there was an explosion of home brewing which then expanded into small business and microbreweries so that today there are over 1,400 breweries in the US making every possible type and flavor of beer imaginable.
I would actually go so far as to say that the American beer is now the best in the world as evidenced by the international competitions where the US beers dominate.
Just trying to make sure I understand the definition of "far right".
There is no definition possible without the context. You can't put even the US parties on a simple one dimensional axis and there are only two of them. And what about Libertarian party, are the right or left? If you have to have a simple chart that maps out political opinions I prefer this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Political_chart.svg Basically I think we need up and down as well as left and right.
For things as important as broadband, we should deal with our fellows as family and take care of those who just live in the wrong place.
:) I don't know about your family, but in mine we don't force everybody to help less fortunate country dwellers get broadband where they live, especially since they don't help us, city dwellers, pay our rent and other higher costs of living. There are pros and cons to living in the middle of nowhere, and yet for some reasons the cons (high cost of mail delivery, higher cost of phone, electricity, water and now broadband hookups etc) need to be subsidized by us even though the overall cost of living is still MUCH lower than say in NYC. Can they also treat me like family and pay half of my $2000/month rent?
First of all, hi Woz if that's really you
BTW, Ahmadinejad has won the next election by a landslide, take their word for it.
No he hasn't because his final term is up soon and he can't run again. That doesn't matter though as he is just a disposable puppet, the real power lies with the Supreme Leader who doesn't need to concern himself with silly things like elections.
How long until the first idiot shows up to say things are just as bad in the US.
And 1% would give everybody a monthly income of 800. And why stop there? A 25% tax would give everybody 20,000 euro a MONTH and everybody will be filthy rich and nobody will have to work ever again. You, Sir, are a genius!
Ah, so you belong to the school of thought that holds that if only human nature wasn't in the way, and if everybody just did what you want them to do, the world would be a wonderful place. Well, I guess we are only up to hundred billion examples that show that people act based on incentives, so obviously you need some more evidence before you actually start believing it. The only way to get people to not do something that can be profitable to them, but harmful to the society is to make it not possible for them to do so. They are not idiotic, short sighted, greedy bastards, they are just humans and if this particular company didn't do it, another one would.
I guess we don't want the disaster like the British NHS inflicted on us by "well meaning" but clueless idiots.
Pretty much all mainstream and big media is conservative on Economics any more.
It may seem that way but only if your own views are slightly to the left of Lenin. The reality is that the mainstream media is still Keynesian, i.e. in favor of heavy government intervention. NYT still has the discredited loon Krugman as their economics expert for God's sake, how supply side is that? The only real pro-capitalism program that I know of is Stossel on Fox Business channel and that's hardly mainstream media.
stole their oil
It wasn't their oil.
overthrew their democratically elected government
Because it tried to nationalize our oil and align itself with our enemy.
and now are sending in computer malware to blow up their centrifuges and assassinating their nuclear scientists
Because they are trying to develop nuclear weapons.
They are better than battleships for beating up on hilariously outmatched little countries, since their range is longer; but that, along with saber rattling, is all they've been used for for quite some time.
That's what all US military technology has been used for for quite some time. Last I checked we haven't gone to war with China or Russia recently, and the rest of the world (not counting our allies) is pretty much made up of hilariously outmatched little countries.
You know, to us in the rest of the world, there is no noticeable difference between Obama and Bush.
Lucky for you and your little bitch country which, let me try a wild guess here, depends on the USA for its defense. I am guessing that because most of the countries that don't are the kind of countries where people are either too poor or too oppressed to be posting on slashdot.
It's the government of Argentina that is "gaming the system" by artificially increasing the price of dollars. Smart people are realizing that socialist policies are going to bring high inflation as they always do and wipe away people's life savings in the name of social justice .