Re:The American worker loses.
on
Giant Sucking Noise
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Paying fair U.S. wages, while complying with U.S. regulations to protect the workers and the environment, costs money. So a company can gain a competitive edge by hiring workers in foreign countries where salaries are lower and where such rules do not exist. If some smoke-belching plant across a border can pay people $10/day and work them for 12 hour shifts, then the company using that workforce can realize lower operating costs and, hence, higher profits.
Folks, this isn't rocket science. All other things being equal, businesses will go with the cheaper source every time. What we need to do, as a country, is to level the playing field. We need tariffs, laws, and fines to discourage firms from outsourcing desirable jobs.
No, it's not rocket science, it's economics. Let's test out your theory. There are three times as many people in Mexico as Canada, and their wages are a lot lower. Their pollution and safety regulations are probably a lot less stringent, too. So, your theory predicts that we import a lot more from Mexico.
The truth is we import 68% more from Canada than from Mexico. What a spectacular failure for your theory.
Hint: read in an economics textbook about wages and productivity. The reason wages are so high in the United States and that we can afford the niceties of pollution and safety regulations is that we are so much more productive. As productivity grows in other countries, their wages rise, too. Forty years ago Japan was a country with wages lower than China has now. But by 1990 wages there were on a par with the U.S. The same thing is happening in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Mexico, Malaysia, and so on.
We, as a nation, actually build very little on our own shores.
This is 100% wrong. It's complete bullshit. The United States is the biggest manufacturer in the world. Real manufacturing output grew over 3% a year in the 1990s. Here are some statistics on top manufacturing in the US:
Here are the top domestic manufacturing categories from 1999:
2001 Statistical Abstract of the United States
Table 974. Manufactures-Summary by Selected Industry: 1999
Value of shipments (mil. dol.)
675,122 Transportation Equipment
458,485 Computer and electronic products
The first two combined exceed the $883 billion in manufactured goods imported from all countries.
429,053 (manufactured) Food products
419,674 Chemical products
(including, e.g., $108 billion pharmaceuticals/medicines)
277,117 Machinery
256,899 Fabricated metal products
(architectural metals, screws, nuts, bolts, etc.)
172,397 Plastics and rubber products
168,096 Petroleum and coal products
158,102 Primary metal
157,491 Paper products
119,792 Electrical equipment, appliance, and component
108,238 Miscellaneous
107,437 Beverage and tobacco products
102,404 Printing
According to the latest trade statistics
(http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/its2002 _e/section1_e/i05.xls)
the United States is the largest exporter of merchandise, with $731 billion in
exports; Germany is second with $571 billion. China comes in sixth with $266
billion.
So I'm supposed to magically know everyone that wants to e-mail me and add them to a whitelist so their messages get through huh? How incredibly inconvenient for both parties. How about automatic replies from online purchases and mailing lists? This doesn't sound like a very good idea unless you're an incredibly fucked up geek who thinks spam is really evil.
For automatic replies, you use a "tagged" version of your mail address. eg. jason-sender-a751af@mastaler.com
instead of just jason@mastaler.com.
You don't have to preload your whitelists with everybody you know. People not in your whitelist will get a message that they must acknowledge in order to get added to the whitelist.
Entertainment is probably the only thing making money for exports for the US anymore. The US is rapidly becoming a country that produces little more than marketing and car chase movies.
Wrong. The U.S. is the biggest exporter in the world and the majority of exports from the U.S. are manufactured goods. (Check Statistical Abstract on the Census Bureau's web site and the CIA World factbook.)
Another example might be Jay Leno. He gives all the money he makes from the Tonight Show to charity. So the Tonight Show never made him money. Is he a failure? A sucker? Or just smart enough to know that contributing is more important than amassing wealth once you're living at a means you're content with?
I don't think this is true. He donates all the profits from the Headlines books to charity, but I've never heard that he doesn't make any money from the Tonight Show.
Shipping a can of beans to another country is one thing.
Shipping a JOB to another country has a direct impact on your own economic base - because the country that just lost a job is the "lucrative market" you're trying to sell your product to. And if you lower the standard of living in your own country, you're just pissing in the well.
Naive economic thinking says that anytime you buy a good or service from somewhere else you are "exporting a job" because someone here could do it. But guess what? The number of jobs is not fixed. 150 years ago, 90% of Americans were farmers. Now less than 2% are farmers. That doesn't mean 88% of people are unemployed. Once the population of this country was 140 million. Now it's twice that. That doesn't mean that half the country is unemployed.
IMO - CEO's that make such decisions (and economists who try to justify them) are no better than "enemy combatants" and should be treated as such.
Economists have studied the question for over two hundred years. You haven't. Perhaps you should try learning about it before you decide they are traitors.
Ok, WTF does this have to do with guest workers or farming engineering work out to other countries? This quote is specifically about tariffs and import quotas, which only deals with the importation of goods, and has nothing to do with labor.
It has nothing to do with guest workers, but neither did your original post about "child labor laws, health care, social program for the indigent, anti-pollution laws, etc."
Come to think of it, I don't think your complaint applies to farming out engineering work either, unless you expect there to be children working as engineers, computer programmers creating a lot of pollution, etc.
Economists don't see any big difference between importing goods and importing services. Try taking a few economics classes sometime.
Your "90% of economists" statistics is out-of-context BS, and of course has no source listed.
"Surveys have consistently shown strong support
among economists for free trade policies. In a 1990
survey of economists employed in the United States,
Alston, Kearl, and Vaughan (1992) reported that
more than 90 percent agreed generally with the
proposition that tariffs and import quotas usually
reduce general economic welfare."
http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/02/01/1-22Coughlin.pdf
Reference is to:
Alston, Richard M.; Kearl, J.R. and Vaughan, Michael B. "Is
There a Consensus Among Economists in the 1990's?"
American Economic Review, May 1992, 82(2), pp. 203-9.
Yes, there is. Due to conditions inherent in our first-world economy, which are absent from India's third-world economy (like child labor laws, health care, social programs for the indigent, anti-pollution laws, etc.), things which make this country a nice one to live in instead of a polluted poverty-stricken hellhole, it's simply not possible to survive on a $2,000 per year salary. Unless we want to turn the clock back and become like a third-world country, we should have protections.
Well, all these laws also apply to H-1B workers, so I guess you're talking about foreign trade, not H-1B. However, economists agree that the main reason we are not a "poverty-stricken hellhole" is because of our high productivity, not "protections." Yes, 90% of economists agree that foreign trade is beneficial to the vast majority of citizens.
No, wage negotiations (in any country) are not inherently evil. The problem is that, in the current setup, they're inherently unequal. The whole concept of negotiations pretty much depends on the idea of the negotiating parties having, if not equal power, at least comparable power. Right now, the balance of power is tilted so far in favor of the employer that employees have basically nothing to bring to the table.
Yes, that's why everybody except union members make minimum wage. Oh, wait, only 5% of workers earn that little. Hmmm, I earn about six times minimum wage, plus benefits (also not mandated by law). That's a little hard to explain by your theory, isn't it?
When are we going to see an H1-B program for lawyers and MBAs?
The H-1B program is not limited to technology. Law is pretty rare since the law is specific to the United States (or even individual states). Only 0.5% of H-1B visas were law-related in 2001. But there were almost 24,000 visas for "Occupations in administrative specializations". Admittedly, that's still pretty small compared to the 191,100 for "Computer-related occupations. See Report on Characteristics of Specialty Occupation Workers (H-1B)
Dale and Krueger compared the earnings of students who were admitted to the same colleges but made different choices. This ensured that they looked at similar individuals. In other words, because the students had been admitted to the same schools, they would have had equivalent SAT scores and "unobserved" traits.
Krueger and Dale concluded that smart, talented kids who attended less selective schools did just as well in their careers as their counterparts at elite colleges. There was no difference in average earnings.
The screen's backlit, so I don't have to worry about light (I can even read in bed after my wife's gone to sleep), it's flat, so it's easier to hold with one hand, and I never lose my place.
Reading in bed with one hand after your wife goes to sleep? Just what kind of ebooks are these?
When you load a web page, you normally make quite a few connections--one for each image, e.g. I'll have to see how he handles that.
Now that I've read it, I see that he's just talking about the first connection to a computer. So, if your web page's images are all on the same server, no delay. If you have one on images.slashdot.org and another on adserver.f-edcompany.com and another on aj783.akamai.net, there will be a slight delay.
Here's Williamson's paper on the idea:
Throttling Viruses: Restricting propagation to defeat malicious mobile code
I haven't read it yet, but I see one potential problem right away. When you load a web page, you normally make quite a few connections--one for each image, e.g. I'll have to see how he handles that
Pre-Employment Testing of Applicants [nolo.com]", written tests can be dangerous because "A multiple choice aptitude test may discriminate against minority applicants or female applicants because it really reflects test-taking ability rather than actual job skills."
This is a spoof right ?
The point of a selction process *is* to discriminate based on fair objective criteria (test) rather than a unfair subjective criteria (interview).
You would think so, but no. The Supreme Court first recognized a "disparate impact" theory of discrimination back in 1971 with Griggs v. Duke Power and said that an employer can only use a test that minorities pass at a lower rate if it is a "business necessity".
Then, with the Civil Rights act of 1991, Congress reinstated the business necessity requirement, but courts have been a little uneven on how to apply the law.
Search on "disparate impact" if you want to see more.
Will we ever see > 24fps in the movie theater? Possibly, but it's going to take some time.
Roger Ebert has been praising a system called Maxivision48 which is 48 fps (and can dynamically switch to 24 fps to save money).
Also, Douglas Trumbull's ShowScan system has been around for a while, but has only been used for a few specialty attractions. I've read comments that said that ShowScan was too realistic and not "cinematic." That reminds me of the CD vs. vinyl debate.
This patent is another ridiculous one. It's nothing new at all.
I can't find any reference to it online, but in the early 80s or late 70s NASA came out with a design for a trans-continental train... in a vacuum tube.
Trans-planetary subway systems : a burgeoning capability / Robert M. Salter.
Santa Monica, Calif. : Rand Corporation, 1978.
Rand series designation: P-6092
... He went on to enumerate some of the nightmare scenarios that keep the Palladium team up at night, such as a virus/trojan that launches something worse than a Denial Of Service (DOS) attack. These included:
A virus/trojan that trades stock thereby disrupting the market
A trojan that activates and places an order on Amazon.com
A virus that publishes sensitive information such as private tax records
... Indeed, as was pointed out by Stallman and others, if Palladium would run unmodified legacy applications, then how could Palladium thwart the legacy virus/trojans without upgrading Palladium enabled Outlook/IE/IIS?
Well, duh, if the user wants to run insecure applications, fine, Trusted Computing won't stop him. But if he wants to run secure applications, it will let him. The point of Trusted Computing is that, for example, the stock broker's computer can tell
that it is really talking to the client's computer,
that it is talking to a secure application, not a trojan emulating the protocol,
that the application is running on the operating system it thinks it is running on,
that the computer was booted in secure mode,
that when the user is asked for the password, the user is actually physically present.
There is no way to tell those things without hardware assistance.
It is fine to point out the potential downsides and abuses of the technology but there really are uses for it to improve security! For RMS to pretend otherwise is wrong.
I won't even bother commenting on the author's fantasy that heart monitors will be running a DRM operating system.
However, his contention that the only use for Palladium/Trusted Computing Platform technology is DRM is wrong. It could be used, for example, with the Brazilian voting machines, to make sure that what you think is the output from the voting software really is. Without keys protected in hardware, you can't be sure. With TCPA, the output from the software (over the net or on floppy disk) can be signed with a chain of keys right down to the hardware. Without hardware help, there's no way to hide keys on remote systems.
On a less serious note, you could be sure that your opponent in a network game is a person, not a gamebot.
That being said, DRM would still be the #1 use for the technology.
Slashdot Mirror
The truth is we import 68% more from Canada than from Mexico. What a spectacular failure for your theory.
Hint: read in an economics textbook about wages and productivity. The reason wages are so high in the United States and that we can afford the niceties of pollution and safety regulations is that we are so much more productive. As productivity grows in other countries, their wages rise, too. Forty years ago Japan was a country with wages lower than China has now. But by 1990 wages there were on a par with the U.S. The same thing is happening in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Mexico, Malaysia, and so on.
Here are the top domestic manufacturing categories from 1999:
2001 Statistical Abstract of the United States
Table 974. Manufactures-Summary by Selected Industry: 1999
Value of shipments (mil. dol.)
675,122 Transportation Equipment
458,485 Computer and electronic products
The first two combined exceed the $883 billion in manufactured goods imported from all countries.
429,053 (manufactured) Food products
419,674 Chemical products
(including, e.g., $108 billion pharmaceuticals/medicines)
277,117 Machinery
256,899 Fabricated metal products
(architectural metals, screws, nuts, bolts, etc.)
172,397 Plastics and rubber products
168,096 Petroleum and coal products
158,102 Primary metal
157,491 Paper products
119,792 Electrical equipment, appliance, and component
108,238 Miscellaneous
107,437 Beverage and tobacco products
102,404 Printing
According to the latest trade statistics
(http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/its200
the United States is the largest exporter of merchandise, with $731 billion in
exports; Germany is second with $571 billion. China comes in sixth with $266
billion.
I resent the recent images of UFOs that were sent and resent.
You don't have to preload your whitelists with everybody you know. People not in your whitelist will get a message that they must acknowledge in order to get added to the whitelist.
Wrong. The U.S. is the biggest exporter in the world and the majority of exports from the U.S. are manufactured goods. (Check Statistical Abstract on the Census Bureau's web site and the CIA World factbook.)
I don't think this is true. He donates all the profits from the Headlines books to charity, but I've never heard that he doesn't make any money from the Tonight Show.
Naive economic thinking says that anytime you buy a good or service from somewhere else you are "exporting a job" because someone here could do it. But guess what? The number of jobs is not fixed. 150 years ago, 90% of Americans were farmers. Now less than 2% are farmers. That doesn't mean 88% of people are unemployed. Once the population of this country was 140 million. Now it's twice that. That doesn't mean that half the country is unemployed.
Economists have studied the question for over two hundred years. You haven't. Perhaps you should try learning about it before you decide they are traitors.
It has nothing to do with guest workers, but neither did your original post about "child labor laws, health care, social program for the indigent, anti-pollution laws, etc."
Come to think of it, I don't think your complaint applies to farming out engineering work either, unless you expect there to be children working as engineers, computer programmers creating a lot of pollution, etc.
Economists don't see any big difference between importing goods and importing services. Try taking a few economics classes sometime.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/revie
Reference is to:
Alston, Richard M.; Kearl, J.R. and Vaughan, Michael B. "Is There a Consensus Among Economists in the 1990's?" American Economic Review, May 1992, 82(2), pp. 203-9.
Well, all these laws also apply to H-1B workers, so I guess you're talking about foreign trade, not H-1B. However, economists agree that the main reason we are not a "poverty-stricken hellhole" is because of our high productivity, not "protections." Yes, 90% of economists agree that foreign trade is beneficial to the vast majority of citizens.
Yes, that's why everybody except union members make minimum wage. Oh, wait, only 5% of workers earn that little. Hmmm, I earn about six times minimum wage, plus benefits (also not mandated by law). That's a little hard to explain by your theory, isn't it?
The H-1B program is not limited to technology. Law is pretty rare since the law is specific to the United States (or even individual states). Only 0.5% of H-1B visas were law-related in 2001. But there were almost 24,000 visas for "Occupations in administrative specializations". Admittedly, that's still pretty small compared to the 191,100 for "Computer-related occupations.
See Report on Characteristics of Specialty Occupation
Workers (H-1B)
Reading in bed with one hand after your wife goes to sleep? Just what kind of ebooks are these?
Now that I've read it, I see that he's just talking about the first connection to a computer. So, if your web page's images are all on the same server, no delay. If you have one on images.slashdot.org and another on adserver.f-edcompany.com and another on aj783.akamai.net, there will be a slight delay.
Here's Williamson's paper on the idea: Throttling Viruses: Restricting propagation to defeat malicious mobile code I haven't read it yet, but I see one potential problem right away. When you load a web page, you normally make quite a few connections--one for each image, e.g. I'll have to see how he handles that
Later, in Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Antonio (1989), the Supreme Court reversed itself, saying that "business necessity" was a huge burden to prove.
Then, with the Civil Rights act of 1991, Congress reinstated the business necessity requirement, but courts have been a little uneven on how to apply the law.
Search on "disparate impact" if you want to see more.
Yeah, but it doesn't say he survived the explosion, does it? Huh? Does it? Huh? Huh?
Oops. Well I did read the NYT article before posting, at least. Does that count?
Gelernter also survived a bomb from the Unabomber.
Roger Ebert has been praising a system called Maxivision48 which is 48 fps (and can dynamically switch to 24 fps to save money).
Also, Douglas Trumbull's ShowScan system has been around for a while, but has only been used for a few specialty attractions. I've read comments that said that ShowScan was too realistic and not "cinematic." That reminds me of the CD vs. vinyl debate.
I've never seen either system.
Santa Monica, Calif. : Rand Corporation, 1978.
Rand series designation: P-6092
Well, duh, if the user wants to run insecure applications, fine, Trusted Computing won't stop him. But if he wants to run secure applications, it will let him. The point of Trusted Computing is that, for example, the stock broker's computer can tell
There is no way to tell those things without hardware assistance.
It is fine to point out the potential downsides and abuses of the technology but there really are uses for it to improve security! For RMS to pretend otherwise is wrong.
There are several book price comparing services, I like this one: www.bestwebbuys.com
However, his contention that the only use for Palladium/Trusted Computing Platform technology is DRM is wrong. It could be used, for example, with the Brazilian voting machines, to make sure that what you think is the output from the voting software really is. Without keys protected in hardware, you can't be sure. With TCPA, the output from the software (over the net or on floppy disk) can be signed with a chain of keys right down to the hardware. Without hardware help, there's no way to hide keys on remote systems.
On a less serious note, you could be sure that your opponent in a network game is a person, not a gamebot.
That being said, DRM would still be the #1 use for the technology.