But if your government does something to you, _generally_ (as long as you're not a minority?) if you're in the USA, you have the protection of the Constitution when you're dealing with the government. Up here in Canada, we have a similar document called the Charter.
But constitutions, in the states that are lucky enough to have them, generally say very little about private contracts/interactions. For example, if your employer decides to put you under surveillance, as long as they're not breaking the law in the process, and they decide to turn that evidence (photos video whatever) over to law enforcement, then it's generally admissible with no pesky warrants.
"There's a reason people aren't buying it. That still doesn't mean you should keep collecting until you're finally satisfied that it's paid itself off. If you wrote a crappy book, you probably should lose money on it."
So when are we gonna go confiscate the author's royalties for "The DaVinci Code"? 'Cause I wanna volunteer to help out with that...
I love when people start tossing around terms like "deserve". Who or what exactly will be the arbitrator of who deserves what?
If we're gonna say that Gatsby "deserves" to make the author a pile of cash because it's such a great book, then will we be confiscating the author's royalties earned by "The DaVinci Code"?
The "least bad" option seems to be more of a free-market solution. Except, as somebody pointed out, the equilibrium price of something who's marginal cost of production is zero, is basically zero.
That may be tough to accept, but the plain fact is, nobody is entitled to X amount of money for Y amount of time and effort. Sometimes what you decided to invest your time and effort in makes money, sometimes it doesn't.
Well, that's an interesting discussion of how and why people get paid, but then there's this part:
"Copyright is no different from the rights of ownership that allow you to build a house and then rent if out over several years"
And I almost sprayed coffee all over my monitor.
Seriously, this might be how it looks from the author or publisher's point-of-view. But it's at best a gross misunderstanding of copyright law.
The ability to have copyright law is in the US constitution. But it's not _mandated_ in the constitution. Copyright is not a natural right, or else it would've been enumerated with all the other "natural rights" like freedom of speech, religion, etc.
Copyright is a bargain. The basis of this is, "you get exclusive right to reproduction of your work, for a limited time, and then your work enters the public domain."
Given that the unstated position of copyright holders seems to be "Uh, 'eventually enters the public domain? Man, what's he talking about?", then the basic bargain of copyright law has been violated.
The fact that this disrupts the business model of some is irrelevant. Too bad. Tell it to the buggy-whip manufacturers and whale-oil producers.
It's not like the business model of publishing has that much going for it, anyway. High-risk with narrow profit margins for book publishers and sellers, very few authors ever manage to make a living at it, what exactly is it that's so wonderful about the status quo?
"Nonsense. It takes lots of time to write a book, often years. If I made such an investment of my time, I would hope that it would generate some income for several years, rather than just get swiped off PirateBay by spotty-faced freeloaders."
A friend of mine has a master's degree in social anthropology or underwater basket weaving or something. She made an investment of several years of her time, and hopes that it will pay off by 'generating income for several years', too.
But she probably shouldn't hold her breath on it.
Seriously, what are we here, half-assed marxists? We're not seriously saying that an investment of X time should lead to Y income, are we?
Look, we can all agree that piracy leads to "some number" of lost sales. That number might be 100% of unauthorized copies off of BT. It might also be zero.
Somebody asking the question 'what can I do about book pirates' is starting from an unproven assumption that piracy is _actually a problem_ in the first place.
Maybe start by thinking "OK, if P2P filesharing didn't exist, how many of the people who downloaded the book would've bought the book?" Anybody who _wouldn't_ have bought the book, they're not your customers anyway, so who cares what they do?
Um, boo fucking hoo. Women have all the rights, and men are sooooo oppressed. Cry me a fucking river.
How about this - as soon as a majority of non-custodial dads start doing more in terms of child support than legally mandated by the courts, then we'll have sympathy for how "unfair" the family court system is.
Yes, I know, there are a non-zero number of dads who do this, but there aren't enough in the whole country to crowd a phone booth.
Yeah, that was my wife's first thought when I told her about this new form of birth control. It's not men who are gonna get pregnant.
And, let's face it, however bad the 'horrors of child support' etc whining from guys who think it's soooo unjust that they might have to be responsible for their offspring, getting pregnant is still a way bigger deal for women.
I'd also like to add that, part of the problem in North America is we're educating a much larger slice of the population than we used to say, 40 or 50 years ago.
My grandfather dropped out in grade 8. Everybody has stories like that. But today, my grandfather would be a discipline problem in grades 9-12, in all likelihood.
So we're having 70% of kids stay in school through to high school instead of 20% (numbers I just made up, if anybody has real numbers, please correct me) and we haven't really increased funding to match that.
If I had mod points, I'd be using them, instead let me just say that you're absolutely right.
A friend of mine worked as a tutor for high school and undergrad students while he was in university. Amazing tutor, he told me he thought about teaching. But this is a guy who was working on his degree in Electrical engineering and computer science.
Hmmm - he could: 1) Spend another year, maybe 2, getting a teaching degree, then spend a year or 2 working as a substitute teacher, (which is basically part-time work, enjoy your 25K/year if you're lucky) then if you're lucky after a year or 2 of that, you might get a term position for one year. Which may or may not be renewed.
After several years of that, you _might_ get on as a regular full-time teacher.
OR
2) Just get a job as an electrical engineer, in the 80-100K/year range.
Guess which one my buddy picked?
I don't know what the solution to bad teachers is, but I don't think it's just as simple as "fire the bad ones". I don't think many people (OK, probably _some_ do,) start out as lackluster mediocre teachers. I suspect that "bad teachers" were once enthusiastic about teaching, then they ended up getting burned out by the variety and combination of factors that make teaching such a crappy job.
So maybe being in the role of "teacher" changes you, in a way similar to the Stanford Prison Experiment changed the "guards" into fascists.
So maybe that's something that should be looked at.
"I am always amazed how industry has been yelling "big bad inefficient government; privatize now and we'll do it better cheaper quicker!""
Whenever I hear somebody assert that the private sector is by definition more efficient, I always wonder where exactly they've been working in the private sector? Not anywhere I've ever even heard of.
My first 2 "real jobs" out of school were working for the government. Sure, there was a certain amount of waste and goofing off and general bureaucratic BS. I used to thing 'hey, the jokes about the civil service are true!'.
Then I got a job doing basically the same work, but in the private sector, and I learned how to _properly_ goof off.
Seriously, whatever shortcomings of waste or bloated bureaucracy one might articulate about the government, you won't find it any better in the private sector.
The smallish city my grandmother lives in decided a few years ago to what we call "area rate" up here in Canada, basically a vote on whether or not to increase property taxes by X, to have all sidewalks in the city cleared of snow and ice by the city.
Previously, the way it worked was the property owner was responsible for shoveling their sidewalks. The city by-law was something like "...you have X hours after it stops snowing to clear your sidewalk..." (I think it was 24 or 36). So the thing is, for somebody who walks with a cane like my grandmother, it only takes one or two jackasses per block for you to be basically housebound.
Now, the city does it, everybody gets theirs done at the same time, and the increase in property taxes is 1/4 to 1/5 of what it would cost to hire somebody to clear your sidewalk for the duration of winter.
I guess my point is, especially with something like internet service, where the service purchased by each individual consumer is very similar or identical, is when it really, really, really makes sense to do it as a municipal utility.
"The fact the the government is selling services "at-cost" does not preclude the possibility of a private organization offering the same services and making money."
Well said. The fact that I can get municipal tap water at a price that's virtually free (or at least cheap enough that I wouldn't notice) free hasn't stopped manufacturers of bottled water from making a decent return.
Companies like TWC in this example are essentially asking the government not to start providing a service which they make a profit off of, regardless of any other factors. Well, I'm sure Blackwater would like it a lot if state and local governments disbanded their police departments, and I'm sure they'd make a lot of money (and create a lot of jobs, too!) but that doesn't make it a good idea.
Well, I can't help but point out that yeah, it's socialism, just like the schools, police, fire and rescue services, and national defense is socialism.
There are in fact some areas where competition serves virtually no one's interests. Services where one really can't do without that service (imagine a scenario of privatized police - when you need the police, you're not in a position to do without their service if you don't like the price) are a great example. Same with areas with high barriers to entry, or things that are necessities. OK, maybe internet isn't _necessary for survival_, but surely/. readers will agree that internet service ought to be in the same category as electricity and water and phone service.
What's interesting about Buffett is that he's also basically left-leaning in his politics. He favors regulation, and has expressed disgust over the fact that his secretary pays a greater percentage of her income in taxes than he does, and he supports the estate tax.
So, I don't know if he's the right one to bring up in the context of libertarianism, even if he is a self-made billionaire. His politics don't seem to conform to the politics I hear self-described libertarians expound.
I wonder how much is that the sort of person who wants to be a cop is basically a bully, and how much is an effect on the human psyche caused by the nature of being a cop.
Military installations have radar like that, but most civilian air traffic control centers track aircraft by transponders, not by any sort of radar contact.
When I was doing my pilot's license, one of our instructors used to joke about going up in a Cessna with a mode-C (transmits altitude as well as location) transponder, then get out to our practice area, put yourself in a spin, at 1000' AGL recover from the spin, scream into the radio, then turn off your transponder.
Am I the only one who spent the boat scene thinking "why the hell did they not push the button yet?"?
I don't know about you guys, but in that situation, I'd pushed that button as fast as I possibly can, and then argue about it, expecting the same reaction from the other side as well.
I was half-expecting someone to push the button, and it turns out that the joker had lied, and the button actually blows up _your_ boat, (or both boats) not the other guys.
Like that parable about the 2 foreign monks that are visiting Vlad the Impaler. Vlad, (knowing that he's hated and feared by his subjects) asks each monk, separately what the people think of their ruler.
One monk, knowing what a murderous psycho he is, is terrified of telling the truth and displeasing the ruler, so he lies to flatter him. The other monk tells the complete and un-varnished truth.
In the morning, Vlad had _one_ of the monks executed, but which one?
1) A lot of these battles between 'the pirates' of various types and copyright/content owners has to do with maintaining control over distribution, not just money.
The RIAA is probably the best (or most obvious) case of this, as, without maintaining their role as a middle-man, eventually we'll reach a point where it's hard to see exactly what value they add (some would say we've already reached that point).
2) Tragedy of the anticommons. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons)
When you have multiple owners of a resource, where to do something or other requires complete unanimous agreement of all parties, then all it takes is one person to "overvalue" their interests/rights/property to bring it all to a screeching halt for everybody.
This is, in the real estate world, generally why we have the concept of "eminent domain". If the government (or some other party) wants to build a railroad for example, if it requires the unanimous consent of all property owners along the proposed rail line, then it only takes one (out of perhaps hundreds or even thousands) crackpot who's overvalued his land by a couple orders of magnitude to screw it up for everybody.
Maybe we'll reach a point in the future where we'll have the equivalent of eminent domain for IP?
The drop in life expectancy post Bolshevik revolution is almost certainly attributable to political conditions, but to suggest that the rise in same post industrial revolution in the USA is a result of some magical effect of capitalism is not the case.
The US life expectancy gains post industrial revolution have more to do with public sanitation and the cleanliness techniques in hospitals developed by people like Florence Nightingale than any discussion of capitalism.
Y'know, clean water, sewers, that sorta thing? The sorta thing that free-marketeers at the time almost certainly thought was "government meddling in the marketplace" by telling people they couldn't just dump raw sewage in the street? Prevents things like, um, cholera. And it's exactly the opposite of lassie-faire capitalism.
OK, so we're talking about a price difference of say, 5 or ten bucks for a keyboard (or, most likely, ten bucks on the price of an ipod or something) to end working conditions that amount to slave labor?
This might not work for products who's final sale price is $100, especially for stuff >$200, is a price increase of between $1 and $10 really that big a deal?
Take a look at the level of state control or power in the bloody days of the union movement in the west (say, 1915-1950 or so,) in terms of how much muscle the state could use to break a strike.
Now compare that to what the current thugs in charge in China are capable of.
Yes, federal troops and police and private agencies like the pinkertons were used to put down strikes with violent or coercive means, but the powers of the state at the time are _nothing_ compared to what China is capable of now.
When it comes to suppressing dissent, the Chinese are a powerful state, with virually nothing that they can't or won't do.
Look, people like Eugene Debbs were imprisoned, but they weren't imprisoned (in secret), kept in isolation, and tortured, followed by selling his organs for transplant.
That makes the idea of workers demanding better working conditions um, iffy at best.
"We cannot compete with them unless we drop our wages and join economic battle the old-fashioned way. There is nothing we can do they cannot do cheaper."
Um, how do you conceivably see this happening? How exactly do we set up a scenario where US workers make 40 cents an hour or so, without them living in cardboard boxes and facing abject starvation?
Besides, making stuff cheap in the 3rd world is a short-term game, almost like a pyramid scheme. Eventually, the standard of living in wherever's cheap now will rise, (as seen in say, Korea, for example) to something like that in the developed world. At that point, companies in the developed world will have moved all their factories and overseas, and eliminated the workforce to run those factories, so now you have factories on the other side of the world, no factories in your home country, and the labor savings have evaporated.
Now, that might happen in 100 years, or in 20 years, but it'll happen eventually.
As someone pointed out before, climate scientists have, amazingly enough, thought about solar cycles, (and volcanic activity, and a few other factors) and concluded that no, solar cycles cannot account for the warming observed.
You're not coming up with anything new by mentioning solar cycles, it's been thought about, and you're not smarter than the sum total of all the world's climate researchers.
Slashdot Mirror
But if your government does something to you, _generally_ (as long as you're not a minority?) if you're in the USA, you have the protection of the Constitution when you're dealing with the government. Up here in Canada, we have a similar document called the Charter.
But constitutions, in the states that are lucky enough to have them, generally say very little about private contracts/interactions. For example, if your employer decides to put you under surveillance, as long as they're not breaking the law in the process, and they decide to turn that evidence (photos video whatever) over to law enforcement, then it's generally admissible with no pesky warrants.
"There's a reason people aren't buying it. That still doesn't mean you should keep collecting until you're finally satisfied that it's paid itself off. If you wrote a crappy book, you probably should lose money on it."
So when are we gonna go confiscate the author's royalties for "The DaVinci Code"? 'Cause I wanna volunteer to help out with that...
I love when people start tossing around terms like "deserve". Who or what exactly will be the arbitrator of who deserves what?
If we're gonna say that Gatsby "deserves" to make the author a pile of cash because it's such a great book, then will we be confiscating the author's royalties earned by "The DaVinci Code"?
The "least bad" option seems to be more of a free-market solution. Except, as somebody pointed out, the equilibrium price of something who's marginal cost of production is zero, is basically zero.
That may be tough to accept, but the plain fact is, nobody is entitled to X amount of money for Y amount of time and effort. Sometimes what you decided to invest your time and effort in makes money, sometimes it doesn't.
Well, that's an interesting discussion of how and why people get paid, but then there's this part:
"Copyright is no different from the rights of ownership that allow you to build a house and then rent if out over several years"
And I almost sprayed coffee all over my monitor.
Seriously, this might be how it looks from the author or publisher's point-of-view. But it's at best a gross misunderstanding of copyright law.
The ability to have copyright law is in the US constitution. But it's not _mandated_ in the constitution. Copyright is not a natural right, or else it would've been enumerated with all the other "natural rights" like freedom of speech, religion, etc.
Copyright is a bargain. The basis of this is, "you get exclusive right to reproduction of your work, for a limited time, and then your work enters the public domain."
Given that the unstated position of copyright holders seems to be "Uh, 'eventually enters the public domain? Man, what's he talking about?", then the basic bargain of copyright law has been violated.
The fact that this disrupts the business model of some is irrelevant. Too bad. Tell it to the buggy-whip manufacturers and whale-oil producers.
It's not like the business model of publishing has that much going for it, anyway. High-risk with narrow profit margins for book publishers and sellers, very few authors ever manage to make a living at it, what exactly is it that's so wonderful about the status quo?
"Nonsense. It takes lots of time to write a book, often years. If I made such an investment of my time, I would hope that it would generate some income for several years, rather than just get swiped off PirateBay by spotty-faced freeloaders."
A friend of mine has a master's degree in social anthropology or underwater basket weaving or something. She made an investment of several years of her time, and hopes that it will pay off by 'generating income for several years', too.
But she probably shouldn't hold her breath on it.
Seriously, what are we here, half-assed marxists? We're not seriously saying that an investment of X time should lead to Y income, are we?
Look, we can all agree that piracy leads to "some number" of lost sales. That number might be 100% of unauthorized copies off of BT. It might also be zero.
Somebody asking the question 'what can I do about book pirates' is starting from an unproven assumption that piracy is _actually a problem_ in the first place.
Maybe start by thinking "OK, if P2P filesharing didn't exist, how many of the people who downloaded the book would've bought the book?" Anybody who _wouldn't_ have bought the book, they're not your customers anyway, so who cares what they do?
Um, boo fucking hoo. Women have all the rights, and men are sooooo oppressed. Cry me a fucking river.
How about this - as soon as a majority of non-custodial dads start doing more in terms of child support than legally mandated by the courts, then we'll have sympathy for how "unfair" the family court system is.
Yes, I know, there are a non-zero number of dads who do this, but there aren't enough in the whole country to crowd a phone booth.
Yeah, that was my wife's first thought when I told her about this new form of birth control. It's not men who are gonna get pregnant.
And, let's face it, however bad the 'horrors of child support' etc whining from guys who think it's soooo unjust that they might have to be responsible for their offspring, getting pregnant is still a way bigger deal for women.
Didn't apple think about that, and reject it because most people don't read?
I'd also like to add that, part of the problem in North America is we're educating a much larger slice of the population than we used to say, 40 or 50 years ago.
My grandfather dropped out in grade 8. Everybody has stories like that. But today, my grandfather would be a discipline problem in grades 9-12, in all likelihood.
So we're having 70% of kids stay in school through to high school instead of 20% (numbers I just made up, if anybody has real numbers, please correct me) and we haven't really increased funding to match that.
If I had mod points, I'd be using them, instead let me just say that you're absolutely right.
A friend of mine worked as a tutor for high school and undergrad students while he was in university. Amazing tutor, he told me he thought about teaching. But this is a guy who was working on his degree in Electrical engineering and computer science.
Hmmm - he could:
1) Spend another year, maybe 2, getting a teaching degree, then spend a year or 2 working as a substitute teacher, (which is basically part-time work, enjoy your 25K/year if you're lucky) then if you're lucky after a year or 2 of that, you might get a term position for one year. Which may or may not be renewed.
After several years of that, you _might_ get on as a regular full-time teacher.
OR
2) Just get a job as an electrical engineer, in the 80-100K/year range.
Guess which one my buddy picked?
I don't know what the solution to bad teachers is, but I don't think it's just as simple as "fire the bad ones". I don't think many people (OK, probably _some_ do,) start out as lackluster mediocre teachers. I suspect that "bad teachers" were once enthusiastic about teaching, then they ended up getting burned out by the variety and combination of factors that make teaching such a crappy job.
So maybe being in the role of "teacher" changes you, in a way similar to the Stanford Prison Experiment changed the "guards" into fascists.
So maybe that's something that should be looked at.
"I am always amazed how industry has been yelling "big bad inefficient government; privatize now and we'll do it better cheaper quicker!""
Whenever I hear somebody assert that the private sector is by definition more efficient, I always wonder where exactly they've been working in the private sector? Not anywhere I've ever even heard of.
My first 2 "real jobs" out of school were working for the government. Sure, there was a certain amount of waste and goofing off and general bureaucratic BS. I used to thing 'hey, the jokes about the civil service are true!'.
Then I got a job doing basically the same work, but in the private sector, and I learned how to _properly_ goof off.
Seriously, whatever shortcomings of waste or bloated bureaucracy one might articulate about the government, you won't find it any better in the private sector.
The smallish city my grandmother lives in decided a few years ago to what we call "area rate" up here in Canada, basically a vote on whether or not to increase property taxes by X, to have all sidewalks in the city cleared of snow and ice by the city.
Previously, the way it worked was the property owner was responsible for shoveling their sidewalks. The city by-law was something like "...you have X hours after it stops snowing to clear your sidewalk..." (I think it was 24 or 36). So the thing is, for somebody who walks with a cane like my grandmother, it only takes one or two jackasses per block for you to be basically housebound.
Now, the city does it, everybody gets theirs done at the same time, and the increase in property taxes is 1/4 to 1/5 of what it would cost to hire somebody to clear your sidewalk for the duration of winter.
I guess my point is, especially with something like internet service, where the service purchased by each individual consumer is very similar or identical, is when it really, really, really makes sense to do it as a municipal utility.
"The fact the the government is selling services "at-cost" does not preclude the possibility of a private organization offering the same services and making money."
Well said. The fact that I can get municipal tap water at a price that's virtually free (or at least cheap enough that I wouldn't notice) free hasn't stopped manufacturers of bottled water from making a decent return.
Companies like TWC in this example are essentially asking the government not to start providing a service which they make a profit off of, regardless of any other factors. Well, I'm sure Blackwater would like it a lot if state and local governments disbanded their police departments, and I'm sure they'd make a lot of money (and create a lot of jobs, too!) but that doesn't make it a good idea.
Well, I can't help but point out that yeah, it's socialism, just like the schools, police, fire and rescue services, and national defense is socialism.
There are in fact some areas where competition serves virtually no one's interests. Services where one really can't do without that service (imagine a scenario of privatized police - when you need the police, you're not in a position to do without their service if you don't like the price) are a great example. Same with areas with high barriers to entry, or things that are necessities. OK, maybe internet isn't _necessary for survival_, but surely /. readers will agree that internet service ought to be in the same category as electricity and water and phone service.
What's interesting about Buffett is that he's also basically left-leaning in his politics. He favors regulation, and has expressed disgust over the fact that his secretary pays a greater percentage of her income in taxes than he does, and he supports the estate tax.
So, I don't know if he's the right one to bring up in the context of libertarianism, even if he is a self-made billionaire. His politics don't seem to conform to the politics I hear self-described libertarians expound.
I wonder how much is that the sort of person who wants to be a cop is basically a bully, and how much is an effect on the human psyche caused by the nature of being a cop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
Zimbardo managed to turn a bunch of hippies into thugs if anything worse than run-of-the mill cops.
Here, here.
But ATC "radar"?
Military installations have radar like that, but most civilian air traffic control centers track aircraft by transponders, not by any sort of radar contact.
When I was doing my pilot's license, one of our instructors used to joke about going up in a Cessna with a mode-C (transmits altitude as well as location) transponder, then get out to our practice area, put yourself in a spin, at 1000' AGL recover from the spin, scream into the radio, then turn off your transponder.
I can't remember where I heard the joke that "trying to take something off of the internet is like trying to get pee out of a swimming pool".
I was half-expecting someone to push the button, and it turns out that the joker had lied, and the button actually blows up _your_ boat, (or both boats) not the other guys.
Like that parable about the 2 foreign monks that are visiting Vlad the Impaler. Vlad, (knowing that he's hated and feared by his subjects) asks each monk, separately what the people think of their ruler.
One monk, knowing what a murderous psycho he is, is terrified of telling the truth and displeasing the ruler, so he lies to flatter him. The other monk tells the complete and un-varnished truth.
In the morning, Vlad had _one_ of the monks executed, but which one?
1) A lot of these battles between 'the pirates' of various types and copyright/content owners has to do with maintaining control over distribution, not just money.
The RIAA is probably the best (or most obvious) case of this, as, without maintaining their role as a middle-man, eventually we'll reach a point where it's hard to see exactly what value they add (some would say we've already reached that point).
2) Tragedy of the anticommons. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons)
When you have multiple owners of a resource, where to do something or other requires complete unanimous agreement of all parties, then all it takes is one person to "overvalue" their interests/rights/property to bring it all to a screeching halt for everybody.
This is, in the real estate world, generally why we have the concept of "eminent domain". If the government (or some other party) wants to build a railroad for example, if it requires the unanimous consent of all property owners along the proposed rail line, then it only takes one (out of perhaps hundreds or even thousands) crackpot who's overvalued his land by a couple orders of magnitude to screw it up for everybody.
Maybe we'll reach a point in the future where we'll have the equivalent of eminent domain for IP?
OK, I'll bite.
The drop in life expectancy post Bolshevik revolution is almost certainly attributable to political conditions, but to suggest that the rise in same post industrial revolution in the USA is a result of some magical effect of capitalism is not the case.
The US life expectancy gains post industrial revolution have more to do with public sanitation and the cleanliness techniques in hospitals developed by people like Florence Nightingale than any discussion of capitalism.
Y'know, clean water, sewers, that sorta thing? The sorta thing that free-marketeers at the time almost certainly thought was "government meddling in the marketplace" by telling people they couldn't just dump raw sewage in the street? Prevents things like, um, cholera. And it's exactly the opposite of lassie-faire capitalism.
OK, so we're talking about a price difference of say, 5 or ten bucks for a keyboard (or, most likely, ten bucks on the price of an ipod or something) to end working conditions that amount to slave labor?
This might not work for products who's final sale price is $100, especially for stuff >$200, is a price increase of between $1 and $10 really that big a deal?
Take a look at the level of state control or power in the bloody days of the union movement in the west (say, 1915-1950 or so,) in terms of how much muscle the state could use to break a strike.
Now compare that to what the current thugs in charge in China are capable of.
Yes, federal troops and police and private agencies like the pinkertons were used to put down strikes with violent or coercive means, but the powers of the state at the time are _nothing_ compared to what China is capable of now.
When it comes to suppressing dissent, the Chinese are a powerful state, with virually nothing that they can't or won't do.
Look, people like Eugene Debbs were imprisoned, but they weren't imprisoned (in secret), kept in isolation, and tortured, followed by selling his organs for transplant.
That makes the idea of workers demanding better working conditions um, iffy at best.
"We cannot compete with them unless we drop our wages and join economic battle the old-fashioned way. There is nothing we can do they cannot do cheaper."
Um, how do you conceivably see this happening? How exactly do we set up a scenario where US workers make 40 cents an hour or so, without them living in cardboard boxes and facing abject starvation?
Besides, making stuff cheap in the 3rd world is a short-term game, almost like a pyramid scheme. Eventually, the standard of living in wherever's cheap now will rise, (as seen in say, Korea, for example) to something like that in the developed world. At that point, companies in the developed world will have moved all their factories and overseas, and eliminated the workforce to run those factories, so now you have factories on the other side of the world, no factories in your home country, and the labor savings have evaporated.
Now, that might happen in 100 years, or in 20 years, but it'll happen eventually.
As someone pointed out before, climate scientists have, amazingly enough, thought about solar cycles, (and volcanic activity, and a few other factors) and concluded that no, solar cycles cannot account for the warming observed.
You're not coming up with anything new by mentioning solar cycles, it's been thought about, and you're not smarter than the sum total of all the world's climate researchers.