i know what you meant. I was meaning that this market cannot only exist in the US. For instance, perhaps US or antarctican:p villains would do better in e.g. Europe.
Yuppie food stamps ($20 bills or whatever medium denomination of the localized currency your ATMs spit out) hold lines up. Correct change (or nearly correct change) is almost always faster than plastic. This goes double for those ancient CC modems that take 2 minutes to run a charge.
And yah, large companies want more plastic use, partly because they pay lower CC processing fees than smaller businesses.
Cash will continue to be the best way to patronize your small and local businesses, especially those with one or two cashiers who aren't going to be able to cut a cashier from any time efficiency resulting from CC use.
All of which is again based on your underlying Divine Dogma of individuals being unchangeably "employed" for "wages" in pursuit of individual "wealth". If that were to be altered in any way, your entire "argument" is blown into dust.
LOL!! I'll ship you your "I win" button shortly. I'm afraid it's broken though. Our system of the use of money as a medium of exchange is what enables us to not have to farm and be blacksmiths and know building trades, etc. It is vastly more scalable than barter. Can you imagine the development of solid state electronics in a barter or other currency lacking society? Your utopia has a severe bootstrapping problem. As it is, I am quite comfortable in my assumption that currencies will remain a tool we use for the indefinite future.
Seriously, though. You give no consideration to *how* a society would get from point a to point b. You gloss over it with "we should experiment" etc. Well, it would require the considerable exercise of coercive and tyrannical power against the vast majority of the population to make any of these changes in what hitherto has been considered to be human nature. Many will see your proposed coercion as evil in its own right despite any noble assertions you might make regarding your motives (I am one of those).
I will not entertain the rest of your one dimensional assertions regarding e.g. feudalism. You are trolling here, even if you don't realize it. Go read some more history.
And I've yet to be able to get you to state the origins of your "ethics" and "morals". Since you evidently have no problem forcing others to do things you consider "right" I cannot consider any of your ends moral because coercion is not compatible with my ethics.
Busts occur because people keep doing things that no longer work and resources are wasted on useless things. It is logical to pursue success where one has found success in the past. Hence in capitalism individuals throng to the same, successful investments. No one wants to be left behind. In communism the fearless leaders do the same thing in their allocation of resources, e.g. the 5 year plans made so famous by the Soviet Union. However, given that change is the only constant, sometimes lack of adequate information, political, and/or sentimental forces cause those directing production to do something suboptimal. Sometimes the forces at hand are so strong that the same failed strategy is pursued well past the point it becomes obvious that it ought to have been ended. This is a vulnerability in any real human organization and no amount of "sentience" is going to fix it.
In your ideal world, where does the omniscient coordination of the entire human economy come from? It's a pipe dream to think that it is achievable by any system, but the virtue of capitalism aided by openly available information is that busts are relatively short while investors figure out what sorts of endeavors are worth investing in (and thus employing people to do the work associated with them). There is always motivation to invest, and thus is native human greed turned to societal benefit. Does politics get in the way of that? Of course. But is does so for every system tried to date, including communism.
The unfortunate aspects of communism are: 1. that historically it has been unstable, shifting readily to totalitarianism or oligarchy. (think Russia's communist revolution being subverted even before the revolution was complete) 2. it results in an ossified, slow to react buraucracy.
Your apologetic for communism would sound more sincere if communism hadn't already been shown by our historical experience to have the above characteristics.
But say your god of the economy were to emerge and tell us each what we ought to be doing. Surely it will need to continually adjust the number of people employed in each pursuit. For just as we no longer tabulate actuarial statistics by hand, sometime we will replace each technology we currently use. E.g. if teleportation were to become possible and practical, we would find ourselves needing many fewer airline pilots and train engineers, and factories to produce those vehicles. Many people would have to change jobs and retrain. Not all of us have the capacity to do the latter effectively. These are the negative consequences of so-called disruptive technologies. There is thus motivation in human politics to preserve the status quo. To still have a perceived need for auto workers as such. To still need toll collectors even though EZPass obviates the need for most of them. Etc.
Under such a scheme as would be needed to make your apparent utopian vision of things, people would have even less certainty of what their job would be the next day because the job oracle would optimize the labor directed at each activity. And people would be unhappy because of being exposed to such constant change in their circumstances.
Further, the book is (as it is titled) about outliers. For those of us firmly within the first 1-2 standard deviations, there is, i'm sure, a much stronger correlation between our effort (on all fronts: social as well as technical) and our results in life. For some of us (the socially challenged in particular) it is hard to recognize that we are members of a society and that we need to communicate our utility and concern for the welfare of those around us in an effective manner. Were effort not at all correlated with success in any part of society as you suggest, society as such would cease to function at all and we'd return to being hunter-gatherers or somesuch. We're not there yet, and i'm not holding my breath for it.
As to the choices you present to me, i'd have to label that as a false dichotomy. There are more choices than free-for-all cage match and no one does anything socialism. We currently have a particularly ineffective mixture of the two, which I agree is frustrating.
I'm pretty sure he wasn't talking about the current economic slump when he said "unsustainable." He was talking about an eventual and irrecoverable collapse of our economy. What we have now is barely a whiff of that; it's not even a taste.
Then I have even greater difficulty seeing how the object of his ire (large salaries) is the root cause of such a collapse. It is still a symptom (and one which will all but certainly pass before the collapse you suggest is manifest). I'd place monitary policy and general laziness (your assertions about wanting to work as little as possible being a desirable and achievable state) as the main culprit there. Problem is that so many want to use the same tool for their own purposes, including people who'd love to use it for the purposes you espouse.
Eh? You mean the viewpoint that just because a group of people do something, that automatically makes it right? I've actually seen very little of that on Slashdot. In fact, the overwhelming majority of discussion on here seems to be about things groups of people do that Slashdotters believe are wrong.
but what criteria does one use to determine wrongness? and where do these criteria come from? Your repeated fixation on being pissed upon? In my experience placing the oppressed in positions of power to "fix" the system that pissed on them merely leads to a shift in who is pissing on who, not the oft-stated goal of ending the pissing.
Who doesn't? Honestly, imagine a world in which everyone has all their basic needs met without working. How many of those people do you think would spend much time working? How many do you think would spend most of their time recreating? My bets are on "almost no one" and "almost everyone," respectively.
overpopulation and idiocracy are the results of such a naive utopia
First, from a moral relativist point of view (which most/.ers seem to have), why is your redefinition of "sane" desirable? What purpose does your apparent desire for egalitarianism serve? Do you merely want to skate through life doing the minimum possible and maximizing your personal recreational time? Do you resent others who manage to have more recreational time than you by dint of whatever circumstances? Or are you misguidedly altrusitic? If so, why? Whence come your ethics and why ought the rest of us subscribe to them?
I think you misplace the blame for the recent unsustainable boom on those making a lot of money. It seems to me that large earners in unsuccessful firms are a symptom, not the cause of our current issues. I (and others much more closely connected to the happenings in the financial industry) place more attribution on the shift of risk away from those in charge caused by investment firms going public in the 80s. Also, risk exposure was shunted away from those making loans in the last 10 years. Another, closely associated proximate cause were the attempts to be egalitarian by reducing lending standards to meet HUD low-income home ownership goals.
you're right. we should just make everyone's lives miserable so as to evenly distribute "society's" resources. i'll take charge of the allocation governance. we can be sure that i'll be just as miserable as everyone else, can't we? oh, wait this has been tried before in soviet russia? damn, i'm not original either.
and it's impossible that we could increase production so fewer people have to be materially miserable. that's just crazy talk.
hooray for me. however, it did give me the opportunity to see just how bassackwards DC is w.r.t. IT. They got federal money to improve IT in schools, so they spent much of it on a contractor to "study" the current state of IT in the schools. (Hint: 8086 PC XTs and PC Jrs if anything) It was a complete boondoggle.
And the leader of this farcical group is now one of our nation's fearless leaders. fandamntastic.
but it is far harder to stay in such a deflationary loop than it is to stay in an inflationary loop. This is especially true when our leaders like the populace foolishly conflate the medium of exchange with the resources being exchanged. It leads to massive "stimulus" packages that enrich cronies and further impoverish the average person by misallocating labor.
It also leads to burning produce whilst people starve to create a false scarcity to prop up prices. perhaps if there hadn't been so much government intervention to drive up production of food for WWI, there wouldn't have been a perceived need to intervene again to "fix" the problem.
he didn't say "worst case." the missing bit is that it is far more difficult to enter extreme deflation than extreme inflation. How many cases of extreme deflation have there been in history? not many. so you present me with phantom fears versus the palpable threat posed by hyperinflation.
uggh... engineers apply science to create mathematically verifiable, trustworthy systems. there are very few software "engineers" who qualify. the only state that has professional licensure for software engineers is Texas, and because the field has historically been so devoid of science the only way you can get the license is through documentation of 20+ years of relevant (safety critical systems) experience. come back and tell me you're an engineer when you have a license. Otherwise we should start calling dental hygenists "doctor". oh, wait, that's illegal. oh, wait, so is calling yourself "engineer" without a license. it is, unfortunately, not often enforced.
and, no, i am not a licensed engineer, but my degree is in engineering.
It's the only silver lining in an economic downturn. the good part is that whatever money the poor have can actually continue to feed them. Perhaps you'd prefer an inflationary depression wherein one's life savings can't buy a loaf of bread? Our fearless leaders are doing their best to ensure that occurs. For an example of the wonderful employment environment it produces, you could consider moving to Zimbabwe.
clearly there is much room for improvement. i for one want lower emissions from an aesthetic point of view as I occasionally use such equipment and hate breathing the exhaust.
You are very focused on the environmental impact side of the set of repercussions of automobiles and other power equipment. The main focus of the debate seems to be on the road maintenance costs. You are muddying the waters by responding only considering the topic that concerns you rather than the one the GP is concerned with. Here's a way to address both:
Premises: 1. We need infrastructure and transit to support our current population densities (and the variety of land uses that sustain them)
2. We want to pay for the construction and maintenance of needed public infrastructure in a way that is fair. e.g. users who drive roads maintained with tax dollars pay for their portion of that use, but not for their use of private roads whose maintenance costs they are likely already paying.
3. We (well, some of us anyways) want to discourage consumption of fuel by penalizing all usage of it, perhaps even disproportionately and we want to do this for all uses of the fuel because we fear the environmental impacts of over-consumption
Analysis:
Part of the tax needs to be proportional to the person's use of the infrastructure. Prii still wear the road and occasionally their drivers don't fess up to destroying signage or guide rails... SUVs wear the road more, but i'd think rather less than you'd like to penalize them for polluting. However, neither type of vehicle costs the state highway commission anything for miles driven on private roads. This last bit is the GP's beef that you don't care to acknowledge, no matter how legitimate it is with respect to highway maintenance costs. A smart GPS system could really shine here.
Part of the tax (in the opinion of many) needs to encourage efficiency to reduce pollution. Thus it is punative against consumption. Gas taxes shine here.
Results:
Taxation that achieves both goals will synthesize both approaches and avoid corner cases where families scratching a living from the earth in BFE have to pay twice for road maintenance they aren't getting, while people tearing up the state roads and creating traffic jams on the Interstates in their Prii don't get off free for the congestion and resulting infrastructure building they contribute to.
Taxation should explicitly acknowledge the balance of maintenance and penalization we as a society feel is appropriate. You will likely think that balance is not punative enough. Others will think it too punative. Compromise is inherent in politics. Get out there and convince others there is benefit to higher sin taxes. Use NY's cigarette tax as an example.
Other than fairness and open government, another reason that explicitly apportioning the tax between the two objectives is necessary is that it is terribly demoralizing to be told that one is paying for infrastructure that one is hardly using at all. It feels like theft. And it is.
Unrelated:
As to your attempt at a point regarding electrical power equipment, you clearly have never used a chainsaw. There are electric chainsaws. They suck. Electric lawn mowers suck too. Perhaps you could make a contribution to the environment by designing electric power equipment that works as well as internal combustion driven equipment and do not weigh twice as much.
and those machines were then used in the "census" process and later the Holocaust. I read somewhere that the Nazis couldn't have been nearly as thorough in their genocide without the IBMs.
Slashdot Mirror
The mark of a good summary... you RTFA. :)
not to mention:
"you shouldn't take life so seriously. you'll never get out alive."
i know what you meant. I was meaning that this market cannot only exist in the US. For instance, perhaps US or antarctican :p villains would do better in e.g. Europe.
is it... *gasp* a conspiracy? :p
and who do non-US publishers pander to to tap this market?
why must everyone diss the Culinary Institute of America? They're trying to make terror-free food! How is that a bad goal?
http://www.ciachef.edu/
or those wonderful people developing terror-free art at the cleveland institute of art. http://www.cia.edu/
Yuppie food stamps ($20 bills or whatever medium denomination of the localized currency your ATMs spit out) hold lines up. Correct change (or nearly correct change) is almost always faster than plastic. This goes double for those ancient CC modems that take 2 minutes to run a charge.
And yah, large companies want more plastic use, partly because they pay lower CC processing fees than smaller businesses.
Cash will continue to be the best way to patronize your small and local businesses, especially those with one or two cashiers who aren't going to be able to cut a cashier from any time efficiency resulting from CC use.
my cookies got blown away... it was me, in case it wasn't obvious. feel free to provide whatever rebuttal you care to.
LOL!! I'll ship you your "I win" button shortly. I'm afraid it's broken though. Our system of the use of money as a medium of exchange is what enables us to not have to farm and be blacksmiths and know building trades, etc. It is vastly more scalable than barter. Can you imagine the development of solid state electronics in a barter or other currency lacking society? Your utopia has a severe bootstrapping problem. As it is, I am quite comfortable in my assumption that currencies will remain a tool we use for the indefinite future.
Seriously, though. You give no consideration to *how* a society would get from point a to point b. You gloss over it with "we should experiment" etc. Well, it would require the considerable exercise of coercive and tyrannical power against the vast majority of the population to make any of these changes in what hitherto has been considered to be human nature. Many will see your proposed coercion as evil in its own right despite any noble assertions you might make regarding your motives (I am one of those).
I will not entertain the rest of your one dimensional assertions regarding e.g. feudalism. You are trolling here, even if you don't realize it. Go read some more history.
And I've yet to be able to get you to state the origins of your "ethics" and "morals". Since you evidently have no problem forcing others to do things you consider "right" I cannot consider any of your ends moral because coercion is not compatible with my ethics.
Busts occur because people keep doing things that no longer work and resources are wasted on useless things. It is logical to pursue success where one has found success in the past. Hence in capitalism individuals throng to the same, successful investments. No one wants to be left behind. In communism the fearless leaders do the same thing in their allocation of resources, e.g. the 5 year plans made so famous by the Soviet Union. However, given that change is the only constant, sometimes lack of adequate information, political, and/or sentimental forces cause those directing production to do something suboptimal. Sometimes the forces at hand are so strong that the same failed strategy is pursued well past the point it becomes obvious that it ought to have been ended. This is a vulnerability in any real human organization and no amount of "sentience" is going to fix it.
In your ideal world, where does the omniscient coordination of the entire human economy come from? It's a pipe dream to think that it is achievable by any system, but the virtue of capitalism aided by openly available information is that busts are relatively short while investors figure out what sorts of endeavors are worth investing in (and thus employing people to do the work associated with them). There is always motivation to invest, and thus is native human greed turned to societal benefit. Does politics get in the way of that? Of course. But is does so for every system tried to date, including communism.
The unfortunate aspects of communism are:
1. that historically it has been unstable, shifting readily to totalitarianism or oligarchy. (think Russia's communist revolution being subverted even before the revolution was complete)
2. it results in an ossified, slow to react buraucracy.
Your apologetic for communism would sound more sincere if communism hadn't already been shown by our historical experience to have the above characteristics.
But say your god of the economy were to emerge and tell us each what we ought to be doing. Surely it will need to continually adjust the number of people employed in each pursuit. For just as we no longer tabulate actuarial statistics by hand, sometime we will replace each technology we currently use. E.g. if teleportation were to become possible and practical, we would find ourselves needing many fewer airline pilots and train engineers, and factories to produce those vehicles. Many people would have to change jobs and retrain. Not all of us have the capacity to do the latter effectively. These are the negative consequences of so-called disruptive technologies. There is thus motivation in human politics to preserve the status quo. To still have a perceived need for auto workers as such. To still need toll collectors even though EZPass obviates the need for most of them. Etc.
Under such a scheme as would be needed to make your apparent utopian vision of things, people would have even less certainty of what their job would be the next day because the job oracle would optimize the labor directed at each activity. And people would be unhappy because of being exposed to such constant change in their circumstances.
Further, the book is (as it is titled) about outliers. For those of us firmly within the first 1-2 standard deviations, there is, i'm sure, a much stronger correlation between our effort (on all fronts: social as well as technical) and our results in life. For some of us (the socially challenged in particular) it is hard to recognize that we are members of a society and that we need to communicate our utility and concern for the welfare of those around us in an effective manner. Were effort not at all correlated with success in any part of society as you suggest, society as such would cease to function at all and we'd return to being hunter-gatherers or somesuch. We're not there yet, and i'm not holding my breath for it.
As to the choices you present to me, i'd have to label that as a false dichotomy. There are more choices than free-for-all cage match and no one does anything socialism. We currently have a particularly ineffective mixture of the two, which I agree is frustrating.
but if equality of outcome is also enforced, then the society fails to produce enough to cover its needs and breadlines or worse result.
Then I have even greater difficulty seeing how the object of his ire (large salaries) is the root cause of such a collapse. It is still a symptom (and one which will all but certainly pass before the collapse you suggest is manifest). I'd place monitary policy and general laziness (your assertions about wanting to work as little as possible being a desirable and achievable state) as the main culprit there. Problem is that so many want to use the same tool for their own purposes, including people who'd love to use it for the purposes you espouse.
but what criteria does one use to determine wrongness? and where do these criteria come from? Your repeated fixation on being pissed upon? In my experience placing the oppressed in positions of power to "fix" the system that pissed on them merely leads to a shift in who is pissing on who, not the oft-stated goal of ending the pissing.
overpopulation and idiocracy are the results of such a naive utopia
First, from a moral relativist point of view (which most /.ers seem to have), why is your redefinition of "sane" desirable? What purpose does your apparent desire for egalitarianism serve? Do you merely want to skate through life doing the minimum possible and maximizing your personal recreational time? Do you resent others who manage to have more recreational time than you by dint of whatever circumstances? Or are you misguidedly altrusitic? If so, why? Whence come your ethics and why ought the rest of us subscribe to them?
I think you misplace the blame for the recent unsustainable boom on those making a lot of money. It seems to me that large earners in unsuccessful firms are a symptom, not the cause of our current issues. I (and others much more closely connected to the happenings in the financial industry) place more attribution on the shift of risk away from those in charge caused by investment firms going public in the 80s. Also, risk exposure was shunted away from those making loans in the last 10 years. Another, closely associated proximate cause were the attempts to be egalitarian by reducing lending standards to meet HUD low-income home ownership goals.
you're right. we should just make everyone's lives miserable so as to evenly distribute "society's" resources. i'll take charge of the allocation governance. we can be sure that i'll be just as miserable as everyone else, can't we? oh, wait this has been tried before in soviet russia? damn, i'm not original either.
and it's impossible that we could increase production so fewer people have to be materially miserable. that's just crazy talk.
I thought they'd gone extinct sometime back in the 90s. ;) Maybe there's hope for some of these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_birds
hooray for me. however, it did give me the opportunity to see just how bassackwards DC is w.r.t. IT. They got federal money to improve IT in schools, so they spent much of it on a contractor to "study" the current state of IT in the schools. (Hint: 8086 PC XTs and PC Jrs if anything) It was a complete boondoggle.
And the leader of this farcical group is now one of our nation's fearless leaders. fandamntastic.
too bad this was subverted by direct election of senators and the rise to power of the opinion poll and focus group
but it is far harder to stay in such a deflationary loop than it is to stay in an inflationary loop. This is especially true when our leaders like the populace foolishly conflate the medium of exchange with the resources being exchanged. It leads to massive "stimulus" packages that enrich cronies and further impoverish the average person by misallocating labor.
It also leads to burning produce whilst people starve to create a false scarcity to prop up prices. perhaps if there hadn't been so much government intervention to drive up production of food for WWI, there wouldn't have been a perceived need to intervene again to "fix" the problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Adjustment_Act
And I can't find it online just now, but my high school us history book had a picture of an orange crop being burned during the depression.
he didn't say "worst case." the missing bit is that it is far more difficult to enter extreme deflation than extreme inflation. How many cases of extreme deflation have there been in history? not many. so you present me with phantom fears versus the palpable threat posed by hyperinflation.
uggh... engineers apply science to create mathematically verifiable, trustworthy systems. there are very few software "engineers" who qualify. the only state that has professional licensure for software engineers is Texas, and because the field has historically been so devoid of science the only way you can get the license is through documentation of 20+ years of relevant (safety critical systems) experience. come back and tell me you're an engineer when you have a license. Otherwise we should start calling dental hygenists "doctor". oh, wait, that's illegal. oh, wait, so is calling yourself "engineer" without a license. it is, unfortunately, not often enforced.
and, no, i am not a licensed engineer, but my degree is in engineering.
It's the only silver lining in an economic downturn. the good part is that whatever money the poor have can actually continue to feed them. Perhaps you'd prefer an inflationary depression wherein one's life savings can't buy a loaf of bread? Our fearless leaders are doing their best to ensure that occurs. For an example of the wonderful employment environment it produces, you could consider moving to Zimbabwe.
untrue. There are no requirements to retrofit small engines that predate the small engine emissions requirements.
EPA, which hasn't taken full effect yet:
http://www.epa.gov/OMS/equip-ld.htm
California has a longer history of regulation:
http://www.egr.msu.edu/erl/emiss/emiss.htm
http://www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/offroad/sm_en_fs.pdf
clearly there is much room for improvement. i for one want lower emissions from an aesthetic point of view as I occasionally use such equipment and hate breathing the exhaust.
You are very focused on the environmental impact side of the set of repercussions of automobiles and other power equipment. The main focus of the debate seems to be on the road maintenance costs. You are muddying the waters by responding only considering the topic that concerns you rather than the one the GP is concerned with. Here's a way to address both:
Premises:
1. We need infrastructure and transit to support our current population densities (and the variety of land uses that sustain them)
2. We want to pay for the construction and maintenance of needed public infrastructure in a way that is fair. e.g. users who drive roads maintained with tax dollars pay for their portion of that use, but not for their use of private roads whose maintenance costs they are likely already paying.
3. We (well, some of us anyways) want to discourage consumption of fuel by penalizing all usage of it, perhaps even disproportionately and we want to do this for all uses of the fuel because we fear the environmental impacts of over-consumption
Analysis:
Part of the tax needs to be proportional to the person's use of the infrastructure. Prii still wear the road and occasionally their drivers don't fess up to destroying signage or guide rails... SUVs wear the road more, but i'd think rather less than you'd like to penalize them for polluting. However, neither type of vehicle costs the state highway commission anything for miles driven on private roads. This last bit is the GP's beef that you don't care to acknowledge, no matter how legitimate it is with respect to highway maintenance costs. A smart GPS system could really shine here.
Part of the tax (in the opinion of many) needs to encourage efficiency to reduce pollution. Thus it is punative against consumption. Gas taxes shine here.
Results:
Taxation that achieves both goals will synthesize both approaches and avoid corner cases where families scratching a living from the earth in BFE have to pay twice for road maintenance they aren't getting, while people tearing up the state roads and creating traffic jams on the Interstates in their Prii don't get off free for the congestion and resulting infrastructure building they contribute to.
Taxation should explicitly acknowledge the balance of maintenance and penalization we as a society feel is appropriate. You will likely think that balance is not punative enough. Others will think it too punative. Compromise is inherent in politics. Get out there and convince others there is benefit to higher sin taxes. Use NY's cigarette tax as an example.
Other than fairness and open government, another reason that explicitly apportioning the tax between the two objectives is necessary is that it is terribly demoralizing to be told that one is paying for infrastructure that one is hardly using at all. It feels like theft. And it is.
Unrelated:
As to your attempt at a point regarding electrical power equipment, you clearly have never used a chainsaw. There are electric chainsaws. They suck. Electric lawn mowers suck too. Perhaps you could make a contribution to the environment by designing electric power equipment that works as well as internal combustion driven equipment and do not weigh twice as much.
and those machines were then used in the "census" process and later the Holocaust. I read somewhere that the Nazis couldn't have been nearly as thorough in their genocide without the IBMs.
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/LAW/03/columns/fl.sebok.IBM.holocaust.03.15/
moral/ethical culpability.
mmmk?
companies are people, so why not let them be governments too?
oh, wait that's been done.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company
the printers are mostly made in China in the first place, so whose are they really? Especially in a partially command economy like China's.