Yes I was oversimplifying things. I was trying to emphasize the point that Cost is King in free markets and that squalid working conditions have always been the dirty secret of capitalism. I do think I was essentially correct about the lack of options though. As I stated originally, If China wages rise, the work can move to Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia or India provided those nations supply the skilled workers. There's an endless supply of cheap labor. It's my understanding that Chinese are clamoring to work in the Foxconn factory, regardless of the poor conditions. From their individual perspective, they might technically have other options, but it sounds fairly bleak from what I can tell. My statement about liberal economists comes from an article which I can no longer find but the idea is not new that poor working conditions are better than no working conditions. It's a bleak notion but the basic idea I think is that you have to walk before you run when it comes to work. Where there is extreme poverty, there is not even an inkling of the idea of fairness vis-a-vis working conditions.
The legislative approach you suggest sounds well-intentioned and perhaps reasonable in theory, but in practice there are some obstacles: * The Chinese would likely decry our 'trade protectionism'. * US business interests would cry bloody murder and start pouring money into free trade conservatives * Politicians implementing this would likely lose their jobs -- or maybe not; depends on the public reaction * The cost of all our cheap electronics (and myriad other things) would rise -- this would result in a negative public reaction * Maybe, just maybe, this policy would result in creation of US jobs. Or maybe it would result in a drag on our economy because 'wealth' as measured in cheaply available goods and services would be harder to come by. I'm out of my depth when it comes to economic theory.
The more I think about it, the more I do think Apple is probably being fairly decent about it. My initial negative reaction to the OP was against the spin aspects of the reporting. I.e., "Apple is not so bad." I get the feeling, perhaps unjustified, that Apple is trying to cover it up and Foxconn is trying to cover it up, and China is trying to cover it up. I can't tell if the original article is well intentioned or not. The rephrasing of the title here on/. is just irritating.
There's one entity that can force the entire market to do something at the same time - it's called government.
Unfortunately, there's no international government with the power to make things right worldwide. If there is any force that works worldwide, it might be our sense of morality. The fact that this exploitation exists tends to suggest that there is no force in place that can currently fix it, which is too bad.
Voluntary charity does not really work on large scale, that's why we have welfare taxes. Same principle applies here.
I agree with you that voluntary charity does not really work like that. I'm not sure what you mean by 'same principle applies here,' but good luck trying to collect welfare taxes here in the US and send them to China. Or, alternatively, good luck telling China how to run her labor markets.
As for paying more for one's phone to rectify a social wrong, I reckon I might be able to afford $100. I'd much rather have it as beer money, but the thought of saving some guy from a dorm with 13 other guys in it -- or giving him healthcare when his hand gets crushed by the metal press -- that is something I would pay $100 for. Paying $100 to bring the labor to the US doesn't necessarily help that Chinese guy though. Instead of saving a poor Chinese guy, I'm giving a job to an American who is protected by labor laws. That's not exactly rectifying any social ills in China. It's depriving a Chinese guy of a job so some spoiled American can have the work instead. Maybe China would get the message? Or maybe they would continue to have destitute citizens willing to work under any conditions.
As for forcing Apple through legislation to honor humane principles of manufacture, I would imagine that might harm their worldwide business if you add 10-20% to the cost of each handset. I'm pretty liberal politically but I'm not sure how I feel about that.
Common decency says that some of Apple's crazy profit should be reduced to provide more humane circumstances for the people who build their products. They make more profit each quarter than Google does annually (or something to that effect). I disagree that there's an easy way to make this happen.
I agree with your points generally speaking, but would assert that redistributing 'wealth' in the form of simple money does not magically create more petroleum, more food, or more real estate so that everyone is better off all of a sudden. If we suddenly distributed purchasing power evenly to every single person on the globe by piling up all the money in the world and giving each person a 1/7,000,000,000 portion of it, I'd be willing to bet that I personally would end up with a lot less than I have now and your average resident of Southeast Asia would have a great deal more. Practically speaking, this means it would be harder to me to pay rent, to buy food or petroleum or entertainment, etc. I'm perfectly ready to admit I don't like that idea much.
On the other hand, I'd be more than happy to deprive some billionaire bastard of 100 million dollars if it eases my tax burden.
To me it seems like all part of the same issue top-to-bottom -- and a one that seems to mimic nature if I may be honest. * extremely poor people want to work in the factory instead of the rice paddies because it's better to sleep in a 10x10 dorm room with 14 other guys than it is to sleep in a malarial grass hut with 14 other guys. * i want to buy a house instead of renting this shitty apartment so i can have a yard, a dog, and a sense of self esteem. like the dude said in O Brother Where Art Thou? - "ain't no kinda man that don't have land." * Mr. D-Bag who lives in the Hamptons wants a $25M house instead of a $20M house so he can continue to bang girls half his age for another 10 years.
We all want to do better. I disagree that we can simply blame the top 0.1% for the working conditions in China. We are all to blame to different degrees. I do, however, agree that Mr. D-Bag is more to blame than I. Nobody *needs* more than one house to live in, am I right?
My 'preconceived' notions are based on the NPR article I cited elsewhere. According to that article Chinese citizens who agitate for real labor changes live in fear and do their organizing in secret.
China's problem is the same one faced by American workers. If labor organizes or if if the government somehow implements mandatory higher living standards, then the jobs are sent abroad to Vietnam or Thailand (or Cambodia or Laos or India) because the people there are willing to work for even less. If that happens, then it's starvation or the rice paddy for the locals. Or, in the US, it means working at McDonald's. This is the dark side of the story behind the efficiency of capitalism. There's usually someone worse off willing to work for less. Capitalism will ultimately find them and put them to work. And why shouldn't they be allowed to work?
Having listened to that NPR segment, I felt a sensation of horror hearing about the working conditions. My mind boggled that people would voluntarily agree to such conditions and I thought for a moment that surely it could be fixed. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Only the folks buying the labor can mandate better conditions, but they face the same problems as the Chinese. Your price goes up (or your profits come down) and people stop buying your product. Your product fizzles and you and all of your employees are out of work. The drive toward efficiency and cost cutting is the very essence of a free market. They are utterly inextricable. The only way that things can change is if the market (meaning YOU -- but not just you, everyone else too) decides that the market wants to pay more so those poor Chinese bastards can live a little better. You might think that Apple, who hires and purchases the efforts of these workers, is the bad guy with the money that is unwilling to share its money with these poor people. In a sense, that's true, but it's only part of the story. Apple gets its money from its customers. Are Apple's customers willing to pay more for their IStuff? Probably not.
NPR did an excellent spot on the foxconn factory. There are some shocking aspects to the factory conditions, but this is not slave labor. Please don't confuse slave labor with voluntary labor under horrible conditions by poor and desperate workers in China. Even liberal economists agree that these (terrible) jobs do result in improvements for the inhabitants of China. The alternative is no work -- or the rice paddy. If you are going to make assertions that people are being enslaved and tortured against their will, you have to at least back it up with some sources.
And NO I'm not a Mac fanboy. My phone is Android. My primary desktop is Ubuntu and Windows. I do not own an iPhone or iPad.
I call shenanigans. Do you really think a legitimate labor union would be permitted to exist in China? This is just a PR shill speaking the party line.
How are we ever supposed to produce skynet and the terminators if we go back to horses? Come on!
Also, there's a moral issue with conscripting innocent animals into a war role. Apparently there's no such moral issue with using machines to kill people.
The poetry is great! Your physics sucks. You neglect to address the amount of energy/mass it would take to accelerate someone to 0.99c. Hint: it's a fuckload.
I would say "absolutely, completely, utterly impossible with current technology." Come on. Just shooting a laser would take 22 years to hit it and if anyone were there they wouldn't even notice because we are just a speck in their sky too. Not to mention that if you ever got there, you're probably looking at 3G gravity at the surface. I'd go from 160 lbs to 480 lbs. How the hell are you supposed to be a conquistador when you weight 3 times as much as you are accustomed to after spending your entire life weightless? Please.
An unmanned, multi-generational mission might be feasible. Maybe.
I didn't mean for my post to be dismissive or disparaging of either Asia or Eastern Europe. The folks I've worked with from Russia, Ukraine, and India have been pretty skilled (with some exceptions). The rates of programmers from these regions are typically half (or less) of programmers in my region.
The biggest difference I can see between your cost-of-living values and mine is property. I live in Los Angeles. The house next door (about 95 square meters) was listed a few years ago for $1m USD -- that's about $10,000/m2 -- but prices have dropped a lot in the past 4 years. A variety of homes listed online in my area range from $2750/m2 to $7500/m2 depending on the neighborhood. Perhaps I should have included rural parts of the US in the regions I complained about. Software Developer wages in Arkansas are half what they are in California. Property values are much lower too.
Your other numbers seem pretty accurate. Chicken $3-4/kg, Electricity $0.145/kWh, Gas $1.1/l
Learn to bullshit about development methods like agile, waterfall, etc. Learn to estimate project costs before a project starts. Expect to spend lots of time making these estimates without getting paid for them only to be told that your estimate is too expensive and you've been beat out by some 'hacker' from Asia or Eastern Europe where the cost of living is a fraction of yours.
If you play your cards right, you will graduate from programmer of the line to 'system architect' or something like that where you tell other programmers what to do.
I don't feel like I'm begging any questions. I'm willing to believe the TSA may be unnecessary. I'm just curious what sort of plan messieurs Ron and Rand Paul have to combat terrorist attacks if they get rid of both the TSA and foreign aid. I would imagine that foreign aid is a great way to buy friends in the world. It's one thing to bitch and moan about how bad things are. It's another thing to offer realistic solutions. I would like to see it spelled out.
I agree that we catch plenty of ill will for our hefty support of Israel and that appears to be the stated reason for the September 11 attacks -- although the professed reasons for the attacks by the terrorists don't ever seem to have been properly discussed here in the United States so it's kind of hard to be sure. I often wonder why we provide Israel with so much aid. Also, does "foreign aid" as defined by a libertarian include sales of advanced weaponry to Saudi Arabia? That would no doubt piss off Saudi Arabian terrorists who oppose the rule of the Saud family.
Personally I'm inclined to think it's wishful thinking to think that eliminating foreign aid will solve our security problems. Just because you stop lending your tools to your neighbor doesn't mean he will stop beating his wife or that his dog will stop shitting on your lawn. Having read extensively about WWI (Tuchman, Simonds, etc.) it's my understanding that the stated reason for US involvement in WWI was to protect free trade on the seas and defend the rights of neutral countries. More skeptical observers say that it was in part to make sure Britain and France survived so they would repay loans and debts owed to the US and also out of fear of a dominating German Empire that stretched unbroken from the North Atlantic to Africa and Asia. In any case, foreign belligerents inevitably tread upon the rights of neutrals. It's better to defuse this problem in advance than to try and solve it after the fact.
I didn't mean to suggest a libertarian would actually support a high level of foreign aid. On the contrary, I suspect he wouldn't. If his plan is to dismantle the TSA, eliminate foreign aid, and revert to the isolationist policy of the United States before World War I, the natural concern would be that this might be folly in the face of geopolitical reality. That we had two World Wars in the span of 30 years tends to suggest it might not be a good idea. On the other hand, a retreat to isolationism might provide substantial benefit in that it eliinates a lot of geopolitical frictions, thereby obviating the need for the TSA.
Just curious. I doubt I'll ever hear any sensible discussion of the matter from any politicians, though.
I'm curious to see how he reconciles his libertarian I-don't-approve-of-patdowns with his stated desire to dismantle all foreign aid and relapse into an isolationist policy. As I understand it, the TSA is necessary due to foreign policy failures and the intrusion of these failures on domestic affairs.
So we go back 4,000 years to the Code of Hammurabi? Eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth means we all end up blind and toothless.
But let's look at what this accomplishes. A few sites went down. They'll be back up in a few days probably. A few of the folks involved in the attack will get arrested and rat out a few other guys who will get arrested or profiled. In two weeks, no one will remember it -- except the attackers, the sysadmins of the victim sites, and the guys who got arrested. Is that victory?
On the other hand, it makes them look dangerous or villainous to most law-abiding types. Anonymous would do well to consider the PR impact of such exploits. It might be gratifying, but it's impetuous and short-sighted.
I would recommend that Anonymous take the high road instead of this silly prank.
Anonymous, however badass they imagine themselves, will never approach the evil blunt instrument that law enforcement becomes in a time when the populace perceives something as a crisis. If you've ever been incarcerated, you know how bad it sucks. This mayhem caused by Anonymous may be fun and get the adrenaline pumping but the sheep of the world get scared when their sense of order is threatened. In scary times, scary politicians fill the void with scary, increasingly facist ideas. As you may have noticed, the public is perfectly willing to put up with all kinds of domestic surveillance and clandestine warfare when they feel law and order breaking down.
And let's face it. Rallying to the cause that everyone is entitled to share movies and music for free? Showing outrage because a few punks who made fortune off content they didn't create got their maserati taken away and sent to jail for it? What kind of cause is that? Who fucking cares? I would definitely agree that the disgusting bastards who invented Justin Beiber (or "work it" or "the hills" or countless other shows) need to be stopped, but if all entertainment is free then there's no such thing as a professional entertainer so we'll all have to settle for the work of amateurs. Buy indie for fuck's sake.
More importantly, "give me entertainment or give me death" is hardly a rallying cry of a revolution. Anonymous could put their power to use working on plenty of things much worse than a bunch of greedy entertainment fat cats. What's particularly strange is the sense of entitlement they seem to have to the fruits of the Big Content's labor. How about a *boycott* ? I personally don't consume much entertainment at all, so I find all this outrage and self righteous indignation and chest thumping to be a little silly. If they really wanted to help the cause of fair use and other consumer rights related to entertainment, they would raise some cold hard cash and bail out Jammie Thomas. The boys of MegaUpload already have plenty of money and can easily afford the best laywers money can buy.
How about digging up dirt on dickheads like Rick Santorum? How about revealing the corruption wherein money buys and sells our elected representatives? Anonymous has so much capacity to affect things that really matter and they're wasting it.
That *is* possibly interesting. I'd be willing to bet the MegaUpload bust will yield quite a harvest of piracy suspects. I wonder if anonymous might be trying to cover the tracks of a few pirates in their midst. ARRRR.
Still, I fail to see any triumph here. If it's even a victory at all, it's a Pyrrhic one.
Slashdot Mirror
These are not the only options.
Yes I was oversimplifying things. I was trying to emphasize the point that Cost is King in free markets and that squalid working conditions have always been the dirty secret of capitalism. I do think I was essentially correct about the lack of options though. As I stated originally, If China wages rise, the work can move to Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia or India provided those nations supply the skilled workers. There's an endless supply of cheap labor. It's my understanding that Chinese are clamoring to work in the Foxconn factory, regardless of the poor conditions. From their individual perspective, they might technically have other options, but it sounds fairly bleak from what I can tell. My statement about liberal economists comes from an article which I can no longer find but the idea is not new that poor working conditions are better than no working conditions. It's a bleak notion but the basic idea I think is that you have to walk before you run when it comes to work. Where there is extreme poverty, there is not even an inkling of the idea of fairness vis-a-vis working conditions.
The legislative approach you suggest sounds well-intentioned and perhaps reasonable in theory, but in practice there are some obstacles:
* The Chinese would likely decry our 'trade protectionism'.
* US business interests would cry bloody murder and start pouring money into free trade conservatives
* Politicians implementing this would likely lose their jobs -- or maybe not; depends on the public reaction
* The cost of all our cheap electronics (and myriad other things) would rise -- this would result in a negative public reaction
* Maybe, just maybe, this policy would result in creation of US jobs. Or maybe it would result in a drag on our economy because 'wealth' as measured in cheaply available goods and services would be harder to come by. I'm out of my depth when it comes to economic theory.
The more I think about it, the more I do think Apple is probably being fairly decent about it. My initial negative reaction to the OP was against the spin aspects of the reporting. I.e., "Apple is not so bad." I get the feeling, perhaps unjustified, that Apple is trying to cover it up and Foxconn is trying to cover it up, and China is trying to cover it up. I can't tell if the original article is well intentioned or not. The rephrasing of the title here on /. is just irritating.
There's one entity that can force the entire market to do something at the same time - it's called government.
Unfortunately, there's no international government with the power to make things right worldwide. If there is any force that works worldwide, it might be our sense of morality. The fact that this exploitation exists tends to suggest that there is no force in place that can currently fix it, which is too bad.
Voluntary charity does not really work on large scale, that's why we have welfare taxes. Same principle applies here.
I agree with you that voluntary charity does not really work like that. I'm not sure what you mean by 'same principle applies here,' but good luck trying to collect welfare taxes here in the US and send them to China. Or, alternatively, good luck telling China how to run her labor markets.
As for paying more for one's phone to rectify a social wrong, I reckon I might be able to afford $100. I'd much rather have it as beer money, but the thought of saving some guy from a dorm with 13 other guys in it -- or giving him healthcare when his hand gets crushed by the metal press -- that is something I would pay $100 for. Paying $100 to bring the labor to the US doesn't necessarily help that Chinese guy though. Instead of saving a poor Chinese guy, I'm giving a job to an American who is protected by labor laws. That's not exactly rectifying any social ills in China. It's depriving a Chinese guy of a job so some spoiled American can have the work instead. Maybe China would get the message? Or maybe they would continue to have destitute citizens willing to work under any conditions.
As for forcing Apple through legislation to honor humane principles of manufacture, I would imagine that might harm their worldwide business if you add 10-20% to the cost of each handset. I'm pretty liberal politically but I'm not sure how I feel about that.
Common decency says that some of Apple's crazy profit should be reduced to provide more humane circumstances for the people who build their products. They make more profit each quarter than Google does annually (or something to that effect). I disagree that there's an easy way to make this happen.
I agree with your points generally speaking, but would assert that redistributing 'wealth' in the form of simple money does not magically create more petroleum, more food, or more real estate so that everyone is better off all of a sudden. If we suddenly distributed purchasing power evenly to every single person on the globe by piling up all the money in the world and giving each person a 1/7,000,000,000 portion of it, I'd be willing to bet that I personally would end up with a lot less than I have now and your average resident of Southeast Asia would have a great deal more. Practically speaking, this means it would be harder to me to pay rent, to buy food or petroleum or entertainment, etc. I'm perfectly ready to admit I don't like that idea much.
On the other hand, I'd be more than happy to deprive some billionaire bastard of 100 million dollars if it eases my tax burden.
To me it seems like all part of the same issue top-to-bottom -- and a one that seems to mimic nature if I may be honest.
* extremely poor people want to work in the factory instead of the rice paddies because it's better to sleep in a 10x10 dorm room with 14 other guys than it is to sleep in a malarial grass hut with 14 other guys.
* i want to buy a house instead of renting this shitty apartment so i can have a yard, a dog, and a sense of self esteem. like the dude said in O Brother Where Art Thou? - "ain't no kinda man that don't have land."
* Mr. D-Bag who lives in the Hamptons wants a $25M house instead of a $20M house so he can continue to bang girls half his age for another 10 years.
We all want to do better. I disagree that we can simply blame the top 0.1% for the working conditions in China. We are all to blame to different degrees. I do, however, agree that Mr. D-Bag is more to blame than I. Nobody *needs* more than one house to live in, am I right?
My 'preconceived' notions are based on the NPR article I cited elsewhere. According to that article Chinese citizens who agitate for real labor changes live in fear and do their organizing in secret.
if you are desperate you have no choices.
Yep, and that sucks for you.
China's problem is the same one faced by American workers. If labor organizes or if if the government somehow implements mandatory higher living standards, then the jobs are sent abroad to Vietnam or Thailand (or Cambodia or Laos or India) because the people there are willing to work for even less. If that happens, then it's starvation or the rice paddy for the locals. Or, in the US, it means working at McDonald's. This is the dark side of the story behind the efficiency of capitalism. There's usually someone worse off willing to work for less. Capitalism will ultimately find them and put them to work. And why shouldn't they be allowed to work?
Having listened to that NPR segment, I felt a sensation of horror hearing about the working conditions. My mind boggled that people would voluntarily agree to such conditions and I thought for a moment that surely it could be fixed. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Only the folks buying the labor can mandate better conditions, but they face the same problems as the Chinese. Your price goes up (or your profits come down) and people stop buying your product. Your product fizzles and you and all of your employees are out of work. The drive toward efficiency and cost cutting is the very essence of a free market. They are utterly inextricable. The only way that things can change is if the market (meaning YOU -- but not just you, everyone else too) decides that the market wants to pay more so those poor Chinese bastards can live a little better. You might think that Apple, who hires and purchases the efforts of these workers, is the bad guy with the money that is unwilling to share its money with these poor people. In a sense, that's true, but it's only part of the story. Apple gets its money from its customers. Are Apple's customers willing to pay more for their IStuff? Probably not.
NPR did an excellent spot on the foxconn factory. There are some shocking aspects to the factory conditions, but this is not slave labor. Please don't confuse slave labor with voluntary labor under horrible conditions by poor and desperate workers in China. Even liberal economists agree that these (terrible) jobs do result in improvements for the inhabitants of China. The alternative is no work -- or the rice paddy. If you are going to make assertions that people are being enslaved and tortured against their will, you have to at least back it up with some sources.
And NO I'm not a Mac fanboy. My phone is Android. My primary desktop is Ubuntu and Windows. I do not own an iPhone or iPad.
I call shenanigans. Do you really think a legitimate labor union would be permitted to exist in China? This is just a PR shill speaking the party line.
And dolphins and seals and marines.
How are we ever supposed to produce skynet and the terminators if we go back to horses? Come on!
Also, there's a moral issue with conscripting innocent animals into a war role. Apparently there's no such moral issue with using machines to kill people.
Yeah so much for the element of surprise. Try fighting the VC with that loud beast tagging along.
Yet another reason to ditch petroleum and use electric instead. Hopefully DARPA will invest in energy storage tech.
Thank you, MrZilla. Mod parent up.
The poetry is great! Your physics sucks. You neglect to address the amount of energy/mass it would take to accelerate someone to 0.99c. Hint: it's a fuckload.
I would say "absolutely, completely, utterly impossible with current technology." Come on. Just shooting a laser would take 22 years to hit it and if anyone were there they wouldn't even notice because we are just a speck in their sky too. Not to mention that if you ever got there, you're probably looking at 3G gravity at the surface. I'd go from 160 lbs to 480 lbs. How the hell are you supposed to be a conquistador when you weight 3 times as much as you are accustomed to after spending your entire life weightless? Please.
An unmanned, multi-generational mission might be feasible. Maybe.
I didn't mean for my post to be dismissive or disparaging of either Asia or Eastern Europe. The folks I've worked with from Russia, Ukraine, and India have been pretty skilled (with some exceptions). The rates of programmers from these regions are typically half (or less) of programmers in my region.
The biggest difference I can see between your cost-of-living values and mine is property. I live in Los Angeles. The house next door (about 95 square meters) was listed a few years ago for $1m USD -- that's about $10,000/m2 -- but prices have dropped a lot in the past 4 years. A variety of homes listed online in my area range from $2750/m2 to $7500/m2 depending on the neighborhood. Perhaps I should have included rural parts of the US in the regions I complained about. Software Developer wages in Arkansas are half what they are in California. Property values are much lower too.
Your other numbers seem pretty accurate. Chicken $3-4/kg, Electricity $0.145/kWh, Gas $1.1/l
Learn to bullshit about development methods like agile, waterfall, etc. Learn to estimate project costs before a project starts. Expect to spend lots of time making these estimates without getting paid for them only to be told that your estimate is too expensive and you've been beat out by some 'hacker' from Asia or Eastern Europe where the cost of living is a fraction of yours.
If you play your cards right, you will graduate from programmer of the line to 'system architect' or something like that where you tell other programmers what to do.
See, this is where Anonymous could actually make itself useful. Maybe dig up some incriminating emails and leak them.
I don't feel like I'm begging any questions. I'm willing to believe the TSA may be unnecessary. I'm just curious what sort of plan messieurs Ron and Rand Paul have to combat terrorist attacks if they get rid of both the TSA and foreign aid. I would imagine that foreign aid is a great way to buy friends in the world. It's one thing to bitch and moan about how bad things are. It's another thing to offer realistic solutions. I would like to see it spelled out.
I agree that we catch plenty of ill will for our hefty support of Israel and that appears to be the stated reason for the September 11 attacks -- although the professed reasons for the attacks by the terrorists don't ever seem to have been properly discussed here in the United States so it's kind of hard to be sure. I often wonder why we provide Israel with so much aid. Also, does "foreign aid" as defined by a libertarian include sales of advanced weaponry to Saudi Arabia? That would no doubt piss off Saudi Arabian terrorists who oppose the rule of the Saud family.
Personally I'm inclined to think it's wishful thinking to think that eliminating foreign aid will solve our security problems. Just because you stop lending your tools to your neighbor doesn't mean he will stop beating his wife or that his dog will stop shitting on your lawn. Having read extensively about WWI (Tuchman, Simonds, etc.) it's my understanding that the stated reason for US involvement in WWI was to protect free trade on the seas and defend the rights of neutral countries. More skeptical observers say that it was in part to make sure Britain and France survived so they would repay loans and debts owed to the US and also out of fear of a dominating German Empire that stretched unbroken from the North Atlantic to Africa and Asia. In any case, foreign belligerents inevitably tread upon the rights of neutrals. It's better to defuse this problem in advance than to try and solve it after the fact.
I didn't mean to suggest a libertarian would actually support a high level of foreign aid. On the contrary, I suspect he wouldn't. If his plan is to dismantle the TSA, eliminate foreign aid, and revert to the isolationist policy of the United States before World War I, the natural concern would be that this might be folly in the face of geopolitical reality. That we had two World Wars in the span of 30 years tends to suggest it might not be a good idea. On the other hand, a retreat to isolationism might provide substantial benefit in that it eliinates a lot of geopolitical frictions, thereby obviating the need for the TSA.
Just curious. I doubt I'll ever hear any sensible discussion of the matter from any politicians, though.
I'm curious to see how he reconciles his libertarian I-don't-approve-of-patdowns with his stated desire to dismantle all foreign aid and relapse into an isolationist policy. As I understand it, the TSA is necessary due to foreign policy failures and the intrusion of these failures on domestic affairs.
So we go back 4,000 years to the Code of Hammurabi? Eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth means we all end up blind and toothless.
But let's look at what this accomplishes. A few sites went down. They'll be back up in a few days probably. A few of the folks involved in the attack will get arrested and rat out a few other guys who will get arrested or profiled. In two weeks, no one will remember it -- except the attackers, the sysadmins of the victim sites, and the guys who got arrested. Is that victory?
On the other hand, it makes them look dangerous or villainous to most law-abiding types. Anonymous would do well to consider the PR impact of such exploits. It might be gratifying, but it's impetuous and short-sighted.
I would recommend that Anonymous take the high road instead of this silly prank.
Anonymous, however badass they imagine themselves, will never approach the evil blunt instrument that law enforcement becomes in a time when the populace perceives something as a crisis. If you've ever been incarcerated, you know how bad it sucks. This mayhem caused by Anonymous may be fun and get the adrenaline pumping but the sheep of the world get scared when their sense of order is threatened. In scary times, scary politicians fill the void with scary, increasingly facist ideas. As you may have noticed, the public is perfectly willing to put up with all kinds of domestic surveillance and clandestine warfare when they feel law and order breaking down.
And let's face it. Rallying to the cause that everyone is entitled to share movies and music for free? Showing outrage because a few punks who made fortune off content they didn't create got their maserati taken away and sent to jail for it? What kind of cause is that? Who fucking cares? I would definitely agree that the disgusting bastards who invented Justin Beiber (or "work it" or "the hills" or countless other shows) need to be stopped, but if all entertainment is free then there's no such thing as a professional entertainer so we'll all have to settle for the work of amateurs. Buy indie for fuck's sake.
More importantly, "give me entertainment or give me death" is hardly a rallying cry of a revolution. Anonymous could put their power to use working on plenty of things much worse than a bunch of greedy entertainment fat cats. What's particularly strange is the sense of entitlement they seem to have to the fruits of the Big Content's labor. How about a *boycott* ? I personally don't consume much entertainment at all, so I find all this outrage and self righteous indignation and chest thumping to be a little silly. If they really wanted to help the cause of fair use and other consumer rights related to entertainment, they would raise some cold hard cash and bail out Jammie Thomas. The boys of MegaUpload already have plenty of money and can easily afford the best laywers money can buy.
How about digging up dirt on dickheads like Rick Santorum? How about revealing the corruption wherein money buys and sells our elected representatives? Anonymous has so much capacity to affect things that really matter and they're wasting it.
...and, apparently, education.
they are out there.
That *is* possibly interesting. I'd be willing to bet the MegaUpload bust will yield quite a harvest of piracy suspects. I wonder if anonymous might be trying to cover the tracks of a few pirates in their midst. ARRRR.
Still, I fail to see any triumph here. If it's even a victory at all, it's a Pyrrhic one.