Then I wasn't talking to you. Don't take offense. But you, I wrote this in exasperation, 'cause I knew some dillhole was going to make the "if you don't like it, get another job/country" line.
Regardless, I choose to reward the artist*, rather than blatantly "steal"** from them.
I wasn't aware the labels were paying the artists a large part of the iTunes income. Anyone you know getting a check from RIAA?
Artists - don't - get - money - from - labels. Artists PAY labels for the privilege of making money for the labels, unless they get more than one gold record, at which point, if they were very careful negotiators, they might actually pay off their creditor and start seeing a royalty stream. Most musicians under a label make the only money they can keep from live performances. If ClearChannel hasn't ripped them off.
The labels, represented by RIAA, are NOT the artists and are NOT their benefactors. Let's stake this meme in the heart. We aren't paying the artists, we're paying the crooks who take advantage of them with their hold on the distribution chain.
Altogether, people:
WHEN WE PAY THE LABELS, WE ARE NOT PAYING THE ARTISTS. WE ARE PAYING DOWN THE DEBT THE ARTISTS OWE THE LABELS, WHICH WOULDN'T EXIST IF THEY HADN'T RAPED THE ARTISTS IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Okay, I've something to contribute in the "I never heard of it" category for most people: The Hilsch Tube!
One upon a time I bought a stack of old Popular Science magazines from the seventies, and found out about the crazy pipe that blows out hot air on one end and cold/cool air out the other. It stuck in my head all these years, so I'm glad to pass on the silly thing to all of you!
I would normally post some sad yet angry commentary about the destruction of our collective human rights, BUT...
I anticipate the libertarian backlash comments on my comments, and now will comment on the comments that they would have posted to my nonexistent comments thusly:
I agree with your points!
We Americans should be happy that we are allowed to live in our Great Country! That we have the right to talk about how great our country is!
We obviously deserve having our hours shaved by our bosses. We just don't have the education and the drive necessary to be the bosses, or even the workers! We should weep with joy as they do their duty to the Stockholders and the God which they stand for.
If we truly deserved better pay, for that matter, agreed-on pay, then we would be given fair measure. It's the free market! If the market doesn't want to pay us, then we shouldn't go whining to our communistic union bosses and their liberal jackbooted thugs in Congress to force arbitrary laws down the throats of the only effective generators of wealth.
We don't have any contracts with our corporate bosses. Therefore, they may do whatever they like with their own money, and if that means they don't feel that we deserve their hard-earned cash, then we can go back to our communist comrades in France. Share French Fries with French mustard with the enemies of all that is Godly and American, the snail eating socialists!
Um, noooot really. It is illegal to distribute copies commercially. A gray area. People have distributed copies of audio and video tapes for years; it is not illegal.
What's been happening for the last eight years or so is this: the IP "industry" is trying to make what is "Fair Use" copying into a criminal act. They are employing fuzzy logic, marketing tactics, political lobbying, and downright lying in a successful attack against semantic sanity, defining legal activity as illegal retroactively in the minds of the confused.
For instance, you can record a TV program and mail it to your buddy in Toronto, legally. Under the new meme, that is illegal.
Movie and TV magnates want any unauthorized recording made illegal. Music moguls want ditto for audio. And (this isn't widely discussed) the book publishing industry has been waging a decade-long campaign to shut down public libraries!
This is a full-scale assault against rights we've always had.
Remember it isn't the act of obtaining an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work that is copyright infringement, it is the act of making such copies available to other people in the first place
Um, how can I say this: No. What you say is the exact opposite of what the judge found. The judge said that simply making the file available DOES NOT constitute copyright infringement. Simply asserting the opposite doesn't work. He found that it was not. Case over.
Now, the solution that right-thinkers in Canada have come up with is this: we'll change the law to make leaving a copy machine in a library a copyright infringement. Madness.
It's effectively voluntary, since you can fib if you like. If a user finds it necessary to be contacted when the site has problems, then the user may leave accurate info; if they don't find it so, then they accept the consequences.
1. The internet was not designed to be a telephone system or a post office. Anonymity and openness are what made it what it is today. Want a secure communications system? Build one. IP was not designed for businesses and their needs. Closed systems existed before busineses stampeded on to the internet. If they want registered users and trusted boxes, then they should build an alternative network that does not connect to the internet itself. Leave what is, alone.
2. Spoofing whois is essential for people who wish to use the internet to get messages across that powerful people want suppressed. Or at the very least, powerful people will retaliate.
For instance:
mediawhoresonline.com -- the people behind the Horse (out to pasture at the moment) were afraid of retaliation in their personal and private lives. They have some justification for this, for Bush and his people have grown famous for their ruthless vengeance against anyone who crosses them - Valerie Plame, Wilson, Richard Clark, the owners of that restaurant in Texas tht called the cops on the Bush Girls (business shut down for "code violations"), the Funeralgate affair (nailed the whistleblower AND her department). And innumerable others whom we don't hear about because, well, reporters don't want to cross the Bush family either.
Buzzflash.com also hides their identies for the same reason, I think.
Now, on to the cultbusters. During the late '90's, a lot of ex-Scientologists went online, mainly on the Usenet on alt.religion.scientology, but also branched out into the web as well. They had to hide their identities: the utter certainty of the destruction of their lives if they ever were outed was paramount. The viciousness of the attacking Sea Org (secret agents oh my) is legendary, and you can check it out at xenu.net, as well as any number of other sites.
Just don't use the WayBack machine: they purged the history of the internet of all the critical sites with any teeth at the behest of the Hubbardites.
Now there are others: the Moonies, the nutballs in Japan, any number of small, evil little cults all over the U.S. If you want to expose them, anonymity is key. And anonymity was long held constitutional in the U.S. under the 1st amendment as necessary to demand redress of wrongs without fear of retaliation.
I fake my whois info, and always will.
3. Registering users will not stop the spam. Oh please. People who send billions of messages and make millions of dollars aren't scared of fines or jail time. They're rich; they won't see real jail. This registration crackdown is happening because the control freaks in law enforcement can't stand seeing anonymous communications. It's like nails on chalkboard to them. I think Pratchett said it best when he wrote that cops, if they had their way, would make everyone sit at home, at their tables, with their hands on top of the table where the cops can see them.
It's not like we haven't seen this coming. The jail doors are clanging shut, and they won't let us bang on any pipes in Morse code without the ability to listen in any time they'd like.
Nah, being "competitive", all else being equal, means lowering wages and salaries.
Not every job requires calculus. Actually, damned few do. Geeks forget this, since math is near and dear to their hearts.
Businesses aren't moving call centers and manufacturing centers offshore to find calculus geniuses. They're looking for near-free labor in order to boost profits, get fat bonuses, and retire in Antigua.
Do you honestly think India, or Malasia, or Russia, will suddenly take in millions of ex-pats? Other nations aren't as happy with the idea of millionaires moving in as, say, Chicago is.
People with gobs of money move into an area. Bingo: property values shoots far past any of the locals' ability to buy. People start moving out of the neighborhood, instablity in prices becomes an inflationary spiral...
No, bad idea to flood a country with wealthy outsiders. Unless you are in a position to become wealthy yourself off of the process. Which explains why 2% of the population become wealthy and happy and everyone else below gets wrecked.
"In reality, the "savings" are passed on the the consumer. In many cases, the project would not be feasible if not for the low cost labor, because no one, or not enough, could afford to buy the end product. Take a pair of Nike's, make them in the US, and instead of $100 a pair, consumers might have to pay $200. Not only does Nike sell more shoes, but the end consumer gets what they want at half the price. "
Half of what price? It's like those signs in the windows of BS stores that scream "EVERYTHING 50% OFF!!". Meaningless.
I disagree. I've been buying shoes for thirty years, and the price are going up, UP. Even adjusting for inflation.
I doubt much that a 10 dollar an hour worker in the U.S. would take 20 hours to make a shoe, to yield that $200 pair of shoes. It'd probably take two hours, if he did it all by himself. A labor cost of $20, in the horrifically overpaid U.S. labor department. The hundred dollar pair of shoes would have a distribution cost/retail markup of $80.
Made in Vietnam, the labor cost would be about $3/day per worker, or about.30/hour, let's say. Let's say the worker also takes two hours to make a shoe. That's a $0.60 labor cost.
So the difference between the U.S. and Vietnamese labor per shoe in the hand-made shoe market would be $19.40.
Because of that 19.40, if the shoe was made in Arkansas, the retail cost of the shoes would double from $100 to $200?
You see how silly this is?
1. Consumer prices have risen, not dropped. 2. Labor cost differences are insignificant in determining the price of the shoes. It's almost all distribution, marketing, and retail markup. 3. The companies have NOT kept the prices down by offshoring labor. They have instead increased profits. The "savings" for the consumer never happened. It was a lie. 4. The U.S. has lost its maufacturing base because of this lie. We don't even build our own defense electronics anymore, for the most part. 5. The lower middle class is disappearing. No real paying jobs for those not at the top of the academic chain anymore. 6. Once the housing bubble bursts, the lowest paid workers won't even dream of buying a home. Rents will also explode, so even more income will drain from those not working at real jobs. 7. If one can't get a decent job, who will buy all these products that are INCREASING or standing pat in price: meat, poultry, fruit, vegetables, homes, clothes, milk, gasoline -- all the staples. Ans: wealthy people and upper middle class people won't care, but everyone else will suffer.
And it boils down to this:
The offshoring of labor did not keep prices down. Prices stayed where they were, or increased. PROFITS increased spectularly. We've lost manufacturing capability, a national security nightmare. We're losing the ability to provide a living for anyone not on the top of the employment pyramid.
And we did it because businesses wanted to make a LOT MORE money than before. We've traded our country's economy in for a pyramid scheme for corporate stockholders and the men who run the executive suites.
The business of America's government is not business. We should have learned this lesson in the robber baron years of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but apparently ideological religion dies hard, especially when trillions of dollars in profits are to be made. We'll have to become economic secularists again -- the hard way. By learning what is and is not real, by watching the next decade's slow slide into an unstable world economy.
And why, exactly, is hiring people in other countries immoral?
Nicely misstated.
The question is: Why is firing people in your own nation, and hiring micropaid labor in other countries, merely to make more money or have your corporation survive, wrong?
Answer is: "patriotism".
Questioning the invasion of Iraq, or questioning the ethos of Bush seems to be unpatriotic to the point where it's nearly impossible to hold a sane discussion without getting yanked off the air or fired from your job.
But somehow business, represented by the corporation, doesn't seem to be bound by any sense of loyalty to one's people or one's country. And this is considered right and proper. Taxes? Move "offices" to offshore havens. Fire your workers and hire foreign labor, quickly -- before Kerry makes it into office. Jack oil prices on speculation, and drive the economy into hell -- all good there, nothing to be morally concerned with.
"Morality" indeed is not a factor with a corporation. They're beyond morality, into some realm where only quarterly profits for the stockholders and huge salaries for the socially connected top executives matter.
It's frightening, but not surprising at this late date, that people can't even perceive that what the corporations are doing, draining their own workers lives for profit, is morally wrong.
If impoverishing your nation's workforce isn't wrong, then what the hell IS wrong? What isn't justifiable?
Are there any brakes on this ideology at all?
You are American/Canadian/Indian/whatever. Your first allegiance is to your country. Your business is a wisp of wind.
Corporations are not more important than nations. And they are subject to the laws of the nation in which they are LICENSED to exist. They have no "right" to profit, or even to exist. Remember that corporations are fake people, a fiction granted by the representatives of the nation's people. They are not above laws, above morality, above nationalism, above patriotism. They are a pack of greedy schucks trying to make even more money than they made last quarter.
People can try to make a profit, but that is not an absolute right. And the right to make a profit seems to be the one and only right that corporatists recognize. It's a new ideology, one that supplants the Rights of Man that we used to understand and believe in.
The Right of Corporate Profit? That's all that matters?
Short answer: killing your own country to make a profit is immoral. It used to be called treason.
Based on practical observation, I would say that not a lot of legitimate stories were rejected. This, however, is crowding the usual anti-Microsoft and trumped up 'Your Rights On Line' drivel off the main page.
I've mentioned it, over and over on various fora since 9/11: anti-terrorist laws were not written to prosecute terrorists.
All over the world, these travesties are now in place. For "evil to succeed", now all that is required is to redefine "terrorism". And we're well on the way for that: now reverse engineering is "terrorism". A marijuana smoker is a terrorist. Someone who criticizes the American government, like Bill Maher, can be advised to "watch what he says". Eventually EVERY infraction can be redefined as terrorism. The ground's the limit.
For the life of me, I cannot see the difference between the Red Nightmare so feared for the last century by the Right, and what the Right is building for us now. Besides a lot of wealthy people and the option to own your own property, what is the real difference between the old Soviet empire and the Brave New World being built by our new jailors?
What we're witnessing is a anti-civil rights movement across the world. The various governments and police/military/spy boys are in the middle of building a new system of law only tangentally related to English common law and the American constitution. They are creating a new world of harsh law unbounded by the rights of man. Altho as many have noticed, corporations aren't men, and aren't bound by any of these new paradigms.
I don't have to even bother finding examples anymore. It's happening every day. Faster and faster, impossible to monitor because it's happening too fast for a single human mind to keep track of it all.
The "terrorism" war is a crock. They aren't using these spiffy new un-laws to capture bombers and the other usual stereotypes. They're using them against US.
The news organizations ran his shout over a microphone designed to screen out crowd noise.
When THE CROWD NOISE WAS PROPERLY MIXED BACK INTO THE TRACK, Dean could barely be heard. He was shouting to be heard over the screams of the crowd.
ABC's Diane Sawyer, I recall, was the only reporter to actually go back, review the tape, and issue an apology. No one else will, though: the Heathers have spoken.
Gore Lied All the Time, Bush is Trustworthy and Personable, Saddam Was going to Attack Us, and Dean Screamed and Was Unstable.
These utter freaking lies are now part of the American fabric of reality, and no one will contradict them because it would mean that reporters would have to tell their "customers" that sometimes the customers are not always right.
Dean never "screamed". He was shouting into the wall of noise around him that his mike wasn't picking up, because it was designed to screen out all sound other than his.
The story had legs because the Heathers had already decided that it fit their narrative, and they won't back down now. They'd look like manipulative bastards, which would be the truth.
God, how I hate it when these lies become "truth".
"That first statement just shines of intelligence."
Well, I'll help out here. You might be too young to remember a '70's era joke, so:
"Jane, you ignorant slut" was the first line out of... um, back up a sec, more background:
The 60 Minutes show in the '70's had a brief end-of-every-show segment called "Point:Counterpoint". In it, a conservative pundit and a liberal pundit each had a minute to speak on a point. One side spoke, and then the other side counterpointed.
Now, on Saturday Night Live, a parody was run every week as well. In it, Dan Akroyd was the conservative reactionary and Jane Curtin the liberal representative. Every week, Jane went first. Then, the Angry Conservative would respond.
The first line out of his thin-lipped mask of anger was: "Jane, you ignorant slut." Then he went on to further insult her.
Back in the day, this was parody. Now, it's the basis of Fox News/MS-NBC news "coverage" every day, NOT meant as a joke, but I digress.
The poster was being self-deprecating, not insulting. Hope I helped.
You've described the mass driver, the standard asteroid/ore moving workhorse of the O'Neill/L5 space colonization effort.
It works like this: picture a bucket on a recirculating rail. The rail is pretty long, hundreds of feet at least. The bucket meglevs along the rail.
There would be at least three railguns on the asteroid, pointing away from the asteroid in opposing directions. Actual orientation is not that important, what is important is that the rails point away.
In operation, the "bucket" stops at a point along the rail on the surface of the asteroid. Some mechanism plonks a pound or so of rock into the bucket. The bucket locks the material down.
The bucket now electromagnetically moves away to the railgun run. On reaching it, it accelerates. At an approprate time, it releases the payload. The bucket slows down, and returns to the loading point.
The process changes the the path of both the payload (reaction mass) and to the asteroid itself. Repeat this process millions of times, and you alter the asteroid's orbit.
The beauty part of a mass driver is that it has no moving parts in contact. You just need something to shovel in the reaction mass, and electricity to run the linear accelerators.
Asteroids can be moved in this manner. Rockets won't hack it, nor ion engines, nor nuclear explosions. Lack of control, or raw power.
We could shape the orbits of these Earth grazers to bring them a little closer to home so that we can exploit them for raw materials to build habitats, build ships, build elevators.
Space elevator projects require a large mass at the opposite end of the tether from the surface to anchor the cable. Asteroids have been suggested for the necessary mass. Mass drivers are the way to go if you want to get that mass.
That's 73% average approval. It breaks down into widespread disapproval in most regions, because the Kurds widely approved the invasion and altered the overall average.
The majority of NON-Kurds disapprove. That would be most of the country, since Kurds are a minority.
Editorial comment: the attitudes of most Iraqs is this: Thanks for getting rid of Saddam. Now get out. Oh, you're not getting out? An 18,000 man embassy? Military bases in perpetuity? Our industries were given away to American corporations? Your oil companies own all rights to manage our major resource for all time? You're installing a convicted thief as our shadow president? ALLLL RIGHTY THEN, PREPARE FOR AN ASS-KICKING... GET. OUT. NOW.
Well, the obvious legislative solution to nuking the circuitry would be to invalidate fried RFID euros as cash.
Um. As I understand it, there are two types of RFID tags: powered and passive.
The euros would have passive tags, since battery powered cash would be silly. I have been told it is pretty hard to RF-fry a passive circuit. It would take a LOT of power, and I don't even know if it would work. Isn't the tag basically a shaped antenna that retransmits an absorbed external signal, modulating said signal with an ID? How would you burn it out? Melt it?
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Then I wasn't talking to you. Don't take offense. But you, I wrote this in exasperation, 'cause I knew some dillhole was going to make the "if you don't like it, get another job/country" line.
And I was right; they did.
Regardless, I choose to reward the artist*, rather than blatantly "steal"** from them.
I wasn't aware the labels were paying the artists a large part of the iTunes income. Anyone you know getting a check from RIAA?
Artists - don't - get - money - from - labels. Artists PAY labels for the privilege of making money for the labels, unless they get more than one gold record, at which point, if they were very careful negotiators, they might actually pay off their creditor and start seeing a royalty stream. Most musicians under a label make the only money they can keep from live performances. If ClearChannel hasn't ripped them off.
The labels, represented by RIAA, are NOT the artists and are NOT their benefactors. Let's stake this meme in the heart. We aren't paying the artists, we're paying the crooks who take advantage of them with their hold on the distribution chain.
Altogether, people:
WHEN WE PAY THE LABELS, WE ARE NOT PAYING THE ARTISTS. WE ARE PAYING DOWN THE DEBT THE ARTISTS OWE THE LABELS, WHICH WOULDN'T EXIST IF THEY HADN'T RAPED THE ARTISTS IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Okay, I've something to contribute in the "I never heard of it" category for most people: The Hilsch Tube!
One upon a time I bought a stack of old Popular Science magazines from the seventies, and found out about the crazy pipe that blows out hot air on one end and cold/cool air out the other. It stuck in my head all these years, so I'm glad to pass on the silly thing to all of you!
I would normally post some sad yet angry commentary about the destruction of our collective human rights, BUT...
I anticipate the libertarian backlash comments on my comments, and now will comment on the comments that they would have posted to my nonexistent comments thusly:
I agree with your points!
We Americans should be happy that we are allowed to live in our Great Country! That we have the right to talk about how great our country is!
We obviously deserve having our hours shaved by our bosses. We just don't have the education and the drive necessary to be the bosses, or even the workers! We should weep with joy as they do their duty to the Stockholders and the God which they stand for.
If we truly deserved better pay, for that matter, agreed-on pay, then we would be given fair measure. It's the free market! If the market doesn't want to pay us, then we shouldn't go whining to our communistic union bosses and their liberal jackbooted thugs in Congress to force arbitrary laws down the throats of the only effective generators of wealth.
We don't have any contracts with our corporate bosses. Therefore, they may do whatever they like with their own money, and if that means they don't feel that we deserve their hard-earned cash, then we can go back to our communist comrades in France. Share French Fries with French mustard with the enemies of all that is Godly and American, the snail eating socialists!
And it's all Clinton's fault!
Um, noooot really. It is illegal to distribute copies commercially. A gray area. People have distributed copies of audio and video tapes for years; it is not illegal.
What's been happening for the last eight years or so is this: the IP "industry" is trying to make what is "Fair Use" copying into a criminal act. They are employing fuzzy logic, marketing tactics, political lobbying, and downright lying in a successful attack against semantic sanity, defining legal activity as illegal retroactively in the minds of the confused.
For instance, you can record a TV program and mail it to your buddy in Toronto, legally. Under the new meme, that is illegal.
Movie and TV magnates want any unauthorized recording made illegal. Music moguls want ditto for audio. And (this isn't widely discussed) the book publishing industry has been waging a decade-long campaign to shut down public libraries!
This is a full-scale assault against rights we've always had.
Nope. It applies to uploaders. Downloading is already legal.
Remember it isn't the act of obtaining an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work that is copyright infringement, it is the act of making such copies available to other people in the first place
Um, how can I say this: No. What you say is the exact opposite of what the judge found. The judge said that simply making the file available DOES NOT constitute copyright infringement. Simply asserting the opposite doesn't work. He found that it was not. Case over.
Now, the solution that right-thinkers in Canada have come up with is this: we'll change the law to make leaving a copy machine in a library a copyright infringement. Madness.
It's effectively voluntary, since you can fib if you like. If a user finds it necessary to be contacted when the site has problems, then the user may leave accurate info; if they don't find it so, then they accept the consequences.
"Why can't we run the internet in the same way?"
Because "we" don't "run" the Internet. The Internet is a protocol, not a television network.
1. The internet was not designed to be a telephone system or a post office. Anonymity and openness are what made it what it is today. Want a secure communications system? Build one. IP was not designed for businesses and their needs. Closed systems existed before busineses stampeded on to the internet. If they want registered users and trusted boxes, then they should build an alternative network that does not connect to the internet itself. Leave what is, alone.
2. Spoofing whois is essential for people who wish to use the internet to get messages across that powerful people want suppressed. Or at the very least, powerful people will retaliate.
For instance:
mediawhoresonline.com -- the people behind the Horse (out to pasture at the moment) were afraid of retaliation in their personal and private lives. They have some justification for this, for Bush and his people have grown famous for their ruthless vengeance against anyone who crosses them - Valerie Plame, Wilson, Richard Clark, the owners of that restaurant in Texas tht called the cops on the Bush Girls (business shut down for "code violations"), the Funeralgate affair (nailed the whistleblower AND her department). And innumerable others whom we don't hear about because, well, reporters don't want to cross the Bush family either.
Buzzflash.com also hides their identies for the same reason, I think.
Now, on to the cultbusters. During the late '90's, a lot of ex-Scientologists went online, mainly on the Usenet on alt.religion.scientology, but also branched out into the web as well. They had to hide their identities: the utter certainty of the destruction of their lives if they ever were outed was paramount. The viciousness of the attacking Sea Org (secret agents oh my) is legendary, and you can check it out at xenu.net, as well as any number of other sites.
Just don't use the WayBack machine: they purged the history of the internet of all the critical sites with any teeth at the behest of the Hubbardites.
Now there are others: the Moonies, the nutballs in Japan, any number of small, evil little cults all over the U.S. If you want to expose them, anonymity is key. And anonymity was long held constitutional in the U.S. under the 1st amendment as necessary to demand redress of wrongs without fear of retaliation.
I fake my whois info, and always will.
3. Registering users will not stop the spam. Oh please. People who send billions of messages and make millions of dollars aren't scared of fines or jail time. They're rich; they won't see real jail. This registration crackdown is happening because the control freaks in law enforcement can't stand seeing anonymous communications. It's like nails on chalkboard to them. I think Pratchett said it best when he wrote that cops, if they had their way, would make everyone sit at home, at their tables, with their hands on top of the table where the cops can see them.
It's not like we haven't seen this coming. The jail doors are clanging shut, and they won't let us bang on any pipes in Morse code without the ability to listen in any time they'd like.
Nah, being "competitive", all else being equal, means lowering wages and salaries.
Not every job requires calculus. Actually, damned few do. Geeks forget this, since math is near and dear to their hearts.
Businesses aren't moving call centers and manufacturing centers offshore to find calculus geniuses. They're looking for near-free labor in order to boost profits, get fat bonuses, and retire in Antigua.
Do you honestly think India, or Malasia, or Russia, will suddenly take in millions of ex-pats? Other nations aren't as happy with the idea of millionaires moving in as, say, Chicago is.
People with gobs of money move into an area. Bingo: property values shoots far past any of the locals' ability to buy. People start moving out of the neighborhood, instablity in prices becomes an inflationary spiral...
No, bad idea to flood a country with wealthy outsiders. Unless you are in a position to become wealthy yourself off of the process. Which explains why 2% of the population become wealthy and happy and everyone else below gets wrecked.
"In reality, the "savings" are passed on the the consumer. In many cases, the project would not be feasible if not for the low cost labor, because no one, or not enough, could afford to buy the end product. Take a pair of Nike's, make them in the US, and instead of $100 a pair, consumers might have to pay $200. Not only does Nike sell more shoes, but the end consumer gets what they want at half the price. "
.30/hour, let's say. Let's say the worker also takes two hours to make a shoe. That's a $0.60 labor cost.
Half of what price? It's like those signs in the windows of BS stores that scream "EVERYTHING 50% OFF!!". Meaningless.
I disagree. I've been buying shoes for thirty years, and the price are going up, UP. Even adjusting for inflation.
I doubt much that a 10 dollar an hour worker in the U.S. would take 20 hours to make a shoe, to yield that $200 pair of shoes. It'd probably take two hours, if he did it all by himself. A labor cost of $20, in the horrifically overpaid U.S. labor department. The hundred dollar pair of shoes would have a distribution cost/retail markup of $80.
Made in Vietnam, the labor cost would be about $3/day per worker, or about
So the difference between the U.S. and Vietnamese labor per shoe in the hand-made shoe market would be $19.40.
Because of that 19.40, if the shoe was made in Arkansas, the retail cost of the shoes would double from $100 to $200?
You see how silly this is?
1. Consumer prices have risen, not dropped.
2. Labor cost differences are insignificant in determining the price of the shoes. It's almost all distribution, marketing, and retail markup.
3. The companies have NOT kept the prices down by offshoring labor. They have instead increased profits. The "savings" for the consumer never happened. It was a lie.
4. The U.S. has lost its maufacturing base because of this lie. We don't even build our own defense electronics anymore, for the most part.
5. The lower middle class is disappearing. No real paying jobs for those not at the top of the academic chain anymore.
6. Once the housing bubble bursts, the lowest paid workers won't even dream of buying a home. Rents will also explode, so even more income will drain from those not working at real jobs.
7. If one can't get a decent job, who will buy all these products that are INCREASING or standing pat in price: meat, poultry, fruit, vegetables, homes, clothes, milk, gasoline -- all the staples. Ans: wealthy people and upper middle class people won't care, but everyone else will suffer.
And it boils down to this:
The offshoring of labor did not keep prices down. Prices stayed where they were, or increased. PROFITS increased spectularly. We've lost manufacturing capability, a national security nightmare. We're losing the ability to provide a living for anyone not on the top of the employment pyramid.
And we did it because businesses wanted to make a LOT MORE money than before. We've traded our country's economy in for a pyramid scheme for corporate stockholders and the men who run the executive suites.
The business of America's government is not business. We should have learned this lesson in the robber baron years of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but apparently ideological religion dies hard, especially when trillions of dollars in profits are to be made. We'll have to become economic secularists again -- the hard way. By learning what is and is not real, by watching the next decade's slow slide into an unstable world economy.
And why, exactly, is hiring people in other countries immoral?
Nicely misstated.
The question is: Why is firing people in your own nation, and hiring micropaid labor in other countries, merely to make more money or have your corporation survive, wrong?
Answer is: "patriotism".
Questioning the invasion of Iraq, or questioning the ethos of Bush seems to be unpatriotic to the point where it's nearly impossible to hold a sane discussion without getting yanked off the air or fired from your job.
But somehow business, represented by the corporation, doesn't seem to be bound by any sense of loyalty to one's people or one's country. And this is considered right and proper. Taxes? Move "offices" to offshore havens. Fire your workers and hire foreign labor, quickly -- before Kerry makes it into office. Jack oil prices on speculation, and drive the economy into hell -- all good there, nothing to be morally concerned with.
"Morality" indeed is not a factor with a corporation. They're beyond morality, into some realm where only quarterly profits for the stockholders and huge salaries for the socially connected top executives matter.
It's frightening, but not surprising at this late date, that people can't even perceive that what the corporations are doing, draining their own workers lives for profit, is morally wrong.
If impoverishing your nation's workforce isn't wrong, then what the hell IS wrong? What isn't justifiable?
Are there any brakes on this ideology at all?
You are American/Canadian/Indian/whatever. Your first allegiance is to your country. Your business is a wisp of wind.
Corporations are not more important than nations. And they are subject to the laws of the nation in which they are LICENSED to exist. They have no "right" to profit, or even to exist. Remember that corporations are fake people, a fiction granted by the representatives of the nation's people. They are not above laws, above morality, above nationalism, above patriotism. They are a pack of greedy schucks trying to make even more money than they made last quarter.
People can try to make a profit, but that is not an absolute right. And the right to make a profit seems to be the one and only right that corporatists recognize. It's a new ideology, one that supplants the Rights of Man that we used to understand and believe in.
The Right of Corporate Profit? That's all that matters?
Short answer: killing your own country to make a profit is immoral. It used to be called treason.
Based on practical observation, I would say that not a lot of legitimate stories were rejected. This, however, is crowding the usual anti-Microsoft and trumped up 'Your Rights On Line' drivel off the main page.
Ashcroft? Izzat you?
I've mentioned it, over and over on various fora since 9/11: anti-terrorist laws were not written to prosecute terrorists.
All over the world, these travesties are now in place. For "evil to succeed", now all that is required is to redefine "terrorism". And we're well on the way for that: now reverse engineering is "terrorism". A marijuana smoker is a terrorist. Someone who criticizes the American government, like Bill Maher, can be advised to "watch what he says". Eventually EVERY infraction can be redefined as terrorism. The ground's the limit.
For the life of me, I cannot see the difference between the Red Nightmare so feared for the last century by the Right, and what the Right is building for us now. Besides a lot of wealthy people and the option to own your own property, what is the real difference between the old Soviet empire and the Brave New World being built by our new jailors?
What we're witnessing is a anti-civil rights movement across the world. The various governments and police/military/spy boys are in the middle of building a new system of law only tangentally related to English common law and the American constitution. They are creating a new world of harsh law unbounded by the rights of man. Altho as many have noticed, corporations aren't men, and aren't bound by any of these new paradigms.
I don't have to even bother finding examples anymore. It's happening every day. Faster and faster, impossible to monitor because it's happening too fast for a single human mind to keep track of it all.
The "terrorism" war is a crock. They aren't using these spiffy new un-laws to capture bombers and the other usual stereotypes. They're using them against US.
Gore never said that. Another Load of Crap(tm) unkillable lie.
Because Kerry isn't a dick that killed thousands of people and giggled about it.
Good point!
No, sorry, it's not. Copyright infringment is not a crime: it is a civil infraction, not dealt with by the criminal courts.
Theft, and the "piracy" committed this asinine law, is a criminal matter. This is a criminalization of something that WAS NOT a crime before.
That "Deanism" never freaking happened.
The news organizations ran his shout over a microphone designed to screen out crowd noise.
When THE CROWD NOISE WAS PROPERLY MIXED BACK INTO THE TRACK, Dean could barely be heard. He was shouting to be heard over the screams of the crowd.
ABC's Diane Sawyer, I recall, was the only reporter to actually go back, review the tape, and issue an apology. No one else will, though: the Heathers have spoken.
Gore Lied All the Time, Bush is Trustworthy and Personable, Saddam Was going to Attack Us, and Dean Screamed and Was Unstable.
These utter freaking lies are now part of the American fabric of reality, and no one will contradict them because it would mean that reporters would have to tell their "customers" that sometimes the customers are not always right.
Dean never "screamed". He was shouting into the wall of noise around him that his mike wasn't picking up, because it was designed to screen out all sound other than his.
The story had legs because the Heathers had already decided that it fit their narrative, and they won't back down now. They'd look like manipulative bastards, which would be the truth.
God, how I hate it when these lies become "truth".
"That first statement just shines of intelligence."
Well, I'll help out here. You might be too young to remember a '70's era joke, so:
"Jane, you ignorant slut" was the first line out of... um, back up a sec, more background:
The 60 Minutes show in the '70's had a brief end-of-every-show segment called "Point:Counterpoint". In it, a conservative pundit and a liberal pundit each had a minute to speak on a point. One side spoke, and then the other side counterpointed.
Now, on Saturday Night Live, a parody was run every week as well. In it, Dan Akroyd was the conservative reactionary and Jane Curtin the liberal representative. Every week, Jane went first. Then, the Angry Conservative would respond.
The first line out of his thin-lipped mask of anger was: "Jane, you ignorant slut." Then he went on to further insult her.
Back in the day, this was parody. Now, it's the basis of Fox News/MS-NBC news "coverage" every day, NOT meant as a joke, but I digress.
The poster was being self-deprecating, not insulting. Hope I helped.
You've described the mass driver, the standard asteroid/ore moving workhorse of the O'Neill/L5 space colonization effort.
It works like this: picture a bucket on a recirculating rail. The rail is pretty long, hundreds of feet at least. The bucket meglevs along the rail.
There would be at least three railguns on the asteroid, pointing away from the asteroid in opposing directions. Actual orientation is not that important, what is important is that the rails point away.
In operation, the "bucket" stops at a point along the rail on the surface of the asteroid. Some mechanism plonks a pound or so of rock into the bucket. The bucket locks the material down.
The bucket now electromagnetically moves away to the railgun run. On reaching it, it accelerates. At an approprate time, it releases the payload. The bucket slows down, and returns to the loading point.
The process changes the the path of both the payload (reaction mass) and to the asteroid itself. Repeat this process millions of times, and you alter the asteroid's orbit.
The beauty part of a mass driver is that it has no moving parts in contact. You just need something to shovel in the reaction mass, and electricity to run the linear accelerators.
Asteroids can be moved in this manner. Rockets won't hack it, nor ion engines, nor nuclear explosions. Lack of control, or raw power.
We could shape the orbits of these Earth grazers to bring them a little closer to home so that we can exploit them for raw materials to build habitats, build ships, build elevators.
Space elevator projects require a large mass at the opposite end of the tether from the surface to anchor the cable. Asteroids have been suggested for the necessary mass. Mass drivers are the way to go if you want to get that mass.
Why a backpack necessarily? How about a modified cellphone? Laptop? Umbrella? Briefcase? Coat? Hell, boots?
Hm. Adhoc. Meshed. Encrypted. Unhooked from the internet. sounds like one of my old ideas come back to life.
Thing is, you have to break down the poll.
That's 73% average approval. It breaks down into widespread disapproval in most regions, because the Kurds widely approved the invasion and altered the overall average.
The majority of NON-Kurds disapprove. That would be most of the country, since Kurds are a minority.
Editorial comment: the attitudes of most Iraqs is this: Thanks for getting rid of Saddam. Now get out. Oh, you're not getting out? An 18,000 man embassy? Military bases in perpetuity? Our industries were given away to American corporations? Your oil companies own all rights to manage our major resource for all time? You're installing a convicted thief as our shadow president? ALLLL RIGHTY THEN, PREPARE FOR AN ASS-KICKING... GET. OUT. NOW.
Well, the obvious legislative solution to nuking the circuitry would be to invalidate fried RFID euros as cash.
Um. As I understand it, there are two types of RFID tags: powered and passive.
The euros would have passive tags, since battery powered cash would be silly. I have been told it is pretty hard to RF-fry a passive circuit. It would take a LOT of power, and I don't even know if it would work. Isn't the tag basically a shaped antenna that retransmits an absorbed external signal, modulating said signal with an ID? How would you burn it out? Melt it?
Sadly, not an EE or radio guy. Any ideas?