"the key is to not adjust your lifestyle above where it needs to be and"
yes, we should, all live in mud huts, eat beetles and walk to work in dirty rags, because that's allow really need, right?
So spend more than you earn so you don't have to life in a mud hut, is that it? Max out the credit cards, take another mortgage to afford the holiday you deserve, after all you work hard, you're earning a decent wage, you should be able to afford a new car every few years, right?
And when you get old and sick, start whining at the government that it wasn't your fault, you *deserved* to spend all that money, now you *deserve* a pension and medical care over and above what you can afford, because you paid all those taxes right?
Yeah. So. Fuck You. If you can't live within your means then you're the fucking problem.
We're about to hit the baby boomers doing exactly this (well, technically it started two years ago when the people born in 1945 hit 65, but that's only the leading edge of the bell curve). A huge bulge of population has completely failed to save enough money to pay for their retirement, and are going to ask you to pay more taxes to keep them afloat in their old age. And possibly alive in their old age, as there are a lot of very expensive treatments for age-related illnesses that are available now. They feel entitled because they worked hard their whole lives, and paid taxes their whole lives, and they've never been refused anything they want because they're such a big block of voters. This is going to be a brutal shock to either them, or the rest of us, because there isn't enough money to keep everyone happy here. Crunch time will be when your Mum asks you to pay for the surgery she needs to keep walking, and you realise that you'll have to sell your house to cover it. Not a pleasant choice, or a pleasant conversation to have with her.
do you want to live in a desert, or near the beach?
If they'd stop fly-in-fly-out and force the miners to live locally we might have a chance, but that would mean revoking the Fringe Benefits Tax, and convincing pollies to rescind a tax is really hard
What you consider to be immoral is not necessarily illegal.
And that's a really really good thing.
We don't all have the same set of morals, but we do all have to have the same set of laws. Forcing other people to live by your morals is as bad as other people forcing you to live by theirs.
I like my laws as minimal and amoral as possible. As few laws as possible, as cleanly and clearly enunciated as possible, and parliaments focused on making better law not more law.
That's one possible business model. Not the only one. Off the top of my head in 5 minutes:
- Move to a free purchase but paid-for additional features model. That works for a lot of game software.
- Move to a free purchase but paid support model like Red Hat and other open-source software.
- Add a server component that requires a licence. Make the server component optional but useful so pirate users will eventually buy the licence. This works for multiplayer games.
- Use a voluntary pricing model, it works for Humble Bundle
- The ad-supported route works for a lot of free software
- Sell your soon-to-be-pirated software to a large company as an advertisement medium in its own right
All of these work better than whining on/. that life is somehow unfair and pirates are ruining the software industry because the world doesn't work the way it "should".
If your customers aren't buying your products, please stop whining about customer behaviour and change your products to suit the market.
If your business model doesn't make money in the market you've chosen, please stop whining about the market and change your business model.
So what Rovio is supporting is market conditions that favour their particular product, which is very different from market conditions that ensure a robust and healthy competitive environment, or that ensure innovation and development.
The market is fixed. Your business model and product is flexible (or should be). So change your product so it suits the market conditions.
Rovio understood that the market they chose to operate in has a large amount of piracy. Instead of trying to change the market to suit their products, they chose the eminently more profitable option of working out how they could make piracy work for them. As you've pointed out, one of the ways they did this was by launching merch to go with their game that allowed them to take advantage of the fanbase generated by pirate players. As another poster pointed out, the game they created is not unique and the Castle version doesn't have the merch potential, which is possibly why Angry Birds made a lot more money from the same game.
Pirating software is going to happen regardless of any action you take. It's a fact of life in the market. So you can choose to view pirated copies as lost sales and let your business plan get broken by it, or you can choose to view it as free marketing and incorporate it into your business plan.
Well done:) My hopes for the planet increase:) And the courtesy is appreciated.
I only came to my point of view after talking to a Korean studying abroad. His attitude was very interesting; his parents saw working in sweat shops as a way of improving their lives and their children's lives. They didn't resent it, but they didn't want their children working in sweat shops. So he was studying IT abroad on the money they'd earned and was going to go back and get an office job and look after his parents in their old age. It's such a different attitude to what we have in the West. I have no obligation to my parents, my country, my family. I stand on my own two feet and don't ask anyone else for anything. The thought of spending my life in a job I hated and that was bad for my health so that someone else could benefit and do better, or even that my country would be a better place, is completely foreign to me (and most Western cultures). It's a much more common point of view in developing countries though. In the end, I think it's about choice, as the previous poster said. No-one is forcing people to work in factories. They're choosing to do this, for reasons that seem good to them. Taking away that choice is bad, even if it's done from a paternalistic sense of 'we know what's best for you and we're trying to help you'.
Leave your pointless partisan politics at the door and think for yourself. I'm not even American, so your futile choices between two aspects of the same corporate-funded gravy train really don't interest or affect me.
There are a couple of hole in your nice, pat theory. First, those western countries reformed their work environments from within, because at the time manufacturing was mainly a local or region endeavor. In the US, in the 30's, labor finally organized to begin to reform working environments *with the support of the government*. In essence, it was a free and fairly democratic society that provided the means for the worker to stand up and demand rights.
Yup, and the children of China's current factory workers will undoubtedly demand better conditions and more pay than their parents did.
Manufacturers are not chasing cheap labor, they are in search of cheap governments that don't have pesky environmental regulations or troublesome labor laws. They get into these countries and they stick, perhaps even helping to prop up the government so the labor force has no ability to force change. The Chinese laborer, whether it be farmer or factory, is merely chattel for the government to use. A "middle-class" is presented to show progress, but it tightly controlled and can be struck down if they get to strong to support the status quo.
Except that this doesn't actually happen. There isn't a single country in the world that used to have sweat shops as its major manufacturing base 25 years ago and still does because of government oppression. This is a complete fiction.
Certainly there is a relative aspect to life around the globe. I would not expect a worker in a developing country to have the same living environment, the say pay, or the same life style as I. What I would expect is that the worker has rights to a regulated workplace, one the respects a human life through decent hours, balanced wages, and a respect of work/life. I would expect that the worker has the right to assemble, to form an organization that gives them some power against abuse in the workplace. I would expect that humans be treated humanely.
And they will, when they're ready for it. And that's not as a result of an external judgement from an unconnected western point of view meddling in their lives. The workers (or more likely their children) themselves will improve their working conditions when they value their quality of life more than the jobs, because the factories will move on to the next country when they start demanding quality of life, and the next impoverished rural economy will get the factory jobs.
Now the notion of a boycott is foolish in part for reasons stated throughout this thread. It is not just Apple eating from the poison fruit, it is many companies and we all share in that guilt. The only effective way to change is to demand that our "civilized" governments enforce humane work environments for goods that come into the country or monetary penalties will be assested for each violation of human rights. Apple wants to use slave labor to build iPads, fine, but it will cost more to get them back into this country. Don't just boycott, write to representatives and demand that we stand up for human rights be making it costly to abuse humans in the manufacturing of goods.
Your mad scheme will hurt the very people you're trying to help. The factory owners won't improve conditions, because they can't. The factories only get the work because they charge so little, and as soon as they start charging more the economics don't work and the jobs disappear. The peasants go back to their farms that they chose to leave to get these jobs as the AC above pointed out, back to their subsistence farming with worse conditions than they ever faced in the factories. And their children get raised ignorant and destined to short, unpleasant lives. You've locked the entire developing country into a poverty trap that they can't get out of until your insane legislation is rescinded and once again they can willingly head to the factories to work in inhuman conditions like our ancestors did.
Western countries, and particularly the UK during the first heady rush of the Industrial Age, had working practices that would horrify the most suicidal Foxconn worker while they moved from a rural to an industrial economy. The USA actually practiced slavery during this period of their development. This is nothing new and while it is horrible, it's an essential part of the development of an economy.
The only thing a developing country can do to lure investment from the more developed economies is sell cheap labour. Luckily, there is a progression from cheap labour to educated workforce that means it's usually only a single generation that has to work in conditions like this. Korea is the best most recent example, where the younger generation are firmly building a knowledge economy on the back of the education that their parent's factory work paid for. [citation coming if I can be bothered digging it out]
You can see a pattern of modern manufacturers chasing cheap labour moving around the globe, building factories and industrial knowledge and infrastructure, then moving on as the local workforce becomes more knowledgeable and expensive. It does leave behind a country that is industrialised and capable of building a manufacturing base that doesn't rely on cheap labour and has better working conditions.
If we insisted that all labour in developing countries was paid the same wage as the average US or European worker, and had similar working conditions, healthcare, life expectancy, educational prospects, and so on, then no developing country could afford to develop. We would be stuck with a developed world that had all the money and an undeveloped world that could never compete or take part in the global economy, wedged forever in a poverty trap that they couldn't get out of.
So yes, bizarrely, it's a good thing that Chinese workers are working under horrific working conditions, just like our great-great-grandparents were, so that they can bring up kids like us who won't have to.
And what would be the point of pulling it over? Give it a stern reprimand before sending back on its way?
Unless the cop plans to either (1) Inspect it for malfunction/damage, or (2) Impound it, I don't see any reason to physically stop the vehicle. A properly tagged vehicle should provide all you need to issue a citation; no curb required.
You could easily do this with human drivers at the moment. Fake uniforms and a fake Homeland Security 'terrorism spot-check' will get everyone playing nice and quietly and too scared to do anything to resist.
99% of the drivers with satnav at the moment don't bother learning their route, they just follow the instructions that the voice gives them.
My point: human drivers are vulnerable to the same attack vector. I don't expect the research has been done, but I'd bet $1 that if you managed to crack the satnav traffic alert system and fed in data that directed traffic to your dark alleyway, at least 50% of satnav drivers would follow those directions instead of their own idea of the route.
I'm not suggesting that we force companies to "do good", I'm saying we should stand on their necks to prevent them from "doing bad".
Do you get the distinction?
For example, cutting down a forest to supply timber would destroy an animal habitat but keep a rural community economically viable. How do you decide which is the preferable outcome?
If you cut down the forest to supply timber, the timber's gone, so the jobs are gone so the rural community's gone.
You could also keep a community "economically viable" by rounding up everyone who's got brown eyes and selling off their organs.
If you find a situation where a community is being harmed by environmentalists after the externalities are taken into account, then we can talk. And which "community" are we talking about? One square block? One square mile? A county or state or region or nation or continent or planet? Every time you take one "community" into account, there's a bigger one that may have a different outcome.
So, my point is, just make corporations scared. Keep them terrified of doing wrong and we'll all be fine. Take away the individual liability protection of corporations. They're nothing but aggregated capital anyway. Hire lots more regulators to watch them. Make the corporations pay for the regulators.
And who regulates the regulators? If the corporations pay for the regulators, then ultimately they will own the regulators.
As usual, my off-the-top-of-my-head example was poorly thought out and open to all sorts of counter-examples hehe. One day I'll learn to think them through more. I'm not even vaguely trying to suggest that environmentalists harm communities, although I will point out that environmental concerns (as one of a number of other 'concerns' such as child safety, health & safety and political correctness) is often used by the usual control freaks to justify their control freakery.
Corporations aren't protected from liability anyway. Shareholders are, but they don't make decisions about corporate activity. Directors can already be prosecuted for the actions of the companies they control. I don't see how more regulation is going to make them more scared, and I don't see the benefits of keeping corporations scared anyway.
For-profit corporations cannot help themselves. If you have shareholders, you are a menace and everything you do should be very closely regulated. Because it is in your nature to do wrong if there's a profit in it. This is why corporations are not people and they're not even a facsimile of a person. A person will occasionally do good even if there's no profit in it. It happens all the time. A corporation will never, ever do good unless there is a profit in it, just as they will do bad if there is a profit in it. There are no exceptions. Corporations are like highly radioactive isotopes. Used properly, they can be involved in good outcomes, but only if handled with great care and under strictly-controlled conditions.
Companies, by law, obey a very simple rule: increase shareholder value. Directors and management teams of companies can be sued by their shareholders for not increasing shareholder value. Personally speaking, I prefer this very simple rule to the total fucking mess that would happen if companies had to 'do good'. Because there is no way of quantifying 'good' and therefore making any decisions about which of multiple choices of actions does more good. For example, cutting down a forest to supply timber would destroy an animal habitat but keep a rural community economically viable. How do you decide which is the preferable outcome?
Forcing companies to 'do good' would in effect do one of two things: - hand complete control of corporate behaviour to (mostly sociopathic) management teams with no accountability or - totally cripple the ability of management teams to make any kind of decisions because any decision can be second-guessed after the fact by lawyers as to whether it was the right one based on the perceived amount of 'good' done.
At least with a simple, quantifiable rule at the moment corporate behaviour can be predicted, and there are sound reasons to believe that increasing shareholder value does at least some good within society by increasing society's wealth.
Well I don't know much about the NOAA studies, but surely an error bar of up to 5 degrees C (as is shown on the video we're discussing) *is* greater than the rise in temperature in the 20th century?
I'm not defending him, I'm just not seeing the whacky anti-science crank you're seeing. I've visited his site and he comes across as a pretty reasonable guy *shrug*
If anything, the video producers come across as the whacky anti-science cranks. Bringing in the publisher's other work with the tobacco industry as a blatant ad-hominem? Why? How does that have anything to do with what Watts has said? If, as you say (and I don't disbelieve you) Watts has made other statements that have been disproven by climate science, then why not devote the time to discussing that instead of his publisher's vague connections with the tobacco lobby?
Winning? no...there's no winning here. Arguing on the internet is pointless. It's like putting your tongue in a missing tooth: you know you shouldn't, it's annoying and it sometimes hurts, but you can't stop yourself.
I have clearly stated the point making (last paragraph). In fact, in each of my posts I have clearly stated the point I'm making.
The point I'm making, in case you missed it last time, is that video that you've linked to several times claiming that it proves Watts is making false claims actually doesn't show Watts making false claims. The only claim that the video shows Watts making (that some of the land-based weather stations in the USA are poorly sited and this may affect the temperature data recorded by them) is, in fact, confirmed by the video rather than disproven.
I understand that you think Watts is a charlatan, and that he makes all sorts of wild claims elsewhere, but my point was (and still is) that the video you linked doesn't show this. Since you still haven't been able to point to anywhere in the video where Watts makes any claim that is subsequently disproven by anything in the video, then I must conclude that my point stands confirmed and the video you linked does not, actually, prove Watts has made any inaccurate statements at all.
Now, you've labelled my characterisation of the video as deceptive, without actually showing any inaccuracy or deception, and without being able to point to anything in my characterisation or our subsequent discussion that is deceptive.
OK the claim Watts made was that the sensor data was so poor that it negated the temperature data as a valid source of data for use in AGW modeling.
Can you please point me to the exact time on the video where he makes this claim? I can't find it... around 1:50 it says: "...some of these stations, according to Mr Watts, may be unreliable." a claim which is actually confirmed later in the video at 4:20 "... NOAA scientists acknowledged that some weather station siting does not conform to published standards and that some temperature readings may be affected by those variations..."
around 2:30 it says "...if temperature data is incorrect, according to this reasoning, then perhaps climate models and predictions are tainted and unreliable as well". Which seems to me to be an eminently sensible line of reasoning (you can't base an accurate model on inaccurate data), and anyway isn't attributed to Anthony Watts.
Elsewhere Watts has claimed that this faulty sensor data undermines the entire credibility of AGW theories.
Okay...but that's not in the video is it? If he's actually said that, why isn't it in the video?
Sticking only with the first claim, the video explicitly says that Watts was shown to be wrong. The temp data was not so corrupted and inaccurate that it materially effected the conclusions based on that data.
Again, can you tell me where in the video this is explicitly said? If you're referring to the NOAA response as presented in the video, then I should point out that the error column on the pie chart presented has a *minimum* error of 1 degree celsius. The line graph presented as 'proof of no material effect' has a complete range of 4 degrees fahrenheit (i.e. approx 2 degrees celsius). In other words, without error bars those lines are meaningless, and with error bars they occupy the entire page of the chart presented.
Obviously, I'm not claiming that NOAA can't draw accurate graphs or that they don't know how to utilise error bars. The point I'm making is that the video doesn't prove or disprove anything.
There's a clear difference between this and Pascal's wager. Pascal had only an unsupported hypothesis (with the ultimate carrot and the ultimate stick). Global warming is a scientific consensus.
You must remember that at the time, Christianity was a universal consensus in Pascal's culture, and he was addressing a strange minority atheist meme that all decent-thinking people had nothing to do with and regarded as dangerous. There are strong similarities *shrug*
If "AGW is a symptom of overpopulation", as you say, there are two ways to combat it - reduce the number of people or reduce the negative effects of the average person. What's your plan to reduce the population? It's a very difficult problem to address. I'm not saying it's more or less difficult than addressing the average effect per person, but why only address one side of the equation?
Reducing the environmental impacts only delays the problem, it doesn't solve it. If we halve the impact of each human being then we hand the problem to our great-grandchildren who will have a larger population, less resources, and less room to maneuver to solve it. Not that I'm suggesting we increase the impact we're making to bring the problem to an immediate head, though that is the logical course of action.
Ultimately the problem will solve itself. Plague, famine, drought or war will reduce the human population to sustainable levels again. It'd be nice to think that we can solve this problem in an intelligent way that doesn't involve massive traumatic loss of life, but as you say it's a very difficult problem to address and we don't seem capable as a society of even talking about it yet.
As far as I can see the only 'claim' that Watts made in that video is that some of the sensor sites are poor. The video then goes on to agree with that claim.
I think you've missed the little detail that elementary and high school students are not scientists. And neither are the vast majority of their teachers. They are not qualified to do the questioning properly without falling into some fallacy trap.
Patent clerks, they're the worst. Little bespectacled gits think they can set up a few mental experiments and overturn the entire established consensus of physics departments the world over. Pah! What do they know about physics! They're not scientists!
I do not think that video says what you think it says.
It basically says 'this is Anthony Watts. This is the study of the temperature sensors that he's organising. This is his book about it. His book was published by these people who have also been involved with smoker's rights issues. Therefore they are funded by tobacco companies and inherently evil. Anthony Watts must therefore be evil. This is the response from NOAA to Anthony Watts' claims: "yes there are some problems with the siting of some of the sensors". This is a graph (with no error bars) of temperatures from all the sensors. This is another graph (with no error bars) of the 70 sensors Anthony Watts recommended as being correct. Look they're the same. Therefore Anthony Watts is wrong as well as evil. Some people who looked at animal behaviour have said that it's changing, and mostly in a way that we think it would change if the climate was warming. The End'.
What I got from that is: - NOAA confirmed that yes there are some problems with the sensor sites (and they adjust the temperatures from those sensors to allow for the warming from the changed surroundings), so the sensor survey was valid, good science that should have been applauded. - Graphs without error bars are pretty much worthless. They cut the sample size from >1000 to ~70 and nothing changed? really?
At no point in that video does anyone disprove or even find any serious flaws with anything Anthony Watts has said...so why is this being held up as the video that shows Watts to be an anti-scientific 'denier'?
ah the modern Pascal's Wager (if the risks of not Believing outweigh the costs of Believing, then the logical course of action is to Believe).
Which works fine, except for one thing: if humans are not the principle cause of the climate changes, then the money that we are currently spending on 'battling' climate change (I'm Australian and we are spending a metric fucktonne of taxpayer cash on this) could have been so much better spent elsewhere, to so much better effect.
The biggest problem we face is overpopulation. AGW is a symptom of overpopulation (as is Peak Oil, Peak Water, Peak Food, Peak Everything). "Solving" AGW while allowing humans to breed freely is irresponsible and pointless. The sooner we accept that not everyone can have kids, and people can't have as many kids as they'd like, and breeding is not, in fact, a Human Right, the sooner we'll get our current crop of problems sorted.
Slashdot Mirror
"the key is to not adjust your lifestyle above where it needs to be and"
yes, we should, all live in mud huts, eat beetles and walk to work in dirty rags, because that's allow really need, right?
So spend more than you earn so you don't have to life in a mud hut, is that it? Max out the credit cards, take another mortgage to afford the holiday you deserve, after all you work hard, you're earning a decent wage, you should be able to afford a new car every few years, right?
And when you get old and sick, start whining at the government that it wasn't your fault, you *deserved* to spend all that money, now you *deserve* a pension and medical care over and above what you can afford, because you paid all those taxes right?
Yeah. So. Fuck You. If you can't live within your means then you're the fucking problem.
We're about to hit the baby boomers doing exactly this (well, technically it started two years ago when the people born in 1945 hit 65, but that's only the leading edge of the bell curve). A huge bulge of population has completely failed to save enough money to pay for their retirement, and are going to ask you to pay more taxes to keep them afloat in their old age. And possibly alive in their old age, as there are a lot of very expensive treatments for age-related illnesses that are available now.
They feel entitled because they worked hard their whole lives, and paid taxes their whole lives, and they've never been refused anything they want because they're such a big block of voters. This is going to be a brutal shock to either them, or the rest of us, because there isn't enough money to keep everyone happy here.
Crunch time will be when your Mum asks you to pay for the surgery she needs to keep walking, and you realise that you'll have to sell your house to cover it. Not a pleasant choice, or a pleasant conversation to have with her.
do you want to live in a desert, or near the beach?
If they'd stop fly-in-fly-out and force the miners to live locally we might have a chance, but that would mean revoking the Fringe Benefits Tax, and convincing pollies to rescind a tax is really hard
What you consider to be immoral is not necessarily illegal.
And that's a really really good thing.
We don't all have the same set of morals, but we do all have to have the same set of laws.
Forcing other people to live by your morals is as bad as other people forcing you to live by theirs.
I like my laws as minimal and amoral as possible. As few laws as possible, as cleanly and clearly enunciated as possible, and parliaments focused on making better law not more law.
That's one possible business model. Not the only one. Off the top of my head in 5 minutes:
- Move to a free purchase but paid-for additional features model. That works for a lot of game software.
- Move to a free purchase but paid support model like Red Hat and other open-source software.
- Add a server component that requires a licence. Make the server component optional but useful so pirate users will eventually buy the licence. This works for multiplayer games.
- Use a voluntary pricing model, it works for Humble Bundle
- The ad-supported route works for a lot of free software
- Sell your soon-to-be-pirated software to a large company as an advertisement medium in its own right
All of these work better than whining on /. that life is somehow unfair and pirates are ruining the software industry because the world doesn't work the way it "should".
If your customers aren't buying your products, please stop whining about customer behaviour and change your products to suit the market.
If your business model doesn't make money in the market you've chosen, please stop whining about the market and change your business model.
So what Rovio is supporting is market conditions that favour their particular product, which is very different from market conditions that ensure a robust and healthy competitive environment, or that ensure innovation and development.
The market is fixed. Your business model and product is flexible (or should be). So change your product so it suits the market conditions.
Rovio understood that the market they chose to operate in has a large amount of piracy. Instead of trying to change the market to suit their products, they chose the eminently more profitable option of working out how they could make piracy work for them. As you've pointed out, one of the ways they did this was by launching merch to go with their game that allowed them to take advantage of the fanbase generated by pirate players. As another poster pointed out, the game they created is not unique and the Castle version doesn't have the merch potential, which is possibly why Angry Birds made a lot more money from the same game.
Pirating software is going to happen regardless of any action you take. It's a fact of life in the market. So you can choose to view pirated copies as lost sales and let your business plan get broken by it, or you can choose to view it as free marketing and incorporate it into your business plan.
Well done :) My hopes for the planet increase :) And the courtesy is appreciated.
I only came to my point of view after talking to a Korean studying abroad. His attitude was very interesting; his parents saw working in sweat shops as a way of improving their lives and their children's lives. They didn't resent it, but they didn't want their children working in sweat shops. So he was studying IT abroad on the money they'd earned and was going to go back and get an office job and look after his parents in their old age.
It's such a different attitude to what we have in the West. I have no obligation to my parents, my country, my family. I stand on my own two feet and don't ask anyone else for anything. The thought of spending my life in a job I hated and that was bad for my health so that someone else could benefit and do better, or even that my country would be a better place, is completely foreign to me (and most Western cultures). It's a much more common point of view in developing countries though.
In the end, I think it's about choice, as the previous poster said. No-one is forcing people to work in factories. They're choosing to do this, for reasons that seem good to them. Taking away that choice is bad, even if it's done from a paternalistic sense of 'we know what's best for you and we're trying to help you'.
Leave your pointless partisan politics at the door and think for yourself. I'm not even American, so your futile choices between two aspects of the same corporate-funded gravy train really don't interest or affect me.
There are a couple of hole in your nice, pat theory. First, those western countries reformed their work environments from within, because at the time manufacturing was mainly a local or region endeavor. In the US, in the 30's, labor finally organized to begin to reform working environments *with the support of the government*. In essence, it was a free and fairly democratic society that provided the means for the worker to stand up and demand rights.
Yup, and the children of China's current factory workers will undoubtedly demand better conditions and more pay than their parents did.
Manufacturers are not chasing cheap labor, they are in search of cheap governments that don't have pesky environmental regulations or troublesome labor laws. They get into these countries and they stick, perhaps even helping to prop up the government so the labor force has no ability to force change. The Chinese laborer, whether it be farmer or factory, is merely chattel for the government to use. A "middle-class" is presented to show progress, but it tightly controlled and can be struck down if they get to strong to support the status quo.
Except that this doesn't actually happen. There isn't a single country in the world that used to have sweat shops as its major manufacturing base 25 years ago and still does because of government oppression. This is a complete fiction.
Certainly there is a relative aspect to life around the globe. I would not expect a worker in a developing country to have the same living environment, the say pay, or the same life style as I. What I would expect is that the worker has rights to a regulated workplace, one the respects a human life through decent hours, balanced wages, and a respect of work/life. I would expect that the worker has the right to assemble, to form an organization that gives them some power against abuse in the workplace. I would expect that humans be treated humanely.
And they will, when they're ready for it. And that's not as a result of an external judgement from an unconnected western point of view meddling in their lives. The workers (or more likely their children) themselves will improve their working conditions when they value their quality of life more than the jobs, because the factories will move on to the next country when they start demanding quality of life, and the next impoverished rural economy will get the factory jobs.
Now the notion of a boycott is foolish in part for reasons stated throughout this thread. It is not just Apple eating from the poison fruit, it is many companies and we all share in that guilt. The only effective way to change is to demand that our "civilized" governments enforce humane work environments for goods that come into the country or monetary penalties will be assested for each violation of human rights. Apple wants to use slave labor to build iPads, fine, but it will cost more to get them back into this country. Don't just boycott, write to representatives and demand that we stand up for human rights be making it costly to abuse humans in the manufacturing of goods.
Your mad scheme will hurt the very people you're trying to help. The factory owners won't improve conditions, because they can't. The factories only get the work because they charge so little, and as soon as they start charging more the economics don't work and the jobs disappear. The peasants go back to their farms that they chose to leave to get these jobs as the AC above pointed out, back to their subsistence farming with worse conditions than they ever faced in the factories. And their children get raised ignorant and destined to short, unpleasant lives. You've locked the entire developing country into a poverty trap that they can't get out of until your insane legislation is rescinded and once again they can willingly head to the factories to work in inhuman conditions like our ancestors did.
Western countries, and particularly the UK during the first heady rush of the Industrial Age, had working practices that would horrify the most suicidal Foxconn worker while they moved from a rural to an industrial economy. The USA actually practiced slavery during this period of their development. This is nothing new and while it is horrible, it's an essential part of the development of an economy.
The only thing a developing country can do to lure investment from the more developed economies is sell cheap labour. Luckily, there is a progression from cheap labour to educated workforce that means it's usually only a single generation that has to work in conditions like this. Korea is the best most recent example, where the younger generation are firmly building a knowledge economy on the back of the education that their parent's factory work paid for. [citation coming if I can be bothered digging it out]
You can see a pattern of modern manufacturers chasing cheap labour moving around the globe, building factories and industrial knowledge and infrastructure, then moving on as the local workforce becomes more knowledgeable and expensive. It does leave behind a country that is industrialised and capable of building a manufacturing base that doesn't rely on cheap labour and has better working conditions.
If we insisted that all labour in developing countries was paid the same wage as the average US or European worker, and had similar working conditions, healthcare, life expectancy, educational prospects, and so on, then no developing country could afford to develop. We would be stuck with a developed world that had all the money and an undeveloped world that could never compete or take part in the global economy, wedged forever in a poverty trap that they couldn't get out of.
So yes, bizarrely, it's a good thing that Chinese workers are working under horrific working conditions, just like our great-great-grandparents were, so that they can bring up kids like us who won't have to.
I buy on Steam, and this will fix a lot of games showing as 'unavailable in your region'.
Of course there are ways around that for games I really want to play, but it'll be more convenient if I can just get them on Steam.
Yeah I thought that Canadians were entitled to pirate whatever they liked because they paid a tithe to the content industry on blank storage media?
How come the Canadian government isn't telling the MAFIAA to f*ck off and be happy with their annual tithe?
And what would be the point of pulling it over? Give it a stern reprimand before sending back on its way?
Unless the cop plans to either (1) Inspect it for malfunction/damage, or (2) Impound it, I don't see any reason to physically stop the vehicle. A properly tagged vehicle should provide all you need to issue a citation; no curb required.
Or 3: arrest the passenger(s).
Good point. Has there been a lawsuit yet where the automatic braking failed and 'caused' an accident and the manufacturer has been taken to court?
You could easily do this with human drivers at the moment. Fake uniforms and a fake Homeland Security 'terrorism spot-check' will get everyone playing nice and quietly and too scared to do anything to resist.
99% of the drivers with satnav at the moment don't bother learning their route, they just follow the instructions that the voice gives them.
My point: human drivers are vulnerable to the same attack vector. I don't expect the research has been done, but I'd bet $1 that if you managed to crack the satnav traffic alert system and fed in data that directed traffic to your dark alleyway, at least 50% of satnav drivers would follow those directions instead of their own idea of the route.
I'm not suggesting that we force companies to "do good", I'm saying we should stand on their necks to prevent them from "doing bad".
Do you get the distinction?
If you cut down the forest to supply timber, the timber's gone, so the jobs are gone so the rural community's gone.
You could also keep a community "economically viable" by rounding up everyone who's got brown eyes and selling off their organs.
If you find a situation where a community is being harmed by environmentalists after the externalities are taken into account, then we can talk. And which "community" are we talking about? One square block? One square mile? A county or state or region or nation or continent or planet? Every time you take one "community" into account, there's a bigger one that may have a different outcome.
So, my point is, just make corporations scared. Keep them terrified of doing wrong and we'll all be fine. Take away the individual liability protection of corporations. They're nothing but aggregated capital anyway. Hire lots more regulators to watch them. Make the corporations pay for the regulators.
And who regulates the regulators? If the corporations pay for the regulators, then ultimately they will own the regulators.
As usual, my off-the-top-of-my-head example was poorly thought out and open to all sorts of counter-examples hehe. One day I'll learn to think them through more.
I'm not even vaguely trying to suggest that environmentalists harm communities, although I will point out that environmental concerns (as one of a number of other 'concerns' such as child safety, health & safety and political correctness) is often used by the usual control freaks to justify their control freakery.
Corporations aren't protected from liability anyway. Shareholders are, but they don't make decisions about corporate activity. Directors can already be prosecuted for the actions of the companies they control. I don't see how more regulation is going to make them more scared, and I don't see the benefits of keeping corporations scared anyway.
For-profit corporations cannot help themselves. If you have shareholders, you are a menace and everything you do should be very closely regulated. Because it is in your nature to do wrong if there's a profit in it. This is why corporations are not people and they're not even a facsimile of a person. A person will occasionally do good even if there's no profit in it. It happens all the time. A corporation will never, ever do good unless there is a profit in it, just as they will do bad if there is a profit in it. There are no exceptions. Corporations are like highly radioactive isotopes. Used properly, they can be involved in good outcomes, but only if handled with great care and under strictly-controlled conditions.
Companies, by law, obey a very simple rule: increase shareholder value. Directors and management teams of companies can be sued by their shareholders for not increasing shareholder value.
Personally speaking, I prefer this very simple rule to the total fucking mess that would happen if companies had to 'do good'. Because there is no way of quantifying 'good' and therefore making any decisions about which of multiple choices of actions does more good. For example, cutting down a forest to supply timber would destroy an animal habitat but keep a rural community economically viable. How do you decide which is the preferable outcome?
Forcing companies to 'do good' would in effect do one of two things:
- hand complete control of corporate behaviour to (mostly sociopathic) management teams with no accountability
or
- totally cripple the ability of management teams to make any kind of decisions because any decision can be second-guessed after the fact by lawyers as to whether it was the right one based on the perceived amount of 'good' done.
At least with a simple, quantifiable rule at the moment corporate behaviour can be predicted, and there are sound reasons to believe that increasing shareholder value does at least some good within society by increasing society's wealth.
Well I don't know much about the NOAA studies, but surely an error bar of up to 5 degrees C (as is shown on the video we're discussing) *is* greater than the rise in temperature in the 20th century?
I'm not defending him, I'm just not seeing the whacky anti-science crank you're seeing. I've visited his site and he comes across as a pretty reasonable guy *shrug*
If anything, the video producers come across as the whacky anti-science cranks. Bringing in the publisher's other work with the tobacco industry as a blatant ad-hominem? Why? How does that have anything to do with what Watts has said? If, as you say (and I don't disbelieve you) Watts has made other statements that have been disproven by climate science, then why not devote the time to discussing that instead of his publisher's vague connections with the tobacco lobby?
Winning? no...there's no winning here. Arguing on the internet is pointless. It's like putting your tongue in a missing tooth: you know you shouldn't, it's annoying and it sometimes hurts, but you can't stop yourself.
I have clearly stated the point making (last paragraph). In fact, in each of my posts I have clearly stated the point I'm making.
The point I'm making, in case you missed it last time, is that video that you've linked to several times claiming that it proves Watts is making false claims actually doesn't show Watts making false claims. The only claim that the video shows Watts making (that some of the land-based weather stations in the USA are poorly sited and this may affect the temperature data recorded by them) is, in fact, confirmed by the video rather than disproven.
I understand that you think Watts is a charlatan, and that he makes all sorts of wild claims elsewhere, but my point was (and still is) that the video you linked doesn't show this. Since you still haven't been able to point to anywhere in the video where Watts makes any claim that is subsequently disproven by anything in the video, then I must conclude that my point stands confirmed and the video you linked does not, actually, prove Watts has made any inaccurate statements at all.
Now, you've labelled my characterisation of the video as deceptive, without actually showing any inaccuracy or deception, and without being able to point to anything in my characterisation or our subsequent discussion that is deceptive.
I think you owe me an apology.
OK the claim Watts made was that the sensor data was so poor that it negated the temperature data as a valid source of data for use in AGW modeling.
Can you please point me to the exact time on the video where he makes this claim? I can't find it...
around 1:50 it says: "...some of these stations, according to Mr Watts, may be unreliable." a claim which is actually confirmed later in the video at 4:20 "... NOAA scientists acknowledged that some weather station siting does not conform to published standards and that some temperature readings may be affected by those variations..."
around 2:30 it says "...if temperature data is incorrect, according to this reasoning, then perhaps climate models and predictions are tainted and unreliable as well". Which seems to me to be an eminently sensible line of reasoning (you can't base an accurate model on inaccurate data), and anyway isn't attributed to Anthony Watts.
Elsewhere Watts has claimed that this faulty sensor data undermines the entire credibility of AGW theories.
Okay...but that's not in the video is it? If he's actually said that, why isn't it in the video?
Sticking only with the first claim, the video explicitly says that Watts was shown to be wrong. The temp data was not so corrupted and inaccurate that it materially effected the conclusions based on that data.
Again, can you tell me where in the video this is explicitly said?
If you're referring to the NOAA response as presented in the video, then I should point out that the error column on the pie chart presented has a *minimum* error of 1 degree celsius. The line graph presented as 'proof of no material effect' has a complete range of 4 degrees fahrenheit (i.e. approx 2 degrees celsius). In other words, without error bars those lines are meaningless, and with error bars they occupy the entire page of the chart presented.
Obviously, I'm not claiming that NOAA can't draw accurate graphs or that they don't know how to utilise error bars. The point I'm making is that the video doesn't prove or disprove anything.
There's a clear difference between this and Pascal's wager. Pascal had only an unsupported hypothesis (with the ultimate carrot and the ultimate stick). Global warming is a scientific consensus.
You must remember that at the time, Christianity was a universal consensus in Pascal's culture, and he was addressing a strange minority atheist meme that all decent-thinking people had nothing to do with and regarded as dangerous. There are strong similarities *shrug*
If "AGW is a symptom of overpopulation", as you say, there are two ways to combat it - reduce the number of people or reduce the negative effects of the average person. What's your plan to reduce the population? It's a very difficult problem to address. I'm not saying it's more or less difficult than addressing the average effect per person, but why only address one side of the equation?
Reducing the environmental impacts only delays the problem, it doesn't solve it. If we halve the impact of each human being then we hand the problem to our great-grandchildren who will have a larger population, less resources, and less room to maneuver to solve it. Not that I'm suggesting we increase the impact we're making to bring the problem to an immediate head, though that is the logical course of action.
Ultimately the problem will solve itself. Plague, famine, drought or war will reduce the human population to sustainable levels again. It'd be nice to think that we can solve this problem in an intelligent way that doesn't involve massive traumatic loss of life, but as you say it's a very difficult problem to address and we don't seem capable as a society of even talking about it yet.
OK, I'll feed the troll...
What claim, exactly, did they refute?
As far as I can see the only 'claim' that Watts made in that video is that some of the sensor sites are poor. The video then goes on to agree with that claim.
I think you've missed the little detail that elementary and high school students are not scientists. And neither are the vast majority of their teachers. They are not qualified to do the questioning properly without falling into some fallacy trap.
Patent clerks, they're the worst. Little bespectacled gits think they can set up a few mental experiments and overturn the entire established consensus of physics departments the world over. Pah! What do they know about physics! They're not scientists!
4 - Instrumentation. Anthony Watts has demonstrated the pathetic state of some of our temperature records.
Anthony Watts is a non-scientist, college drop out full blown, outed fraud:
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2009/07/29/204427/the-video-that-anthony-watts-does-not-want-you-to-see-the-sinclair-climate-denial-crock-of-the-week/
I do not think that video says what you think it says.
It basically says 'this is Anthony Watts. This is the study of the temperature sensors that he's organising. This is his book about it. His book was published by these people who have also been involved with smoker's rights issues. Therefore they are funded by tobacco companies and inherently evil. Anthony Watts must therefore be evil. This is the response from NOAA to Anthony Watts' claims: "yes there are some problems with the siting of some of the sensors". This is a graph (with no error bars) of temperatures from all the sensors. This is another graph (with no error bars) of the 70 sensors Anthony Watts recommended as being correct. Look they're the same. Therefore Anthony Watts is wrong as well as evil. Some people who looked at animal behaviour have said that it's changing, and mostly in a way that we think it would change if the climate was warming. The End'.
What I got from that is:
- NOAA confirmed that yes there are some problems with the sensor sites (and they adjust the temperatures from those sensors to allow for the warming from the changed surroundings), so the sensor survey was valid, good science that should have been applauded.
- Graphs without error bars are pretty much worthless. They cut the sample size from >1000 to ~70 and nothing changed? really?
At no point in that video does anyone disprove or even find any serious flaws with anything Anthony Watts has said...so why is this being held up as the video that shows Watts to be an anti-scientific 'denier'?
ah the modern Pascal's Wager (if the risks of not Believing outweigh the costs of Believing, then the logical course of action is to Believe).
Which works fine, except for one thing: if humans are not the principle cause of the climate changes, then the money that we are currently spending on 'battling' climate change (I'm Australian and we are spending a metric fucktonne of taxpayer cash on this) could have been so much better spent elsewhere, to so much better effect.
The biggest problem we face is overpopulation. AGW is a symptom of overpopulation (as is Peak Oil, Peak Water, Peak Food, Peak Everything). "Solving" AGW while allowing humans to breed freely is irresponsible and pointless. The sooner we accept that not everyone can have kids, and people can't have as many kids as they'd like, and breeding is not, in fact, a Human Right, the sooner we'll get our current crop of problems sorted.