It absolutely *stuns* me, I mean jaw drops, cannot move holy shit WTFOMGBBQ that still to this day after millions of man hours dedicated to and billions of pages written dissecting each and every micrometer of the global mess that is known as the financial meltdown. That there are *still* individuals such as yourself so self assured in your absolute delusion drooling "freddie and fannie forced to give loans" even makes sense, let alone was what brought the entire worlds economy to its knees.
Truly you are an intellectual giant. To somehow miss the entirety of the worlds press output and conclusions in dissecting the cause of the crash and manage to attribute it to a few US home mortgages that were given due to some legislation in the 90's takes some *serious* mental horsepower.
Here's the cause of the financial meltdown for you in easy to digest pieces.
1. Banks begin selling mortgages directly to investors. 2. This makes banks a huge amount of money, and so they start handing out mortgages willy nilly so they can sell even more, even to people who they would *never* have lent to before. But now they don't care AS THEY DON"T OWN THE MORTGAGES. -- see that's the bit where they *chose* to give out the crap mortgages. But of course now they try and blame it on the government so corporate lick-spittle dimwits would sell themselves down the river to protect said banks. 3. They package these BAD mortgages up as AAA rated mortgages with the complicity of criminally fradulent ratings agencies. 4. They sell these corrupt mortgage package on to investors rated AAA when in fact they should be rated -ZZZ GTFO. 5. Investors then on sell them, sometimes even *back* to the banks, the packages stop representing any sort of true wealth at all and become fake paper wealth, only held up by the stupidity of huge investment firms and financial institutions. 5. A few people default on their mortgages...investors suddenly realize that their AAA rated mortgages actually are mixed up with extremely high risk mortgages as well. 6. Investors shit themselves and sell them ASAP. 7. A couple of mammoth financial institutions take big hits. 8. AIG insures said institutions...except AIG actually doesn't actually have any money to give them. 9. Banks, financial "institutions" and half of wall street are stuck with a few trillion dollars worth of "toxic" assets, that is packages that are so extraordinarily complicated and recursive that noone knows who actually owns what and how much is real wealth and how much is fake ponzi bullshit scheme wealth.
10. Dimwits somehow blame all this on some ridiculous 1990's legislation that doesn't even GOVERN 70% of the institutions at the top of the problem. 11. Thieves in said institutions use the ensuing shit fight by useful idiots blaming the "over entitled poor people" to stage the biggest plundering of a public treasury in the history of the world.
12. Occasional dimwits continue to blame the government - in some sort of bizarro world NOT for their lack of regulation in order to prevent such an enormous pyramid scheme from being concocted in the first place...but for somehow *forcing* these institutions to fraudulently package shit mortgages that they *chose* to give out as AAA rated investments, making trillions of dollars profit by doing so and trying to pass them along before it all fell apart as is typical of any ponzi scheme.
13. Give it up and learn FFS.
That said the Federal Reserve bears alot of responsibility for the low cost of money making credit to easy to get for the large firms. Of course the fact that the VERY SAME large firms make up the majority of the seats on the Federal Reserve makes blaming the government even stupider.
Except of course for giving the Federal Reserve that sort of power in the first place. Which is a call for more regulation...not less.
Wow! A person choosing what to consume into their own body is a privilege granted by some nebulous higher authority?
Granted by whom? Who is above the individual? The "Community"? That's called facism and it was the motto of facists in the '30s "Community before the individual".
Certain actions are restricted but there's no such thing as a "privilege" when it comes to the relationship between the individual and the state. The state exists because of the individual. The individual cedes certain rights to the state. At no time does the state grant "privileges". The state doesn't have that power except in the small minds of power worshippers.
Why yes, yes I do, much more than you do it would seem.
$14 trillion is your DEBT you illiterate. Debt is money owed which is a fraction of your total obligations.
The government does more than just borrow money it creates programs to spend that money on and each American (currently) also has half a million dollars worth of *obligations* to pay for. The government can't put 100% of the money it receives into paying back debt without taking money away from it's programs and services. Which is why I clearly stated that it would take over a century to pay that 14 trillion down even with 100% of Americans wages going in as the government also has to pay for it's obligations (Social Security, Medicare, Military, Beauracracy) which are increasing rapidly over time, even if they didn't allow new spending starting now.
Your current tax level isn't even coming *close* to paying for the governments obligations *let alone* making repayments on the debt and interest owed on bonds. Which is why your government has borrowed nearly 10 trillion dollars from the citizens of China, Russia, Japan, Saudi Arabia and others in the last decade to keep the good times going.
So you're either going to raise taxes to an astronomical level, slash and burn your government services and keep taxes at the same level or do the tried and true practice of bankrupt governments and devalue your currency or worse simply default.
If you lose your job because of your absolutely woeful ability to spell and write a cohesive block of text and then fall critically ill you will change your tune.
You types always do.
Let me guess you are a middle class twenty something borne out of middle class white collar parents and have cruised through middle class high schools into college and out into the world of IT weighed down by the fevered ego and irrational belief that it was all made possible only through your own rugged individualism and determination against all odds(TM)?
Yes and it always depends on the person defining the parameters of "better" as to what "better" is. They always tend to make sure they're in the group that's "better".
Apparently you define being "better" as "scoring high" in things that makes you a better person then someone who doesn't. Of course I assume you'll have a a self styled list of things that do and don't count. I also didn't actually think your parameters would be quite so pathetic as that...
Yes some people are better than others but then here we are again...You assume your one of those people don't you?
Here's a hint for you *everyone here thinks that* but it can't be true for everyone can it?
I'd say a pretty huge portion of people would say your arrogance and assumption that you're "better" than nearly everyone else makes you nothing but an arse.
But then we're all beneath you so it doesn't matter does it?
Your countries financial problems are unsolvable by anybody, let alone the average man on the street short of revolution French or Russian style to make the bastards who did this to you all pay and I'm not even talking about the banks.
Even if every man, woman and child in your country starting today gave 100% of their income to your Federal Government and your government approved no new spending it would take over a century to pay down the existing debt while continuing to meet the governments current obligations.
The only way out is for your government to massively devalue your currency or default.
Yes actually it really is *that bad*. This isn't some magical movie where everything just works itself out. Nor is it some baseless scare mongering, your citizens and government have been maintaining their lifestyle and country on cheap Asian credit for the last decade. And now they're getting very very nervous about your ability to meet your obligations to them.
At best they'll just cut you off but continue to hold onto their US TBills, that's at best and it's still going to hurt you all *a lot*.
And to answer your question, the "Marijuana issue" costs you billions of dollars each year. Your spending tens of billions of dollars worth of Asians money every year - money that you have to pay interest on on this "Marijuana issue".
That's the problem with science, it's just so hard to use it to make cheap political attacks. One day you're right with science on your side, the next day your so very very ignorant.
I can imagine myself...transported back to pre-civil war America.
"Evn" making impassioned arguments against the norths irritation with having to compete with the cheap goods produced by slaves and indentured servants coming out of the south.
"The masses have spoken, cheap cotton is here to stay! Citizens of the north will just have to compete!"
Are you aware that you're expecting western workers to compete with, in part, factories full of Chinese political prisoners and indentured servants? As quite a few Chinese factories are. So why is government regulation ridiculous? Your expecting the west to compet with Chinese Government factories, not a peep about that, but we should bend over backwards to accomodate them? Try go into China or India and see if they have the same open trade - sell your countrymen out for a few cents per widget policy - as your own country does.
Now given that they protect their borders fairly vigorously and are currently moving most of the real wealth out of the US and into their own, doesn't it stand to reason that *their* policy (which is the same policy that the US grew to power using) is better at enriching a country than the ridiculous "ideal" that almost uncompromisingly white collar middle class westerns espouse is?
When the US has gone the way of Argentina as it rapidly is...or god forbid the USSR, and China and India are booming because of their pragmatic often heavy handed trading policies I wonder if the western "open trade at any cost with anyone..no matter how lopsided" crowd will be proud of themselves? Perhaps, as then they'll be able to have the opportunity to work in a factory for $3 an hour as their ideology comes full circle and the Chinese Government starts opening factories for you to work in.
Wouldn't it stand to reason to have a trading policy that would demand that *China* operate in a competitive fashion if it wants to sell it's goods in your country? Given that *without* the US they were nothing but a poor struggling agrarian country anyway.
India's a slightly different kettle of fish, but 99% of manufacturing is done in China and you referred to physical goods so...
So far in the last 12 months I've had three side projects that projects that were outsourced but for whatever reason such a mess was made of them that the clients have brought them to us to fix at a higher than normal rate.
My employer's now collaborating with an "reverse" outsourcing mob who've set themselves up to help people bring their failing outsourced projects back and are getting a fair bit of work through it.
To be honest, the quality of code I'm seeing is easily the worst I've ever seen and that includes half-assed open source projects. Whether that's because it's just "sweatshop code" as one client put it or they are attempting to write super advanced AI code generators and using them to generate the code...and failing miserably, I don't know. But it's terrible. From the complete lack of imagination and forward thinking in design, right down to the god awful highly inconsistently cased variable names.
Remember this is *three* different projects from three different Indian companies theoretically written by three different sets of programmers. The code all looks and feels the same, which leads me to believe there's something going on industry wide over there. What that is I have no idea but they need to fix it quick smart as the industry as a whole is getting a bit of a reputation.
What I do know is people are willing to pay much more once they've tried outsourcing and failed.
Those that don't go out of business in the mean time that is.
(Yes I'm sure there's some top quality code coming out of India, I doubt most of it is written by the sorts of companies in this articlee).
You are not, nor anywhere *near* in a hundred lifetimes of saving at your current pay rate being "the rich".
If you are a programmer, Manager or *anything* to do with the nuts and bolts of an operation you are smack bang in the middle class. The fact that you associate yourself with "the rich" would I'm sure have them laughing.
First the "brutal Islamic Theocracy" is about half as "brutal" as the "Brutal Facist Dictator" that the US installed was for starters so if you're a yank you've got very little room to talk about the state of governance in that country.
Second I never said anything about being "genetically predisposed" to one view or another so you're talking out of your backside. As if you can be genetically predisposed to a political view, talk about racism.
The people who openly supported democracy in the 1960's were killed by those who (with the full backing of the US and UK) did not. So were many of their children. Out of the remainder of people against the Shah many ran for the cover of extreme religion and many continued to survive the Dictatorship by appearing supportive or keeping their heads down...as people do when being subjected to the horrors of tyranny. Finally the US puppet and his US trained secret police became far too unbearable for both groups of the remainder and they joined forces and overthrew him and his small group of followers. Unfortunately for the pro-democracy faction due to the purges they numbered many less than those who had run for extreme religion who cited "democracy" as the reason they had had all this tyranny, suffering and bloodshed - who had largely been left alone by the Shah - and so lacking numbers were forced out.
*One generation later* the remainders children are becoming politically aware, the old guard of "conservatives" many of whom are anti-democracy *because* of what they saw and lived though LAST TIME they tried it are dying off and losing political power and lo and behold...a pro-democracy movement driven by this generation is afoot.
This has all happened within two generations, the boomer generation that is still alive *today* were the 20 somethings when the US's disgusting dictator was torturing and executing them and their parents and enforcing tyranny on them. It's *their* children now that are the twenty somethings who are starting with a clean slate and don't have the baggage that their parents do which allowed the "anti-democracy / anti-US" extremists to hold power for awhile, that are pushing for democracy again.
Regarding the Soviet Union...So 70 years ago the pro-democracy agitators were purged then their grandchildren demanded democracy.
Thanks for making my argument.
The Iranians have every right to be sore at the US, half the people alive today in Iran suffered under the US's murderous puppet. Only the most blind nationalist would say otherwise.
The Soviet Union had a beautifully crafted Constitution guaranteeing many rights, even more than the US Bill of rights and Constitution.
So yes you are correct, rights come from a peoples willingness to enforce them a piece of paper means nothing. Usually that enforcement is against their own Government, sometimes it's against other factions among them, other times it's against foreign powers.
Governments have little to do with rights, it's what the people around you think and the way they behave that matters.
"I think that's a bit glib. At least a significant portion of the Blackwater people, at least the ones actually on the ground, are just former soldiers who traded up to an employer who would give them better body armor"
And a $50,000 a year pay rise.
Most soldiers can't wait to go home. Out of the soldiers who finish their service there's a tiny fraction that can't wait to get back and make $80k a year and not be bound by *any* law or code regarding their behavior.
Blackwater et al are largely a self selecting group, those that *want* to be in a war zone.
Any if they *choose* to go back into a war zone - not under the flag of their government but under a private army then it doesn't have anything to do with body armour (or patriotism) at all.
Well your sentiments are correct, but your a little off on the "bogeyman" thing.
The baby boomer generation were the ones subjected to the decade of tyranny care of the US government. *As if* they're just going to forget that, anyone who survived through it was either a supporter of the tyranical regime or a sly dog but either way everyone was touched by it, at the very least knowing someone who was tortured and or executed.
And there would certainly be a few more pro-democracy agitators among that generation if they hadn't all been executed by the American created, trained, funded and equipped "SAVAK" secret police, designed specifically to keep the pro-democracy dissidents down. Guess they didn't see what the unintended consequence of that would be come 1979!
Perhaps they have good reason to see America as the "bogeyman". Just like you would if China or Russia did the same thing to *you*.
Well the rest of the world (TM) is pretty used to that coming from your direction so in a perfect world it would be a nice little wake up call to how it feels and that perhaps you should stop doing things like that to the rest of us. Of course it's only the barest of tastes as they didn't kidnap and export him to Syria or Egypt to be imprisoned and tortured for the rest of his life, or better yet simply assassinate him as your country has so often done to people who it doesn't like in other countries.
Not even we who you consider your "allies" are immune from that!
They're obviously amateurs anyway as they didn't even try and assassinate your political leaders or overthrow your government and install a murderous dictator and then supply him with billions of dollars of military hardware and setup and train the most brutal secret police of modern history to keep you inline at your expense - like your government did to them.
Wherever your CIA goes tyranny follows, always.
Unfortunately for Americans like any monster they're turning their attention toward their masters more and more these days.
Well of course they did, given that the CIA was training them on US soil:
"In March 1955, the Army colonel was "replaced with a more permanent team of five career CIA officers, including specialists in covert operations, intelligence analysis, and counterintelligence,including Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf " who "trained virtually all of the first generation of SAVAK personnel." "
"The agency also closely collaborated with the American CIA by sending their agents to an air force base in New York to share and discuss interrogation tactics.[15]"
What Interrogation tactics?
"Brute force was supplemented with the bastinado; sleep deprivation; extensive solitary confinement; glaring searchlights; standing in one place for hours on end; nail extractions; snakes (favored for use with women); electrical shocks with cattle prods, often into the rectum; cigarette burns; sitting on hot grills; acid dripped into nostrils; near-drownings; mock executions; and an electric chair with a large metal mask to muffle screams while amplifying them for the victim. This latter contraption was dubbed the Apollo--an allusion to the American space capsules. Prisoners were also humiliated by being raped, urinated on, and forced to stand naked.[10] Despite the new 'scientific' methods, the torture of choice remained the traditional bastinado" used to beat soles of the feet. The "primary goal" of those using the bastinados "was to locate arms caches, safe houses and accomplices..." [11]"
Those "Interrogation" methods sound *awfully* familiar don't they?
There's a dozen free simple "point and click" web servers already in existence. IIS has a "point and click" interface *and* comes installed in most Windows installations and still holds a minority share.
I don't think you understand why Apache is where it is. And it's *hardly* because there's no competition for it. It's fought web servers backed by billion dollar companies to come out on top. There's a reason for that and it's not just because it's free as there's other free web servers that also hold a tiny fraction of the market.
To do anything other than host a simple html site requires complexity. Some thing's can't be made any simpler than they are with trading off far too much flexibility.
If all you need to do is host a simple static website on your PC that has a static IP, then use the right tool for the job. Trying to make Apache something it's not just so that it's easy to do one thing to make 0.01% of the market happy is ridiculous.
"If population is declining, and there are no jobs, and no people to live in the homes, then let's raze the land and return it to natural habitat. Hell, I say with a significant portion of a development is empty, pay the people to move, and raze the whole thing. "
So the families who did the right thing paid their mortgages are now going to be forced out of their homes by some government social engineering project.
If it was China doing it people would be screaming tyranny and chest puffing about how much better the US is because it doesn't do things like that.
Apparently it does do that and has has wide support from its population.
"Oh, by the way: Portland (and Oregon at-large) pretty much pioneered the urban planning and growth boundary system *IN THE US* that you are cheerleading with your car-hate and enviro-spew in the 1970s."
"The problem, of course, is that some old geezer isn't going to want to move out of the old neighborhood and will end up being the only one in the middle of nowhere but still expect his mail to be delivered to his door."
Damn straight, who does he think he is - he should accept the new way of thinking "Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz" - The community comes before the individual.
Slashdot Mirror
Who the hell buys US cars??
I don't even think that people in the US do anymore!
It absolutely *stuns* me, I mean jaw drops, cannot move holy shit WTFOMGBBQ that still to this day after millions of man hours dedicated to and billions of pages written dissecting each and every micrometer of the global mess that is known as the financial meltdown. That there are *still* individuals such as yourself so self assured in your absolute delusion drooling "freddie and fannie forced to give loans" even makes sense, let alone was what brought the entire worlds economy to its knees.
Truly you are an intellectual giant. To somehow miss the entirety of the worlds press output and conclusions in dissecting the cause of the crash and manage to attribute it to a few US home mortgages that were given due to some legislation in the 90's takes some *serious* mental horsepower.
Here's the cause of the financial meltdown for you in easy to digest pieces.
1. Banks begin selling mortgages directly to investors.
2. This makes banks a huge amount of money, and so they start handing out mortgages willy nilly so they can sell even more, even to people who they would *never* have lent to before. But now they don't care AS THEY DON"T OWN THE MORTGAGES. -- see that's the bit where they *chose* to give out the crap mortgages. But of course now they try and blame it on the government so corporate lick-spittle dimwits would sell themselves down the river to protect said banks.
3. They package these BAD mortgages up as AAA rated mortgages with the complicity of criminally fradulent ratings agencies.
4. They sell these corrupt mortgage package on to investors rated AAA when in fact they should be rated -ZZZ GTFO.
5. Investors then on sell them, sometimes even *back* to the banks, the packages stop representing any sort of true wealth at all and become fake paper wealth, only held up by the stupidity of huge investment firms and financial institutions.
5. A few people default on their mortgages...investors suddenly realize that their AAA rated mortgages actually are mixed up with extremely high risk mortgages as well.
6. Investors shit themselves and sell them ASAP.
7. A couple of mammoth financial institutions take big hits.
8. AIG insures said institutions...except AIG actually doesn't actually have any money to give them.
9. Banks, financial "institutions" and half of wall street are stuck with a few trillion dollars worth of "toxic" assets, that is packages that are so extraordinarily complicated and recursive that noone knows who actually owns what and how much is real wealth and how much is fake ponzi bullshit scheme wealth.
10. Dimwits somehow blame all this on some ridiculous 1990's legislation that doesn't even GOVERN 70% of the institutions at the top of the problem.
11. Thieves in said institutions use the ensuing shit fight by useful idiots blaming the "over entitled poor people" to stage the biggest plundering of a public treasury in the history of the world.
12. Occasional dimwits continue to blame the government - in some sort of bizarro world NOT for their lack of regulation in order to prevent such an enormous pyramid scheme from being concocted in the first place...but for somehow *forcing* these institutions to fraudulently package shit mortgages that they *chose* to give out as AAA rated investments, making trillions of dollars profit by doing so and trying to pass them along before it all fell apart as is typical of any ponzi scheme.
13. Give it up and learn FFS.
That said the Federal Reserve bears alot of responsibility for the low cost of money making credit to easy to get for the large firms. Of course the fact that the VERY SAME large firms make up the majority of the seats on the Federal Reserve makes blaming the government even stupider.
Except of course for giving the Federal Reserve that sort of power in the first place. Which is a call for more regulation...not less.
Wow! A person choosing what to consume into their own body is a privilege granted by some nebulous higher authority?
Granted by whom? Who is above the individual? The "Community"? That's called facism and it was the motto of facists in the '30s "Community before the individual".
Certain actions are restricted but there's no such thing as a "privilege" when it comes to the relationship between the individual and the state. The state exists because of the individual. The individual cedes certain rights to the state. At no time does the state grant "privileges". The state doesn't have that power except in the small minds of power worshippers.
Why yes, yes I do, much more than you do it would seem.
$14 trillion is your DEBT you illiterate. Debt is money owed which is a fraction of your total obligations.
The government does more than just borrow money it creates programs to spend that money on and each American (currently) also has half a million dollars worth of *obligations* to pay for. The government can't put 100% of the money it receives into paying back debt without taking money away from it's programs and services. Which is why I clearly stated that it would take over a century to pay that 14 trillion down even with 100% of Americans wages going in as the government also has to pay for it's obligations (Social Security, Medicare, Military, Beauracracy) which are increasing rapidly over time, even if they didn't allow new spending starting now.
Your current tax level isn't even coming *close* to paying for the governments obligations *let alone* making repayments on the debt and interest owed on bonds. Which is why your government has borrowed nearly 10 trillion dollars from the citizens of China, Russia, Japan, Saudi Arabia and others in the last decade to keep the good times going.
So you're either going to raise taxes to an astronomical level, slash and burn your government services and keep taxes at the same level or do the tried and true practice of bankrupt governments and devalue your currency or worse simply default.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-05-28-debt_N.htm
Comprehension is good.
If you lose your job because of your absolutely woeful ability to spell and write a cohesive block of text and then fall critically ill you will change your tune.
You types always do.
Let me guess you are a middle class twenty something borne out of middle class white collar parents and have cruised through middle class high schools into college and out into the world of IT weighed down by the fevered ego and irrational belief that it was all made possible only through your own rugged individualism and determination against all odds(TM)?
Such a pity.
Yes and it always depends on the person defining the parameters of "better" as to what "better" is. They always tend to make sure they're in the group that's "better".
Apparently you define being "better" as "scoring high" in things that makes you a better person then someone who doesn't. Of course I assume you'll have a a self styled list of things that do and don't count. I also didn't actually think your parameters would be quite so pathetic as that...
Yes some people are better than others but then here we are again...You assume your one of those people don't you?
Here's a hint for you *everyone here thinks that* but it can't be true for everyone can it?
I'd say a pretty huge portion of people would say your arrogance and assumption that you're "better" than nearly everyone else makes you nothing but an arse.
But then we're all beneath you so it doesn't matter does it?
Your countries financial problems are unsolvable by anybody, let alone the average man on the street short of revolution French or Russian style to make the bastards who did this to you all pay and I'm not even talking about the banks.
Even if every man, woman and child in your country starting today gave 100% of their income to your Federal Government and your government approved no new spending it would take over a century to pay down the existing debt while continuing to meet the governments current obligations.
The only way out is for your government to massively devalue your currency or default.
Yes actually it really is *that bad*. This isn't some magical movie where everything just works itself out. Nor is it some baseless scare mongering, your citizens and government have been maintaining their lifestyle and country on cheap Asian credit for the last decade. And now they're getting very very nervous about your ability to meet your obligations to them.
At best they'll just cut you off but continue to hold onto their US TBills, that's at best and it's still going to hurt you all *a lot*.
And to answer your question, the "Marijuana issue" costs you billions of dollars each year. Your spending tens of billions of dollars worth of Asians money every year - money that you have to pay interest on on this "Marijuana issue".
Good luck for the coming few years America.
Let me guess...the "majority of people" doesn't include you does it?
Funny that.
Well it would seem you're very very wrong...
Male Circumcision Reduces Risk of Genital Herpes and HPV Infection, but not Syphilis
That's the problem with science, it's just so hard to use it to make cheap political attacks. One day you're right with science on your side, the next day your so very very ignorant.
I can imagine myself...transported back to pre-civil war America.
"Evn" making impassioned arguments against the norths irritation with having to compete with the cheap goods produced by slaves and indentured servants coming out of the south.
"The masses have spoken, cheap cotton is here to stay! Citizens of the north will just have to compete!"
Are you aware that you're expecting western workers to compete with, in part, factories full of Chinese political prisoners and indentured servants? As quite a few Chinese factories are. So why is government regulation ridiculous? Your expecting the west to compet with Chinese Government factories, not a peep about that, but we should bend over backwards to accomodate them? Try go into China or India and see if they have the same open trade - sell your countrymen out for a few cents per widget policy - as your own country does.
Now given that they protect their borders fairly vigorously and are currently moving most of the real wealth out of the US and into their own, doesn't it stand to reason that *their* policy (which is the same policy that the US grew to power using) is better at enriching a country than the ridiculous "ideal" that almost uncompromisingly white collar middle class westerns espouse is?
When the US has gone the way of Argentina as it rapidly is...or god forbid the USSR, and China and India are booming because of their pragmatic often heavy handed trading policies I wonder if the western "open trade at any cost with anyone..no matter how lopsided" crowd will be proud of themselves? Perhaps, as then they'll be able to have the opportunity to work in a factory for $3 an hour as their ideology comes full circle and the Chinese Government starts opening factories for you to work in.
Oh wait it all ready is http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/27/AR2008012702380.html
Wouldn't it stand to reason to have a trading policy that would demand that *China* operate in a competitive fashion if it wants to sell it's goods in your country? Given that *without* the US they were nothing but a poor struggling agrarian country anyway.
India's a slightly different kettle of fish, but 99% of manufacturing is done in China and you referred to physical goods so...
I posted this before and I'll post it again.
So far in the last 12 months I've had three side projects that projects that were outsourced but for whatever reason such a mess was made of them that the clients have brought them to us to fix at a higher than normal rate.
My employer's now collaborating with an "reverse" outsourcing mob who've set themselves up to help people bring their failing outsourced projects back and are getting a fair bit of work through it.
To be honest, the quality of code I'm seeing is easily the worst I've ever seen and that includes half-assed open source projects. Whether that's because it's just "sweatshop code" as one client put it or they are attempting to write super advanced AI code generators and using them to generate the code...and failing miserably, I don't know. But it's terrible. From the complete lack of imagination and forward thinking in design, right down to the god awful highly inconsistently cased variable names.
Remember this is *three* different projects from three different Indian companies theoretically written by three different sets of programmers. The code all looks and feels the same, which leads me to believe there's something going on industry wide over there. What that is I have no idea but they need to fix it quick smart as the industry as a whole is getting a bit of a reputation.
What I do know is people are willing to pay much more once they've tried outsourcing and failed.
Those that don't go out of business in the mean time that is.
(Yes I'm sure there's some top quality code coming out of India, I doubt most of it is written by the sorts of companies in this articlee).
This is not insightful it's -1 stupid.
The US GOVERNMENT through it's various institutes bankrolls 90% of all core medical research in the US.
Pharmacompanies research how to market and sell that research to Americans.
You are not, nor anywhere *near* in a hundred lifetimes of saving at your current pay rate being "the rich".
If you are a programmer, Manager or *anything* to do with the nuts and bolts of an operation you are smack bang in the middle class. The fact that you associate yourself with "the rich" would I'm sure have them laughing.
First the "brutal Islamic Theocracy" is about half as "brutal" as the "Brutal Facist Dictator" that the US installed was for starters so if you're a yank you've got very little room to talk about the state of governance in that country.
Second I never said anything about being "genetically predisposed" to one view or another so you're talking out of your backside. As if you can be genetically predisposed to a political view, talk about racism.
The people who openly supported democracy in the 1960's were killed by those who (with the full backing of the US and UK) did not. So were many of their children. Out of the remainder of people against the Shah many ran for the cover of extreme religion and many continued to survive the Dictatorship by appearing supportive or keeping their heads down...as people do when being subjected to the horrors of tyranny. Finally the US puppet and his US trained secret police became far too unbearable for both groups of the remainder and they joined forces and overthrew him and his small group of followers. Unfortunately for the pro-democracy faction due to the purges they numbered many less than those who had run for extreme religion who cited "democracy" as the reason they had had all this tyranny, suffering and bloodshed - who had largely been left alone by the Shah - and so lacking numbers were forced out.
*One generation later* the remainders children are becoming politically aware, the old guard of "conservatives" many of whom are anti-democracy *because* of what they saw and lived though LAST TIME they tried it are dying off and losing political power and lo and behold...a pro-democracy movement driven by this generation is afoot.
This has all happened within two generations, the boomer generation that is still alive *today* were the 20 somethings when the US's disgusting dictator was torturing and executing them and their parents and enforcing tyranny on them. It's *their* children now that are the twenty somethings who are starting with a clean slate and don't have the baggage that their parents do which allowed the "anti-democracy / anti-US" extremists to hold power for awhile, that are pushing for democracy again.
Regarding the Soviet Union...So 70 years ago the pro-democracy agitators were purged then their grandchildren demanded democracy.
Thanks for making my argument.
The Iranians have every right to be sore at the US, half the people alive today in Iran suffered under the US's murderous puppet. Only the most blind nationalist would say otherwise.
The Soviet Union had a beautifully crafted Constitution guaranteeing many rights, even more than the US Bill of rights and Constitution.
So yes you are correct, rights come from a peoples willingness to enforce them a piece of paper means nothing. Usually that enforcement is against their own Government, sometimes it's against other factions among them, other times it's against foreign powers.
Governments have little to do with rights, it's what the people around you think and the way they behave that matters.
"I think that's a bit glib. At least a significant portion of the Blackwater people, at least the ones actually on the ground, are just former soldiers who traded up to an employer who would give them better body armor"
And a $50,000 a year pay rise.
Most soldiers can't wait to go home. Out of the soldiers who finish their service there's a tiny fraction that can't wait to get back and make $80k a year and not be bound by *any* law or code regarding their behavior.
Blackwater et al are largely a self selecting group, those that *want* to be in a war zone.
Any if they *choose* to go back into a war zone - not under the flag of their government but under a private army then it doesn't have anything to do with body armour (or patriotism) at all.
It's money. Or something worse - the thrill.
So yes they're mercenaries by definition.
Well your sentiments are correct, but your a little off on the "bogeyman" thing.
The baby boomer generation were the ones subjected to the decade of tyranny care of the US government. *As if* they're just going to forget that, anyone who survived through it was either a supporter of the tyranical regime or a sly dog but either way everyone was touched by it, at the very least knowing someone who was tortured and or executed.
And there would certainly be a few more pro-democracy agitators among that generation if they hadn't all been executed by the American created, trained, funded and equipped "SAVAK" secret police, designed specifically to keep the pro-democracy dissidents down. Guess they didn't see what the unintended consequence of that would be come 1979!
Perhaps they have good reason to see America as the "bogeyman". Just like you would if China or Russia did the same thing to *you*.
Empathy, it's not hard.
Well the rest of the world (TM) is pretty used to that coming from your direction so in a perfect world it would be a nice little wake up call to how it feels and that perhaps you should stop doing things like that to the rest of us. Of course it's only the barest of tastes as they didn't kidnap and export him to Syria or Egypt to be imprisoned and tortured for the rest of his life, or better yet simply assassinate him as your country has so often done to people who it doesn't like in other countries.
Not even we who you consider your "allies" are immune from that!
They're obviously amateurs anyway as they didn't even try and assassinate your political leaders or overthrow your government and install a murderous dictator and then supply him with billions of dollars of military hardware and setup and train the most brutal secret police of modern history to keep you inline at your expense - like your government did to them.
Wherever your CIA goes tyranny follows, always.
Unfortunately for Americans like any monster they're turning their attention toward their masters more and more these days.
Well of course they did, given that the CIA was training them on US soil:
"In March 1955, the Army colonel was "replaced with a more permanent team of five career CIA officers, including specialists in covert operations, intelligence analysis, and counterintelligence,including Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf " who "trained virtually all of the first generation of SAVAK personnel." "
"The agency also closely collaborated with the American CIA by sending their agents to an air force base in New York to share and discuss interrogation tactics.[15]"
What Interrogation tactics?
"Brute force was supplemented with the bastinado; sleep deprivation; extensive solitary confinement; glaring searchlights; standing in one place for hours on end; nail extractions; snakes (favored for use with women); electrical shocks with cattle prods, often into the rectum; cigarette burns; sitting on hot grills; acid dripped into nostrils; near-drownings; mock executions; and an electric chair with a large metal mask to muffle screams while amplifying them for the victim. This latter contraption was dubbed the Apollo--an allusion to the American space capsules. Prisoners were also humiliated by being raped, urinated on, and forced to stand naked.[10] Despite the new 'scientific' methods, the torture of choice remained the traditional bastinado" used to beat soles of the feet. The "primary goal" of those using the bastinados "was to locate arms caches, safe houses and accomplices ..." [11]"
Those "Interrogation" methods sound *awfully* familiar don't they?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAVAK
There's a dozen free simple "point and click" web servers already in existence. IIS has a "point and click" interface *and* comes installed in most Windows installations and still holds a minority share.
I don't think you understand why Apache is where it is. And it's *hardly* because there's no competition for it. It's fought web servers backed by billion dollar companies to come out on top. There's a reason for that and it's not just because it's free as there's other free web servers that also hold a tiny fraction of the market.
To do anything other than host a simple html site requires complexity. Some thing's can't be made any simpler than they are with trading off far too much flexibility.
If all you need to do is host a simple static website on your PC that has a static IP, then use the right tool for the job. Trying to make Apache something it's not just so that it's easy to do one thing to make 0.01% of the market happy is ridiculous.
"If population is declining, and there are no jobs, and no people to live in the homes, then let's raze the land and return it to natural habitat. Hell, I say with a significant portion of a development is empty, pay the people to move, and raze the whole thing. "
So the families who did the right thing paid their mortgages are now going to be forced out of their homes by some government social engineering project.
If it was China doing it people would be screaming tyranny and chest puffing about how much better the US is because it doesn't do things like that.
Apparently it does do that and has has wide support from its population.
What a disturbing trend in attitudes.
The community doesn't exist for the governments benefit. Well not in your average western society anyway, though that is rapidly changing.
I think he was being specific to the US.
"Oh, by the way: Portland (and Oregon at-large) pretty much pioneered the urban planning and growth boundary system *IN THE US* that you are cheerleading with your car-hate and enviro-spew in the 1970s."
"The problem, of course, is that some old geezer isn't going to want to move out of the old neighborhood and will end up being the only one in the middle of nowhere but still expect his mail to be delivered to his door."
Damn straight, who does he think he is - he should accept the new way of thinking "Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz" - The community comes before the individual.
Could she move to Mexico and get away from it?