the Astrodome, and a tilt-a-whirl. We're gonna spin those cows 'til they puke twice, once for each stomach. Then we're gonna randomly shove them out into the dark on the fifty-yard line and wait a couple hours until they settle. Then we're gonna take an infrared photo from the top of the dome facing down. And then, you're gonna bring me Kari from the Mythbusters and I'm gonna give you the photo.
At that point, I don't care about the damn cows. Knock yourself out.
US Customs just outsourced their IT infrastructure design and maintenance to a shop where only 15% of the employees are US citizens.
I keep getting called a racist and a "jingoist" when I point this out, which is hilarious considering half my family are not US citizens, nor by the old Southern rules would I be considered white.
It seems that we are more afraid of paying a living wage than handing the keys to our house over to strangers.
It's not that you should be living in poverty. It's that that poor Chinese bastard -- and my heart truly bleeds for him -- deserves more.
If you studied in school, if you hold down a "real" job that does more than just shuffle paper, if you do an honest day's work, then you deserve your nice house.
Why, because you're an entitled spoiled brat? No. Because that nice house is just a fair share of the wealth a modern worker produces. That house is the beginning of the return on your educational investment you made for the rest of us.
When you were a child, we made you an explicit promise. Don't give us trouble, follow our rules, work with us, learn what we teach you and when you are grown and capable, you'll get a job that pays you enough to be a full member of this society. Maybe not opulence, but certainly housing, transportation, food, medicine and time enough to have a life.
If you're posting on Slashdot, chances are good you held up your end of the deal.
For the past thirty years, I've followed the growth of a cancerous meme that has become a monster. Whether it's Carl Icahn or Robert Kiyosaki or the rest of that ilk, they argue "Nobody owes you anything. The world doesn't owe you a living. Your credentials are meaningless. You only 'deserve' what you can get."
We're supposed to be coders here. We should be able to understand the consequences of rule sets. Idealism breeds happiness. Cynicism breeds destruction.
If we all agree to work together, if we keep our compacts with our young, if our cops believe they are servants of justice, if our doctors believe they have a sacred calling, if our teachers believe they are keepers of the flame of knowledge, if we fairly share the wealth we all produce, then we will have a society that will be the envy of the world -- like it used to be.
If we all decide to be cynics, if we all decide it's every man for himself, if we believe that school is for suckers, if we idolize men who make billions by clever paper shuffling or outright theft, if our cops are in it for the power, our doctors for the money and our teachers believe themselves fools for their career choice, then we're going to wake up in a failed society like every other third-world shithole I've visited.
Idealistic societies that work together and hold to their ideals produce the stability that makes the building of wealth across generations possible.
Cynical, corrupt societies that don't honor their commitments to each other fall apart after a generation or two. The decay becomes amazing. Witness the Banana Republics of South America, the bottomless pits of Southeast Asia, Russia, and lately -- us.
You put a kickass powertrain under the crappy Corolla exterior and line the exterior shell with kevlar. Just cause it looks wimpy and crappy doesn't mean it has to BE wimpy and crappy.
Cheer Up, JollyReaper. We've been through worse than this.
Right now we're fat, slow and stupid. That's bad. People like to point fingers at Bush, but Bush is just a symptom, not a cause. Any people dumb enough to almost elect Bush deserve to have him as president.
The good news is we're basically bears. We've been fat, slow and stupid before. The good news is we can afford to be fat, slow and stupid. We're not Japan. We don't HAVE to trade with the outside world. We can feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, and get by on the oil we have. We can roll the clock back to a lifestyle of a century ago and get by.
We'll have disasters, of course. Haymarket riots all over again. We'll burn a few of our cities down in frustration. People will die, but it's happened before. We lost, what, 25,000 people at Gettysburg alone?
We may be headed into another great depression. I actually believe we're going to have a "soft" second American revolution, something a little stronger than the New Deal. We're going to default on the national debt. We're struggling to make the interest payments alone, and all it's going to take is one populist to say "Why are we sending the Chinese all our money?"
Like any bankruptcy that came from idiocy, we'll learn and emerge stronger on the other side. There will be domestic riots and mayhem. We'll learn to refrain from foreign adventures unless there's no choice. When people learn to demand more from their government, we'll get it.
When the misery is bad enough, people will learn. I just think we may have to redo the 1890s and the 1930s to make that happen.
If you stop and look around at what's happening, it terrifies you. So you quit looking and try to kill or at least discredit the messenger.
The last time I was in an emergency room I was escorting someone with uncontrolled bleeding. I had done my boy scout best, but I am not a medic. It was a three-hour wait while the orderlies joked about how much weed they were planning to smoke that weekend. When I asked for a doctor, they referred me to a security guard. I mentioned the incident to my doctor at my next visit. She winced and said "Yeah, we avoid that place like the plague when we can." It's the largest, best-funded hospital in the area.
The last time I asked a cop for directions in a strange city -- wearing business casual clothes, mind you -- he placed his hand on his weapon and told me in rude terms he wasn't a tour guide. I'd like to think he was just a random jackass, but the attitude smelled like he was trying to bluff through insecurity and fear.
The last time I went on a business trip, I watched a TSA agent browbeat and threaten a small clumsy woman with incarceration if she didn't take her shoes off faster. When I spoke to his supervisor, he called over an armed officer in uniform and threatened to arrest me. The supervisor caved and apologized when I pointed out the surveillance camera recording the incident.
My kids' teachers have that vacant look of learned helplessness in their eyes. They were idealists once. It's been beaten out of them.
There's a major elevated highway in my city. It's been basically condemned and it's still in use. When it falls, there's a large number of buildings and thoroughfares that it will take with it. Everybody knows. No one can do anything. I try to avoid it when I can.
Forget McCain and Obama. We need a seance with Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln and both Roosevelts, Teddy and Frank. I honestly think it would take all six to get us out of this mess, after they kicked all of our respective asses for letting it get this bad.
You're not looking at this systemically
on
My Job Went To India
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I entirely agree that individually you need to be as valuable as possible. That's why all the CCNPs I know are working to finish their CCIEs and the CCIEs are working on their Juniper/Avaya certs. All of this is on top of their technical degrees.
The problem is that you and your "invaluable" skills really aren't being taken into account. It doesn't matter if firing you would cripple the company because we're typically thinking 90 days at a time. If you replace a $150K CCIE with a $20K wanna-be, then you as a manager can claim a $130K dollar "savings." Hooray for you, here's your bonus.
When that $20K wonder takes all of your customers down -- and here's the beauty part -- you aren't blamed for it. No one is currently drawing the line between your $130K savings and the customers that walked with their millions of dollars.
The really scary part? I frequently work on municipal, hospital and 911 systems. Infrastructure disasters here can cost lives. I've watched the cheap guys take down emergency systems, and I tried not to think about the calls that were getting dropped as I fought to get them back online. I push the frantic calls for help out of my mind, because if I let my imagination run with what an unanswered 911 call could mean...
The cheap guy's response as I berated him for putting lives at risk? Basically, what do I care? It's not my country.
Every one of the guys I know are putting in 60-hours weeks routinely. Hours like that mean divorces. They mean early heart attacks. They mean neglected children left to raise themselves. They mean broken homes with the societal carnage that goes with it.
It's the classic tragedy of the commons. The people who lead our country are insulated from the carnage associated with gutting our workforce. In the meantime, my country is falling apart. I've got a CS degree from a prestigious college, a CCIE, and a decade of international experience and even I am feeling the heat. I weep for those not as lucky as I.
We're gutting our middle class. We just are, and if you don't see it, it's probably because you're young. I hear your "Well, it's not a problem if you're the best of the best" bravado, and I wonder what you propose to do with the other 99% percent of the population, because they're not just going to just disappear.
I was downtown during the LA Riots of '92. Rodney King and Daryl Gates might have been the spark that set it off, but that riot burned on the fuel of unemployed people. Last time I was in LA, more than a decade later, the damage still hadn't been repaired.
I'd really prefer not to see that happen on a country-wide scale. But me and the other gray-hairs are worried, especially the people I know out in LA. We're getting that "vibe" again.
Things are stretched beyond breaking. Our teachers have flat-out given up. Our cops are showing the sort of violent and unstable behavior you would expect from PTSD. The wave of earnest enlistees that flooded the military after 9/11 have become the sort of weary jaded bastards that could put the most burned-out Vietnam Vet to shame.
We are, for the first time in history, routinely using mercenaries in almost every level of our military and law enforcement. I'm seeing military families, families with generations of service, hang up their uniforms and forbid their children from serving.
Our hospitals are literally allowing people to die from neglect in the ER. Our bridges are falling down. Our electrical grid is one snapped breaker from going dark.
Katrina should have been our moment of clarity. The fact that it so clearly wasn't scares me to death.
But you go ahead, and keep humming that "I'm the best, I'm the best, I'm the best" mantra. Keep closing your eyes as tight as you can and shut your ears tighter. Find a good teddy bear, because the old man, the old man has seen all this before.
Since the police like to play at being the military, I'd suggest they take a page from our manual and learn this lesson well:
"The Honor of the Unit Lies with Each Man."
If ONE of my men is wrong, then the whole group is wrong, and I'M wrong because I'm his commander. Get this, and get this straight. You clean your damn house.
When a cop goes wrong, I damn well expect his partner to slap cuffs on him, and if the partner doesn't, then the partner is culpable and just as guilty. If you see wrong, and you don't oppose it with everything you've got, then YOU are wrong, and worse, you're wrong under color of authority.
As someone with a military background, I'm sick of hearing this "just a couple bad apples" shit. The fact that you tolerate the bad apples, that bad officers are not weeded out on the damn spot, makes the whole unit bad.
"So, your argument is that if we had stopped trading with China, the Chinese government would have been more open today and Tienanmen Square students would be heroes?"
No, my argument is that they would have considerably fewer weapons, our children's bloodstreams would have lower levels of lead, and a lot of our dogs would still be alive.
My argument is that trade with these countries leaves us bleeding wealth and that we need to stop making deals that enrich our politicians and CEOs while gutting our nation's ability to take care of itself. We have lost our manufacturing capabilities. We have lost an entire generation of engineers, academics and researchers.
We have, on the other hand, gained more powerful enemies. We've gained enemies that have trained right alongside us. We've gained enemies that now have the wealth to build dangerous military machines. We've gained enemies that have the money to bribe our elected officials out from under us.
Not trading with Cuba absolutely brought down Castro. Not trading with Cuba kept Castro a minor irritant, rather than a full-fledged threat 90 miles off our coast. Not trading with Cuba kept Cuba limping along, rather than arming themselves with their own fleet of MiGs. Not trading with Cuba meant Fidel hand to spend his time coping with political threats at home, rather than planning foreign adventures.
Just because you're doing business with someone doesn't mean it's a good idea. Sometimes doing business with someone is the worst idea you can have. Go spend some time in Vegas and you'll see what I mean.
"Indian women are more likely to be freed if we continue trading with India than if we stop trading with India."
That is the classical argument and it does appeal. I'd very much like to believe it's true. If we simply expose them to a better way, sell them coke and blue jeans, play them some rock and roll, and show them some movies, they'll chill the hell out, buy a clue and peace will bust out all over. This is the specific argument the State Department makes regarding trade with Saudi Arabia and China.
It's an experiment that has been tried and empirically disproven. Religious police still patrol Saudi Arabia, our "best friends" in the region. The jets on 9/11 were flown by Saudis. The money that has poured into China did not go into increasing the quality of life. It went into buying an offensive military that scares the crap out of my friends in the Navy.
Trade simply enriches the ruling classes, and with their increased strength, they oppress their people and threaten their neighbors even more. When we connected China to the Internet, I remember the argument at the time was that "Information Wants to be Free," and that the truth would leak out.
I work with a number of young Chinese H1Bs. I've taught them in my classes. They're smart, wonderful people. And they were raised to believe that the students at Tiananmen Square were terrorists who got what they deserved.
We'd like to think that we're going to enlighten, educate, Hell, if it comes right down to it, seduce them into a better way. The problem is, our trade doesn't benefit their societies as a whole -- it only benefits the people who keep the profits. And those people are not interested in letting their slaves go.
They are, however, interested in pillaging their neighbors. I've even heard it argued that our trade is responsible for the atrocities in Burma and Darfur. If it wasn't for the money we give them, China wouldn't have the strength to backstop their pet monsters.
Out trade isn't dragging them kicking and screaming into the 21 century. It is, however, financing their conquests.
And I promise you, your best people were gone between the first and second round of layoffs. I can't tell you the number of hiring managers I've heard say "If they were any good, they'd already have a job."
There's a real bias against people looking for work who don't already have a job, and the good people know it. I remember one place where a friend of mine worked, the really valuable people were all gone with the first solid rumor of layoffs.
Here's the thing. Western Kids in the First World are taught to be inclusive. We are raised to believe diversity makes us stronger. We are raised in cultures that, at their finest, preach that all men are brothers. We are literally Children of the Renaissance and Children of the Enlightenment.
We forget that the Civilized World left India, China and the Middle East behind five hundred years ago. Third World cultures, feudal cultures, never had the struggles that dragged the First World out of the Darkness and into the Light. The Black Plague, the Magna Carta, the French Philosophers, the Reformation, the wave of popular rebellions that swept the First World and forged beliefs and ideas that you and I take for granted Never. Happened. There.
They still believe in owning people. I sat through college pitying my Indian friends, wondering when they were going to quit hiding in the library and start their lives. I found out when they graduated, got jobs and had wives delivered to them like cattle. Helpless little girls who had never left their fathers' houses now stranded in a foreign country to be mastered and raped by craven little boys with their first taste of power over another.
Boys who stammered like buffoons whenever any girl came round suddenly began barking orders at helpless and frightened women who cowed and jumped to obey. I never thought I'd see an honest-to-God slave in my life. I'd been a fool. What I had taken for awkwardness and shyness was simply the cowardice of bullies. Obsequious on the bottom, Vicious from the top.
They come from places where women are traded like pigs, where simply talking to a boy is a crime punishable by stoning. They still believe that certain people are descended from gods, and others are literally untouchable. All those wonderful First-World ideas -- equality before the law, self-determination -- don't exist over there. I watched people I thought were my friends in college turn into wife-beating monsters who bought and sold their own people into various levels of exploitation.
We allow these people to be included in the economies we built. We think we're being just, fair and inclusive.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a movie, it's film.
It's not a comic book, it's a graphic novel.
It's not sex, it's making love.
We're not a company, we're a group of people dedicated to pretentious bullshit.
Sure, like Eureka benefited so much by getting sponsored by Degree antiperspirant.
Ma Bell shutting down Bell Labs is like a kid quitting school so he can make more money as a waiter.
the Astrodome, and a tilt-a-whirl. We're gonna spin those cows 'til they puke twice, once for each stomach. Then we're gonna randomly shove them out into the dark on the fifty-yard line and wait a couple hours until they settle. Then we're gonna take an infrared photo from the top of the dome facing down. And then, you're gonna bring me Kari from the Mythbusters and I'm gonna give you the photo.
At that point, I don't care about the damn cows. Knock yourself out.
US Customs just outsourced their IT infrastructure design and maintenance to a shop where only 15% of the employees are US citizens.
I keep getting called a racist and a "jingoist" when I point this out, which is hilarious considering half my family are not US citizens, nor by the old Southern rules would I be considered white.
It seems that we are more afraid of paying a living wage than handing the keys to our house over to strangers.
It's not that you should be living in poverty. It's that that poor Chinese bastard -- and my heart truly bleeds for him -- deserves more.
If you studied in school, if you hold down a "real" job that does more than just shuffle paper, if you do an honest day's work, then you deserve your nice house.
Why, because you're an entitled spoiled brat? No. Because that nice house is just a fair share of the wealth a modern worker produces. That house is the beginning of the return on your educational investment you made for the rest of us.
When you were a child, we made you an explicit promise. Don't give us trouble, follow our rules, work with us, learn what we teach you and when you are grown and capable, you'll get a job that pays you enough to be a full member of this society. Maybe not opulence, but certainly housing, transportation, food, medicine and time enough to have a life.
If you're posting on Slashdot, chances are good you held up your end of the deal.
For the past thirty years, I've followed the growth of a cancerous meme that has become a monster. Whether it's Carl Icahn or Robert Kiyosaki or the rest of that ilk, they argue "Nobody owes you anything. The world doesn't owe you a living. Your credentials are meaningless. You only 'deserve' what you can get."
We're supposed to be coders here. We should be able to understand the consequences of rule sets. Idealism breeds happiness. Cynicism breeds destruction.
If we all agree to work together, if we keep our compacts with our young, if our cops believe they are servants of justice, if our doctors believe they have a sacred calling, if our teachers believe they are keepers of the flame of knowledge, if we fairly share the wealth we all produce, then we will have a society that will be the envy of the world -- like it used to be.
If we all decide to be cynics, if we all decide it's every man for himself, if we believe that school is for suckers, if we idolize men who make billions by clever paper shuffling or outright theft, if our cops are in it for the power, our doctors for the money and our teachers believe themselves fools for their career choice, then we're going to wake up in a failed society like every other third-world shithole I've visited.
Idealistic societies that work together and hold to their ideals produce the stability that makes the building of wealth across generations possible.
Cynical, corrupt societies that don't honor their commitments to each other fall apart after a generation or two. The decay becomes amazing. Witness the Banana Republics of South America, the bottomless pits of Southeast Asia, Russia, and lately -- us.
You put a kickass powertrain under the crappy Corolla exterior and line the exterior shell with kevlar. Just cause it looks wimpy and crappy doesn't mean it has to BE wimpy and crappy.
Is this the reason why you need a skull gun?
Cheer Up, JollyReaper. We've been through worse than this.
Right now we're fat, slow and stupid. That's bad. People like to point fingers at Bush, but Bush is just a symptom, not a cause. Any people dumb enough to almost elect Bush deserve to have him as president.
The good news is we're basically bears. We've been fat, slow and stupid before. The good news is we can afford to be fat, slow and stupid. We're not Japan. We don't HAVE to trade with the outside world. We can feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, and get by on the oil we have. We can roll the clock back to a lifestyle of a century ago and get by.
We'll have disasters, of course. Haymarket riots all over again. We'll burn a few of our cities down in frustration. People will die, but it's happened before. We lost, what, 25,000 people at Gettysburg alone?
We may be headed into another great depression.
I actually believe we're going to have a "soft" second American revolution, something a little stronger than the New Deal. We're going to default on the national debt. We're struggling to make the interest payments alone, and all it's going to take is one populist to say "Why are we sending the Chinese all our money?"
Like any bankruptcy that came from idiocy, we'll learn and emerge stronger on the other side. There will be domestic riots and mayhem. We'll learn to refrain from foreign adventures unless there's no choice. When people learn to demand more from their government, we'll get it.
When the misery is bad enough, people will learn. I just think we may have to redo the 1890s and the 1930s to make that happen.
But I'd prefer not to.
If you stop and look around at what's happening, it terrifies you. So you quit looking and try to kill or at least discredit the messenger.
The last time I was in an emergency room I was escorting someone with uncontrolled bleeding. I had done my boy scout best, but I am not a medic. It was a three-hour wait while the orderlies joked about how much weed they were planning to smoke that weekend. When I asked for a doctor, they referred me to a security guard. I mentioned the incident to my doctor at my next visit. She winced and said "Yeah, we avoid that place like the plague when we can." It's the largest, best-funded hospital in the area.
The last time I asked a cop for directions in a strange city -- wearing business casual clothes, mind you -- he placed his hand on his weapon and told me in rude terms he wasn't a tour guide. I'd like to think he was just a random jackass, but the attitude smelled like he was trying to bluff through insecurity and fear.
The last time I went on a business trip, I watched a TSA agent browbeat and threaten a small clumsy woman with incarceration if she didn't take her shoes off faster. When I spoke to his supervisor, he called over an armed officer in uniform and threatened to arrest me. The supervisor caved and apologized when I pointed out the surveillance camera recording the incident.
My kids' teachers have that vacant look of learned helplessness in their eyes. They were idealists once. It's been beaten out of them.
There's a major elevated highway in my city. It's been basically condemned and it's still in use. When it falls, there's a large number of buildings and thoroughfares that it will take with it. Everybody knows. No one can do anything. I try to avoid it when I can.
Forget McCain and Obama. We need a seance with Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln and both Roosevelts, Teddy and Frank. I honestly think it would take all six to get us out of this mess, after they kicked all of our respective asses for letting it get this bad.
I entirely agree that individually you need to be as valuable as possible. That's why all the CCNPs I know are working to finish their CCIEs and the CCIEs are working on their Juniper/Avaya certs. All of this is on top of their technical degrees.
The problem is that you and your "invaluable" skills really aren't being taken into account. It doesn't matter if firing you would cripple the company because we're typically thinking 90 days at a time. If you replace a $150K CCIE with a $20K wanna-be, then you as a manager can claim a $130K dollar "savings." Hooray for you, here's your bonus.
When that $20K wonder takes all of your customers down -- and here's the beauty part -- you aren't blamed for it. No one is currently drawing the line between your $130K savings and the customers that walked with their millions of dollars.
The really scary part? I frequently work on municipal, hospital and 911 systems. Infrastructure disasters here can cost lives. I've watched the cheap guys take down emergency systems, and I tried not to think about the calls that were getting dropped as I fought to get them back online. I push the frantic calls for help out of my mind, because if I let my imagination run with what an unanswered 911 call could mean...
The cheap guy's response as I berated him for putting lives at risk? Basically, what do I care? It's not my country.
Every one of the guys I know are putting in 60-hours weeks routinely. Hours like that mean divorces. They mean early heart attacks. They mean neglected children left to raise themselves. They mean broken homes with the societal carnage that goes with it.
It's the classic tragedy of the commons. The people who lead our country are insulated from the carnage associated with gutting our workforce. In the meantime, my country is falling apart. I've got a CS degree from a prestigious college, a CCIE, and a decade of international experience and even I am feeling the heat. I weep for those not as lucky as I.
We're gutting our middle class. We just are, and if you don't see it, it's probably because you're young. I hear your "Well, it's not a problem if you're the best of the best" bravado, and I wonder what you propose to do with the other 99% percent of the population, because they're not just going to just disappear.
I was downtown during the LA Riots of '92. Rodney King and Daryl Gates might have been the spark that set it off, but that riot burned on the fuel of unemployed people. Last time I was in LA, more than a decade later, the damage still hadn't been repaired.
I'd really prefer not to see that happen on a country-wide scale. But me and the other gray-hairs are worried, especially the people I know out in LA. We're getting that "vibe" again.
Things are stretched beyond breaking. Our teachers have flat-out given up. Our cops are showing the sort of violent and unstable behavior you would expect from PTSD. The wave of earnest enlistees that flooded the military after 9/11 have become the sort of weary jaded bastards that could put the most burned-out Vietnam Vet to shame.
We are, for the first time in history, routinely using mercenaries in almost every level of our military and law enforcement. I'm seeing military families, families with generations of service, hang up their uniforms and forbid their children from serving.
Our hospitals are literally allowing people to die from neglect in the ER. Our bridges are falling down. Our electrical grid is one snapped breaker from going dark.
Katrina should have been our moment of clarity. The fact that it so clearly wasn't scares me to death.
But you go ahead, and keep humming that "I'm the best, I'm the best, I'm the best" mantra. Keep closing your eyes as tight as you can and shut your ears tighter. Find a good teddy bear, because the old man, the old man has seen all this before.
I'm terrified of where this train is going.
Since the police like to play at being the military, I'd suggest they take a page from our manual and learn this lesson well:
"The Honor of the Unit Lies with Each Man."
If ONE of my men is wrong, then the whole group is wrong, and I'M wrong because I'm his commander. Get this, and get this straight. You clean your damn house.
When a cop goes wrong, I damn well expect his partner to slap cuffs on him, and if the partner doesn't, then the partner is culpable and just as guilty. If you see wrong, and you don't oppose it with everything you've got, then YOU are wrong, and worse, you're wrong under color of authority.
As someone with a military background, I'm sick of hearing this "just a couple bad apples" shit. The fact that you tolerate the bad apples, that bad officers are not weeded out on the damn spot, makes the whole unit bad.
"So, your argument is that if we had stopped trading with China, the Chinese government would have been more open today and Tienanmen Square students would be heroes?"
No, my argument is that they would have considerably fewer weapons, our children's bloodstreams would have lower levels of lead, and a lot of our dogs would still be alive.
My argument is that trade with these countries leaves us bleeding wealth and that we need to stop making deals that enrich our politicians and CEOs while gutting our nation's ability to take care of itself. We have lost our manufacturing capabilities. We have lost an entire generation of engineers, academics and researchers.
We have, on the other hand, gained more powerful enemies. We've gained enemies that have trained right alongside us. We've gained enemies that now have the wealth to build dangerous military machines. We've gained enemies that have the money to bribe our elected officials out from under us.
Not trading with Cuba absolutely brought down Castro. Not trading with Cuba kept Castro a minor irritant, rather than a full-fledged threat 90 miles off our coast. Not trading with Cuba kept Cuba limping along, rather than arming themselves with their own fleet of MiGs. Not trading with Cuba meant Fidel hand to spend his time coping with political threats at home, rather than planning foreign adventures.
Just because you're doing business with someone doesn't mean it's a good idea. Sometimes doing business with someone is the worst idea you can have. Go spend some time in Vegas and you'll see what I mean.
"Indian women are more likely to be freed if we continue trading with India than if we stop trading with India."
That is the classical argument and it does appeal. I'd very much like to believe it's true. If we simply expose them to a better way, sell them coke and blue jeans, play them some rock and roll, and show them some movies, they'll chill the hell out, buy a clue and peace will bust out all over. This is the specific argument the State Department makes regarding trade with Saudi Arabia and China.
It's an experiment that has been tried and empirically disproven. Religious police still patrol Saudi Arabia, our "best friends" in the region. The jets on 9/11 were flown by Saudis. The money that has poured into China did not go into increasing the quality of life. It went into buying an offensive military that scares the crap out of my friends in the Navy.
Trade simply enriches the ruling classes, and with their increased strength, they oppress their people and threaten their neighbors even more. When we connected China to the Internet, I remember the argument at the time was that "Information Wants to be Free," and that the truth would leak out.
I work with a number of young Chinese H1Bs. I've taught them in my classes. They're smart, wonderful people. And they were raised to believe that the students at Tiananmen Square were terrorists who got what they deserved.
We'd like to think that we're going to enlighten, educate, Hell, if it comes right down to it, seduce them into a better way. The problem is, our trade doesn't benefit their societies as a whole -- it only benefits the people who keep the profits. And those people are not interested in letting their slaves go.
They are, however, interested in pillaging their neighbors. I've even heard it argued that our trade is responsible for the atrocities in Burma and Darfur. If it wasn't for the money we give them, China wouldn't have the strength to backstop their pet monsters.
Out trade isn't dragging them kicking and screaming into the 21 century. It is, however, financing their conquests.
And I promise you, your best people were gone between the first and second round of layoffs. I can't tell you the number of hiring managers I've heard say "If they were any good, they'd already have a job."
There's a real bias against people looking for work who don't already have a job, and the good people know it. I remember one place where a friend of mine worked, the really valuable people were all gone with the first solid rumor of layoffs.
Here's the thing. Western Kids in the First World are taught to be inclusive. We are raised to believe diversity makes us stronger. We are raised in cultures that, at their finest, preach that all men are brothers. We are literally Children of the Renaissance and Children of the Enlightenment.
We forget that the Civilized World left India, China and the Middle East behind five hundred years ago. Third World cultures, feudal cultures, never had the struggles that dragged the First World out of the Darkness and into the Light. The Black Plague, the Magna Carta, the French Philosophers, the Reformation, the wave of popular rebellions that swept the First World and forged beliefs and ideas that you and I take for granted Never. Happened. There.
They still believe in owning people. I sat through college pitying my Indian friends, wondering when they were going to quit hiding in the library and start their lives. I found out when they graduated, got jobs and had wives delivered to them like cattle. Helpless little girls who had never left their fathers' houses now stranded in a foreign country to be mastered and raped by craven little boys with their first taste of power over another.
Boys who stammered like buffoons whenever any girl came round suddenly began barking orders at helpless and frightened women who cowed and jumped to obey. I never thought I'd see an honest-to-God slave in my life. I'd been a fool. What I had taken for awkwardness and shyness was simply the cowardice of bullies. Obsequious on the bottom, Vicious from the top.
They come from places where women are traded like pigs, where simply talking to a boy is a crime punishable by stoning. They still believe that certain people are descended from gods, and others are literally untouchable. All those wonderful First-World ideas -- equality before the law, self-determination -- don't exist over there. I watched people I thought were my friends in college turn into wife-beating monsters who bought and sold their own people into various levels of exploitation.
We allow these people to be included in the economies we built. We think we're being just, fair and inclusive.
They think we're fools.
And they're right.