I've had this discussion before and I'm sure I'll have it many times again: you can't say that Dell has better customer service than Apple just because Dell's customers quote (say) a 70% satisfaction rate while Apple's customers quote (say) a 75% satisfaction rate.
Even ignoring the possible statistical insignificance, it makes no sense. You're assuming that Apple and Dell users have the same demands and the same affinity for their brand, whereas the point raised by everyone who is disturbed by Apple brand fanaticism is that the Apple community is full of easily pleased brand fanatics. Dell isn't a fashion statement and it isn't a schoolboy accessory; it's a tool to get the job done. What is more, the software you want is probably available for Windows, so if you don't like Apple then you don't remain a dissatisfied Apple user: you switch. But a dissatisfied Dell user is far less likely to be able to switch to Apple.
Just consider the small proportion of customers who need to be mindless fanboys / tied down to Windows in order for the approval rating to shoot up the few percentage points required for Apple to seem always on top. From figures I recall, you're talking about a difference of 1 in 20 customers for Apple vs next "best", and you're still talking about 1 in 5 customers not pleased with Apple.
It was evident to me looking at the figures that it would be entirely without reason to use Apple's "1st in consumer satisfaction" as part of any purchasing decision. This is a great example of how statistics can be used to mislead.
Oh look, another Apple story designed to drum up attention for Apple who are releasing iProduct from Apple which gives you features that every other device has had for years but this one is an iProduct from Apple which makes it easier to use because there is value in electron-microscope-resolution on a 3" screen from Apple did I mention Apple are releasing a product for which demand is soooo high that Apple's servers are having trouble coping with the demand from Apple customers for HEY, did you know that some Apple products have been stolen before release and that this has nothing to do with Apple because Apple would never encourage that sort of thing mysteriously for a single product in multiple locations around the world especially because Apple is an ethical company at which people are so happy to work for Apple they literally jump for joy, sometimes quite high, or low, depending on how you look at it, anyway Apple is now giving bonuses to these workers for producing Apple products because it turns out that when you're required to live on-site and work 12 hours a day with little prospect for promotion what you want is a bit more money not freedom but paper which can be exchanged for a cardboard cutout of an iProduct because you can't afford the real thing anyway because Apple is an exclusive brand for exclusive people except when it wants to achieve a majority market then suddenly it's great how many people are buying it hey did I mention Apple products are in such demand that you can't actually order from Apple at the moment?
"Filter error: Too much repetition." Now to insert some random words here to bypass the filter, because comments are not articles and clearly require greater editorial oversight to prevent someone saying the same thing too much. You know, that company, the one I can't mention again otherwise I'm quite certain I'll be unable to post this. You know, the company with products in sooo much demand. The fruity one. You know... anyway, let's try again...
A lot of it has to do with how good the lawyers are for both sides. If there is a jury involved, it's all showmanship. Whoever puts on the best show wins.
There is modern belief that a jury is easier to trick with showmanship or be bribed than a judge is to demonstrate prejudice or be bribed. But it's a lot easier to bribe a single well-known person than 12 unrelated people, and it's a lot more likely that a judge will have particular character traits which every member of a jury will not. This is why we have juries.
IOW, the jury is a slice of society; the judge is an element of one part of society. I understand that the US corrupts jury randomness by allowing lawyers way too much input into jury selection but this isn't an inherent problem with the jury system. The jurors I sat with when I was on a jury were far from stupid - indeed, part of our discussion was on the relative showmanship of the two lawyers and identifying where there were attempts to appeal to prejudice.
It is said that a jury comprises 12 men too stupid to get out of jury duty. And the world comprises 6 billion schmucks too stupid to jump off a cliff, right?
Well, I did, and it follows the model of every on-the-streets pro-capitalism article published about any centrally planned economy since the US first started declaring the USSR its sworn enemy. The model goes like this:
(1) Take half a dozen willing emigrants and start the ball rolling by mentioning random irrelevant luxuries which they enjoy now, such as strawberries in springtime or the ability to watch a different set of propaganda on TV;
(2) Advance to the meat of your story: the centrally planned economy is so corrupt that no-one gets compensation for their work and everyone would starve if they followed the official methods;
(3) Ask them for stories about how they implemented petty capitalism to survive, because you cannot survive without capitalism;
(4) Add emotive rather than descriptive language to illustrate just how hard even fairly routine actions were - e.g. fishing is always in "treacherous waters". A staple is that goods are always carried one hundred miles across a mine-filled swamp on a unicycle;
(5) Once you've built empathy with these heroes of the American dream, describe how crackdowns on and confiscations of their justly earnt property make petty capitalism impossible;
(6) Round off with one party official making a delicious quote describing how great the system is and insisting that crackdowns on capitalism are moral for added "OMG the humanity!".
The inevitable conclusion from such articles is: everyone bar Party officials who hasn't already escaped from the regime must now be dying or dead, which is an obvious nonsense. Thus the article must be exaggerating or non-representative.
But at least the article givs a hint of the elephant in the room: sanctions and US military opposition. No country on this earth exists well when it is faced with those two hurdles.
Next, we can move on to how many democracies or tolerable governments (from the PoV of the people) the US overthrows for something much worse - Kim could never dream about holding more than his own countrymen under his thumb. We can talk about currency devaluation in the West - both jumps in specific countries and the imaginary currency by fiat of most Western nations which is devalued in a constant trickle. We can then move on to how collusion between US government and corporation has destroyed the savings of US workers.
By the template of this article, you are the successful Party official, achieving comfort through a combination of intelligence and conformance, proclaiming the greatness of your government while it craps on the majority of the world's people.
Maybe it would be better if such hate speech was illegal,
No it wouldn't. No it isn't.
"God hates fags" is like "magic unicorns hate puppies". Even Phelps knows it, and has indicated it's not he who hates but magic^WGod.
The right to come out with harmless (from the PoV of rocking the boat carrying the elite) nonsense is well recognised in US law, and is part of the distraction which enables the government to say "see! you are free! You can call Bush a moron! You can call blacks niggers! How can this not mean you are free???"
I assume your thought processes are focusing on the life of one young middle class dude in suburban US and contrasting with the guy facing public execution in NK. You need to begin by concentrating on the hundreds of millions of people subjugated as a result of US influence in foreign nations.
Then move on to the wage slaves of America: work 2 mindless jobs 10+ hours a day and go home to watch biased news and lowbrow entertainment. Insultingly tell them they are free because they have the power to whine, even though they can never speak loudly enough for their words to be of any consequence. Is this what makes their lives so wonderful over those who aren't allowed to whine (to equal effect)?
(The US is still better for workers because they have protections and collective bargaining powers from the remnants of a time when the US was more free and/or had to make concessions to the worker so he didn't look too far to the East, not because they have the illusion of free speech today.)
I wasn't making any assumptions about your beliefs about the US beyond poking a little fun at your citing the very US-centric Wikipedia;-). I was trying to illustrate that the US achieves the same control by different methods lest the wrong problem be identified. It is not that NK is a prison camp, it is that much of the world is a prison camp.
Hopefully implied (and made explicit in a later post) is that China is just somewhere else on the spectrum of methods to achieve the same end.
I've entered the US dozens of times, pre and post 9/11 and I've never been interrogated.
So you've never been asked whether you were a Nazi, whether you are a Communist, what your purpose is in the US, where you're staying, how you got to know those in the US you're meeting, etc.? I know some of these questions won't be asked to/everyone/, but some are on the standard ex-INS visa waiver form. Or maybe since this is usually done with checkboxes and a smiling man who mostly keeps his gun in his holster, you're misled into thinking an interrogation is just a friendly chat.
(Or maybe you're Canadian. They're exempted from most of this shit.)
You can however move around the US without handlers.
If a government can and does track activities without a warrant, why do you feel any more at ease that they don't have a human physically and ostensibly following you around? That's just a threatre of freedom.
Had you lived in the DPRK, being that critical of the DPRK would have resulted in the imprisonment of you, your family, your parents and grandparents.
I don't have evidence that all that would happen. The world suffers a lack of neutral reports about DPRK - it's like Cuban exile sites showing the "awful" condition of some Cuban buildings, each picture making me think "wow, that reminds me of X on the East Coast / Y in England".
But I did hit your link and stop reading at "the guide wouldn't allow you to keep your passport?" since you'd have to be the least travelled tourist in the world not to recognise the number of countries where the government directs hotels to hold your passport during your stay (and copy information).
Because when the ratio between the people to representative is low, it makes it a whole lot easier to vote out bad representatives and easier to contact them or even run for office.
5 million isn't low. You're thinking on a US scale and imagining that surely scaling down a bit for more local representation will mean your voice is heard: but most countries aren't US-sized and their representatives are supposed to speak for far lower numbers.
If you were to successfully implement real local democracy, which would involve much more local and fine-grained management of representatives, you still don't guarantee libertarianism, just democracy.
And for the EU, due to proportional representation, there are a lot more people who have their voices heard, at least in part, than the system of the US.
The EU is a horrible bureaucracy and pretty much no-one but the well-lobbied special interest gets his voice heard, but that's another topic...
No one does because its not a power vacuum. The right for me to live my life how I feel like it should only be filled through me.
That may be your ideal, but that doesn't help in the real world where people want control of you and someone will eventually get that control. It's just up to you whether several people wrestle semi-impotently for control or one entity is allowed to grow strong enough to ruthlessly oppress you.
The US government isn't "an arm of corporations". It has a friendly symbiotic relationship with them, but it is its own gorilla, able to fling the shit of the voters or its military/security services in the right direction (and vice versa) to preserve its autonomy.
Countries with a more intimate relationship between corporation and government bring to mind British East India or the USSR.
What manner of strawman is this? Of course society is a compromise. This doesn't mean it has to be based on outright physical oppression of a majority and trickery to mollify the rest.
Every empire's justification has been "Society = compromise. Deal with it." applied with poor premises. You're rewording the white man's burden.
By restoring power to the state/local governments, you make elections that count and it has accountability.
That's not libertarianism, it's decentralisation and promotion of democracy. Why do you expect this to result in state governments which represent the interests of the individual rather than, say, the governments typical of the states of the European Union?
Libertarianism aims to
Communism aims to create a workers' paradise.
taking away special benefits granted by the government to corporations that were making them not responsible to the people
A little revolution's always nice, but who fills that power vacuum? If you're really asking for "the people" to, then we once again don't have libertarianism but local democracy. Otherwise you're back to a system of lobbyists and special interests campaigning for government power, i.e. corporate welfare, but (as back in C19) no-one engaging from the other side of the ring on the national or social welfare platform (whether they really care for you or not is irrelevant - that's the stick they beat with).
and taking away powers of the government that were making the government not responsible to the people.
Power is merely a result. Transfer of control is the method. Decentralisation may be positive by increasing the difficulty of collusion and other corruption but it won't necessarily take you toward libertarianism.
People who protest in the United States usually seem to get arrested and beaten after they start smashing shop windows and cars (none of which belong to the government), so I would say they deserve what they get.
I'm just going to highlight this as pretty much reflecting the tone of your whole argument: "when a government I like takes away your freedom, it's surely because you were doing something bad".
In NK, you get arrested for whispering. In China, you get arrested for talking. In America, you get arrested for shouting. In each case, the government makes sure that not enough people hear you; it's just that some countries silence you earlier on, as they're not yet sophisticated enough to know the sweet spot which keeps people quiet enough while making them think they're free. The only reason I can say without significant repercussion what I'm saying right now in the West is that not enough people are listening to me.
You're missing the parent's point. If government is weak, who is going to stop government becoming an arm of corporations? You're deploying the romantic and entirely fictional long-term untouchable to regulate your country.
Corporations and governments are kept in check because they're two mafias in a power battle. Everyone at the top is inevitably corrupt, so the best we can hope for is that they all fight each other and no-one ends up too strong. Take away this battle and you're a decade away from totalitarianism.
Slashdot poster citing Wikipedia citing Fox News citing the South Korean Good Friends.
Quite.
As far as monitoring goes, the difference between NK and US ("the West") is that NK does it with people in the next room, and US does it with tech everywhere. NK is merely three decades out of date. I cannot enter the US without being interrogated (during which I must affirm that I'm not of certain political affiliations), photographed, retina scanned and fingerprinted; I can't communicate without my words being intercepted without warrant.
As far as prison camps regular and super-size and executions played out in the media all but at the point of filming the death proper, the US and its allies have quite a few of them - although mostly it makes prison camps of foreign territories. More people have suffered under US rule than the Kims could ever dream of. In the US, I am free to speak my mind as long as not enough people are listening, and the freedom of troublemakers is taken rather than their lives: that is the difference in the sophistication of oppression between US and NK.
Perhaps you haven't compared classical Western to Chinese engineering. Perhaps you are too young to have even experienced Western-engineered technology, and everything on your desk was Made in China. Perhaps you don't know what it's like to have a 20 year old calculator with buttons as comfortable as they were the day you bought it; perhaps you're cool with a disposable printer rather than something churning out smudge-free printouts as well as it did in '95; perhaps all your capacitors are lucky enough to retain their sleek and slender shape. Or perhaps you like the upgrade treadmill and think that repairing rather than discarding is something people should only have to do during wartime.
The Chinese approach is simple: make something which works well enough to be sold now and hopefully won't break down in the next couple of years. Interfacing and reliability aren't problems because you want your clients to be locked into your system and to upgrade before things start going wrong. Decent documentation for interoperability and long-term maintenance is a pipedream, and wouldn't be worth requesting anyway because processes are so lax: see post above.
As opposed to Western businessmen, who... tell you that your money is no good to them? What are your experiences with Western businessmen?
you'll see that [Chinese engineers] are often (not always, of course) both smart and resourceful, and will generally want to work with you.
As opposed to Western engineers, who are... what, exactly? Stupid? Unable to apply resources? Refuse to work with you? What are your experiences with Western engineers?
They will not apply rules like automatons would, just to get out of work. Typical US excuse: "we are not allowed to change the production process without a written ECO and a re-quote"
Sounds like the problem is that you agreed to stupid rules and are annoyed that US engineers adhere to them while Chinese engineers don't.
never mind that basically adds a week of downtime to any "experimental" change,
Fix your processes.
"well, I guess we'll have to wait until we have the intermediate product before we start making tooling for the next step, you know you can't trust those thar CAD drawings of yours."
Sorry, what? Did you actually say "I'll pay you to do this, and if our CAD designs are fucked then that's our problem and you'll still get paid"? Or are you annoyed again because you agreed to a particular process and found that it didn't fit with your requirements, but you weren't prepared to change it?
Unions. It's very "amusing" when you move a piece of equipment from one room to the other (on casters no less), just to get written up for not requesting a union employee.
So renegotiate terms with your union. Or join the union and improve it from within. American workers have rights unimaginable in China, but with any collective bargaining there will be some stupid rules - focus on fixing these rules rather than jumping somewhere the worker does what he says because he has no alternative.
As an engineer, who has absolutely no financial interest in the cost/profit from my designs
Then you're not an engineer. An engineer's job is compromise to complete some task with the tools available, and what determines the available tools is cost/profit.
You're forgetting that 95% of applications submitted to the App Store were developed in a couple of weeks, cost a couple of dollars (yes, yes, $3.87) and are worth maybe half as much.
A platform is interesting when risky, groundbreaking development occurs, the result of teams taking months to perfect something new and useful. A 1 in 20 chance of delay/rejection due to bureaucracy is then not worth the risk - but the 1 in 20 is a best case figure, and for a significant app the chance of problems, including outright rejection because you're competing with Apple, is much greater.
The iPlatform is not really for people who develop for the sake of development - they'd never consider such a stifling platform. It's more a financial investment risk: things could pay off and you could end up very rich, or you might just find you've just poured time and money down the drain.
It's like asking why companies go into China: is it because business there is fair and open, and everyone has the free opportunity to exchange values and end up richer? Or is it because, if you dance the right dance, you might just be able to take advantage of a restrictive environment rather than having that environment take advantage of you?
I'm not sure that empathy's the right word - you can use your ability to empathise with someone in order to understand their weaknesses and abuse them. But maybe that's just semantics.
Anyway... although an arsehole can feel happy lying on paper or in person, on paper they can't use the tools of body language to try to get the other person to drop their guard and shortcut their logical processing. You're taking away one of their weapons.
However, I'd go one step further and argue that live meetings - whether in person, videoconferencing or IRC - are unproductive because humans are really, really bad at accepting that you need time to think and process information in order to come up with a good answer. It's at this point that I'd defer to the wisdom of the fictional houhynhyms, who would pause before starting a conversation to allow time to think about what should be said. At least with the 'phone you can pause for thought more easily without the other person staring at you and hurrying you along.
Nowdays everything is chickenshittedly done by proxy. Why need the balls to do something as simple as look into a person's eyes beforehand?
It's a lot easier to lie to someone you're looking at because you can learn how to position your eyes/faces/hands/etc in such a way as to gain their trust. If the other party is just hearing you then they have a lot less to go on other than the content of your words.
Sure, not everyone knows how to lie with their faces, and a few people would be caught out. But these people aren't the ones who make it their business to fuck others over on a daily basis for their benefit, so aren't the ones to watch out for.
Yeah, that's not the same thing, is it? I don't want Google getting their hands on free bulk electronic government data before anyone else.
The TESS has been in place since 2000, for example, with subscriptions available to anyone who wants them and without favouring any particular corporation or individual. Notice how many months newer the searchable database is than the bulk downloads available from Google?
I mean, what could a corporation do with early access to an electronic copy of trademarks and patents data? How could that possibly be abused?
Slashdot Mirror
I've had this discussion before and I'm sure I'll have it many times again: you can't say that Dell has better customer service than Apple just because Dell's customers quote (say) a 70% satisfaction rate while Apple's customers quote (say) a 75% satisfaction rate.
Even ignoring the possible statistical insignificance, it makes no sense. You're assuming that Apple and Dell users have the same demands and the same affinity for their brand, whereas the point raised by everyone who is disturbed by Apple brand fanaticism is that the Apple community is full of easily pleased brand fanatics. Dell isn't a fashion statement and it isn't a schoolboy accessory; it's a tool to get the job done. What is more, the software you want is probably available for Windows, so if you don't like Apple then you don't remain a dissatisfied Apple user: you switch. But a dissatisfied Dell user is far less likely to be able to switch to Apple.
Just consider the small proportion of customers who need to be mindless fanboys / tied down to Windows in order for the approval rating to shoot up the few percentage points required for Apple to seem always on top. From figures I recall, you're talking about a difference of 1 in 20 customers for Apple vs next "best", and you're still talking about 1 in 5 customers not pleased with Apple.
It was evident to me looking at the figures that it would be entirely without reason to use Apple's "1st in consumer satisfaction" as part of any purchasing decision. This is a great example of how statistics can be used to mislead.
people
love
Apple
products
QEF.
Indeed, lest the run-on sentence that is Apple (well, Apple marketing, but I repeat myself) be filtered out.
Oh look, another Apple story designed to drum up attention for Apple who are releasing iProduct from Apple which gives you features that every other device has had for years but this one is an iProduct from Apple which makes it easier to use because there is value in electron-microscope-resolution on a 3" screen from Apple did I mention Apple are releasing a product for which demand is soooo high that Apple's servers are having trouble coping with the demand from Apple customers for HEY, did you know that some Apple products have been stolen before release and that this has nothing to do with Apple because Apple would never encourage that sort of thing mysteriously for a single product in multiple locations around the world especially because Apple is an ethical company at which people are so happy to work for Apple they literally jump for joy, sometimes quite high, or low, depending on how you look at it, anyway Apple is now giving bonuses to these workers for producing Apple products because it turns out that when you're required to live on-site and work 12 hours a day with little prospect for promotion what you want is a bit more money not freedom but paper which can be exchanged for a cardboard cutout of an iProduct because you can't afford the real thing anyway because Apple is an exclusive brand for exclusive people except when it wants to achieve a majority market then suddenly it's great how many people are buying it hey did I mention Apple products are in such demand that you can't actually order from Apple at the moment?
"Filter error: Too much repetition." Now to insert some random words here to bypass the filter, because comments are not articles and clearly require greater editorial oversight to prevent someone saying the same thing too much. You know, that company, the one I can't mention again otherwise I'm quite certain I'll be unable to post this. You know, the company with products in sooo much demand. The fruity one. You know... anyway, let's try again...
A lot of it has to do with how good the lawyers are for both sides. If there is a jury involved, it's all showmanship. Whoever puts on the best show wins.
There is modern belief that a jury is easier to trick with showmanship or be bribed than a judge is to demonstrate prejudice or be bribed. But it's a lot easier to bribe a single well-known person than 12 unrelated people, and it's a lot more likely that a judge will have particular character traits which every member of a jury will not. This is why we have juries.
IOW, the jury is a slice of society; the judge is an element of one part of society. I understand that the US corrupts jury randomness by allowing lawyers way too much input into jury selection but this isn't an inherent problem with the jury system. The jurors I sat with when I was on a jury were far from stupid - indeed, part of our discussion was on the relative showmanship of the two lawyers and identifying where there were attempts to appeal to prejudice.
It is said that a jury comprises 12 men too stupid to get out of jury duty. And the world comprises 6 billion schmucks too stupid to jump off a cliff, right?
to say you are out of touch with a kindergartener's ability at compare and contrast and devoid of a firm grasp of reality is putting it mildly
Fair enough, this is the Internet, generic insults are admissible substitutes for an argument.
here, read this: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/asia/10koreans.html
Well, I did, and it follows the model of every on-the-streets pro-capitalism article published about any centrally planned economy since the US first started declaring the USSR its sworn enemy. The model goes like this:
(1) Take half a dozen willing emigrants and start the ball rolling by mentioning random irrelevant luxuries which they enjoy now, such as strawberries in springtime or the ability to watch a different set of propaganda on TV;
(2) Advance to the meat of your story: the centrally planned economy is so corrupt that no-one gets compensation for their work and everyone would starve if they followed the official methods;
(3) Ask them for stories about how they implemented petty capitalism to survive, because you cannot survive without capitalism;
(4) Add emotive rather than descriptive language to illustrate just how hard even fairly routine actions were - e.g. fishing is always in "treacherous waters". A staple is that goods are always carried one hundred miles across a mine-filled swamp on a unicycle;
(5) Once you've built empathy with these heroes of the American dream, describe how crackdowns on and confiscations of their justly earnt property make petty capitalism impossible;
(6) Round off with one party official making a delicious quote describing how great the system is and insisting that crackdowns on capitalism are moral for added "OMG the humanity!".
The inevitable conclusion from such articles is: everyone bar Party officials who hasn't already escaped from the regime must now be dying or dead, which is an obvious nonsense. Thus the article must be exaggerating or non-representative.
But at least the article givs a hint of the elephant in the room: sanctions and US military opposition. No country on this earth exists well when it is faced with those two hurdles.
Next, we can move on to how many democracies or tolerable governments (from the PoV of the people) the US overthrows for something much worse - Kim could never dream about holding more than his own countrymen under his thumb. We can talk about currency devaluation in the West - both jumps in specific countries and the imaginary currency by fiat of most Western nations which is devalued in a constant trickle. We can then move on to how collusion between US government and corporation has destroyed the savings of US workers.
By the template of this article, you are the successful Party official, achieving comfort through a combination of intelligence and conformance, proclaiming the greatness of your government while it craps on the majority of the world's people.
Maybe it would be better if such hate speech was illegal,
No it wouldn't.
No it isn't.
"God hates fags" is like "magic unicorns hate puppies". Even Phelps knows it, and has indicated it's not he who hates but magic^WGod.
The right to come out with harmless (from the PoV of rocking the boat carrying the elite) nonsense is well recognised in US law, and is part of the distraction which enables the government to say "see! you are free! You can call Bush a moron! You can call blacks niggers! How can this not mean you are free???"
I assume your thought processes are focusing on the life of one young middle class dude in suburban US and contrasting with the guy facing public execution in NK. You need to begin by concentrating on the hundreds of millions of people subjugated as a result of US influence in foreign nations.
Then move on to the wage slaves of America: work 2 mindless jobs 10+ hours a day and go home to watch biased news and lowbrow entertainment. Insultingly tell them they are free because they have the power to whine, even though they can never speak loudly enough for their words to be of any consequence. Is this what makes their lives so wonderful over those who aren't allowed to whine (to equal effect)?
(The US is still better for workers because they have protections and collective bargaining powers from the remnants of a time when the US was more free and/or had to make concessions to the worker so he didn't look too far to the East, not because they have the illusion of free speech today.)
I wasn't making any assumptions about your beliefs about the US beyond poking a little fun at your citing the very US-centric Wikipedia ;-). I was trying to illustrate that the US achieves the same control by different methods lest the wrong problem be identified. It is not that NK is a prison camp, it is that much of the world is a prison camp.
Hopefully implied (and made explicit in a later post) is that China is just somewhere else on the spectrum of methods to achieve the same end.
I've entered the US dozens of times, pre and post 9/11 and I've never been interrogated.
So you've never been asked whether you were a Nazi, whether you are a Communist, what your purpose is in the US, where you're staying, how you got to know those in the US you're meeting, etc.? I know some of these questions won't be asked to /everyone/, but some are on the standard ex-INS visa waiver form. Or maybe since this is usually done with checkboxes and a smiling man who mostly keeps his gun in his holster, you're misled into thinking an interrogation is just a friendly chat.
(Or maybe you're Canadian. They're exempted from most of this shit.)
You can however move around the US without handlers.
If a government can and does track activities without a warrant, why do you feel any more at ease that they don't have a human physically and ostensibly following you around? That's just a threatre of freedom.
Had you lived in the DPRK, being that critical of the DPRK would have resulted in the imprisonment of you, your family, your parents and grandparents.
I don't have evidence that all that would happen. The world suffers a lack of neutral reports about DPRK - it's like Cuban exile sites showing the "awful" condition of some Cuban buildings, each picture making me think "wow, that reminds me of X on the East Coast / Y in England".
But I did hit your link and stop reading at "the guide wouldn't allow you to keep your passport?" since you'd have to be the least travelled tourist in the world not to recognise the number of countries where the government directs hotels to hold your passport during your stay (and copy information).
Because when the ratio between the people to representative is low, it makes it a whole lot easier to vote out bad representatives and easier to contact them or even run for office.
5 million isn't low. You're thinking on a US scale and imagining that surely scaling down a bit for more local representation will mean your voice is heard: but most countries aren't US-sized and their representatives are supposed to speak for far lower numbers.
If you were to successfully implement real local democracy, which would involve much more local and fine-grained management of representatives, you still don't guarantee libertarianism, just democracy.
And for the EU, due to proportional representation, there are a lot more people who have their voices heard, at least in part, than the system of the US.
The EU is a horrible bureaucracy and pretty much no-one but the well-lobbied special interest gets his voice heard, but that's another topic...
No one does because its not a power vacuum. The right for me to live my life how I feel like it should only be filled through me.
That may be your ideal, but that doesn't help in the real world where people want control of you and someone will eventually get that control. It's just up to you whether several people wrestle semi-impotently for control or one entity is allowed to grow strong enough to ruthlessly oppress you.
The US government isn't "an arm of corporations". It has a friendly symbiotic relationship with them, but it is its own gorilla, able to fling the shit of the voters or its military/security services in the right direction (and vice versa) to preserve its autonomy.
Countries with a more intimate relationship between corporation and government bring to mind British East India or the USSR.
What manner of strawman is this? Of course society is a compromise. This doesn't mean it has to be based on outright physical oppression of a majority and trickery to mollify the rest.
Every empire's justification has been "Society = compromise. Deal with it." applied with poor premises. You're rewording the white man's burden.
By restoring power to the state/local governments, you make elections that count and it has accountability.
That's not libertarianism, it's decentralisation and promotion of democracy. Why do you expect this to result in state governments which represent the interests of the individual rather than, say, the governments typical of the states of the European Union?
Libertarianism aims to
Communism aims to create a workers' paradise.
taking away special benefits granted by the government to corporations that were making them not responsible to the people
A little revolution's always nice, but who fills that power vacuum? If you're really asking for "the people" to, then we once again don't have libertarianism but local democracy. Otherwise you're back to a system of lobbyists and special interests campaigning for government power, i.e. corporate welfare, but (as back in C19) no-one engaging from the other side of the ring on the national or social welfare platform (whether they really care for you or not is irrelevant - that's the stick they beat with).
and taking away powers of the government that were making the government not responsible to the people.
Power is merely a result. Transfer of control is the method. Decentralisation may be positive by increasing the difficulty of collusion and other corruption but it won't necessarily take you toward libertarianism.
People who protest in the United States usually seem to get arrested and beaten after they start smashing shop windows and cars (none of which belong to the government), so I would say they deserve what they get.
I'm just going to highlight this as pretty much reflecting the tone of your whole argument: "when a government I like takes away your freedom, it's surely because you were doing something bad".
In NK, you get arrested for whispering. In China, you get arrested for talking. In America, you get arrested for shouting. In each case, the government makes sure that not enough people hear you; it's just that some countries silence you earlier on, as they're not yet sophisticated enough to know the sweet spot which keeps people quiet enough while making them think they're free. The only reason I can say without significant repercussion what I'm saying right now in the West is that not enough people are listening to me.
You're missing the parent's point. If government is weak, who is going to stop government becoming an arm of corporations? You're deploying the romantic and entirely fictional long-term untouchable to regulate your country.
Corporations and governments are kept in check because they're two mafias in a power battle. Everyone at the top is inevitably corrupt, so the best we can hope for is that they all fight each other and no-one ends up too strong. Take away this battle and you're a decade away from totalitarianism.
Slashdot poster citing Wikipedia citing Fox News citing the South Korean Good Friends.
Quite.
As far as monitoring goes, the difference between NK and US ("the West") is that NK does it with people in the next room, and US does it with tech everywhere. NK is merely three decades out of date. I cannot enter the US without being interrogated (during which I must affirm that I'm not of certain political affiliations), photographed, retina scanned and fingerprinted; I can't communicate without my words being intercepted without warrant.
As far as prison camps regular and super-size and executions played out in the media all but at the point of filming the death proper, the US and its allies have quite a few of them - although mostly it makes prison camps of foreign territories. More people have suffered under US rule than the Kims could ever dream of. In the US, I am free to speak my mind as long as not enough people are listening, and the freedom of troublemakers is taken rather than their lives: that is the difference in the sophistication of oppression between US and NK.
Perhaps you haven't compared classical Western to Chinese engineering. Perhaps you are too young to have even experienced Western-engineered technology, and everything on your desk was Made in China. Perhaps you don't know what it's like to have a 20 year old calculator with buttons as comfortable as they were the day you bought it; perhaps you're cool with a disposable printer rather than something churning out smudge-free printouts as well as it did in '95; perhaps all your capacitors are lucky enough to retain their sleek and slender shape. Or perhaps you like the upgrade treadmill and think that repairing rather than discarding is something people should only have to do during wartime.
The Chinese approach is simple: make something which works well enough to be sold now and hopefully won't break down in the next couple of years. Interfacing and reliability aren't problems because you want your clients to be locked into your system and to upgrade before things start going wrong. Decent documentation for interoperability and long-term maintenance is a pipedream, and wouldn't be worth requesting anyway because processes are so lax: see post above.
Your project matters to [the Chinese].
As opposed to Western businessmen, who... tell you that your money is no good to them? What are your experiences with Western businessmen?
you'll see that [Chinese engineers] are often (not always, of course) both smart and resourceful, and will generally want to work with you.
As opposed to Western engineers, who are... what, exactly? Stupid? Unable to apply resources? Refuse to work with you? What are your experiences with Western engineers?
They will not apply rules like automatons would, just to get out of work. Typical US excuse: "we are not allowed to change the production process without a written ECO and a re-quote"
Sounds like the problem is that you agreed to stupid rules and are annoyed that US engineers adhere to them while Chinese engineers don't.
never mind that basically adds a week of downtime to any "experimental" change,
Fix your processes.
"well, I guess we'll have to wait until we have the intermediate product before we start making tooling for the next step, you know you can't trust those thar CAD drawings of yours."
Sorry, what? Did you actually say "I'll pay you to do this, and if our CAD designs are fucked then that's our problem and you'll still get paid"? Or are you annoyed again because you agreed to a particular process and found that it didn't fit with your requirements, but you weren't prepared to change it?
Unions. It's very "amusing" when you move a piece of equipment from one room to the other (on casters no less), just to get written up for not requesting a union employee.
So renegotiate terms with your union. Or join the union and improve it from within. American workers have rights unimaginable in China, but with any collective bargaining there will be some stupid rules - focus on fixing these rules rather than jumping somewhere the worker does what he says because he has no alternative.
As an engineer, who has absolutely no financial interest in the cost/profit from my designs
Then you're not an engineer. An engineer's job is compromise to complete some task with the tools available, and what determines the available tools is cost/profit.
You're forgetting that 95% of applications submitted to the App Store were developed in a couple of weeks, cost a couple of dollars (yes, yes, $3.87) and are worth maybe half as much.
A platform is interesting when risky, groundbreaking development occurs, the result of teams taking months to perfect something new and useful. A 1 in 20 chance of delay/rejection due to bureaucracy is then not worth the risk - but the 1 in 20 is a best case figure, and for a significant app the chance of problems, including outright rejection because you're competing with Apple, is much greater.
The iPlatform is not really for people who develop for the sake of development - they'd never consider such a stifling platform. It's more a financial investment risk: things could pay off and you could end up very rich, or you might just find you've just poured time and money down the drain.
It's like asking why companies go into China: is it because business there is fair and open, and everyone has the free opportunity to exchange values and end up richer? Or is it because, if you dance the right dance, you might just be able to take advantage of a restrictive environment rather than having that environment take advantage of you?
I'm not sure that empathy's the right word - you can use your ability to empathise with someone in order to understand their weaknesses and abuse them. But maybe that's just semantics.
Anyway... although an arsehole can feel happy lying on paper or in person, on paper they can't use the tools of body language to try to get the other person to drop their guard and shortcut their logical processing. You're taking away one of their weapons.
However, I'd go one step further and argue that live meetings - whether in person, videoconferencing or IRC - are unproductive because humans are really, really bad at accepting that you need time to think and process information in order to come up with a good answer. It's at this point that I'd defer to the wisdom of the fictional houhynhyms, who would pause before starting a conversation to allow time to think about what should be said. At least with the 'phone you can pause for thought more easily without the other person staring at you and hurrying you along.
Nowdays everything is chickenshittedly done by proxy. Why need the balls to do something as simple as look into a person's eyes beforehand?
It's a lot easier to lie to someone you're looking at because you can learn how to position your eyes/faces/hands/etc in such a way as to gain their trust. If the other party is just hearing you then they have a lot less to go on other than the content of your words.
Sure, not everyone knows how to lie with their faces, and a few people would be caught out. But these people aren't the ones who make it their business to fuck others over on a daily basis for their benefit, so aren't the ones to watch out for.
Yeah, that's not the same thing, is it? I don't want Google getting their hands on free bulk electronic government data before anyone else.
The TESS has been in place since 2000, for example, with subscriptions available to anyone who wants them and without favouring any particular corporation or individual. Notice how many months newer the searchable database is than the bulk downloads available from Google?
I mean, what could a corporation do with early access to an electronic copy of trademarks and patents data? How could that possibly be abused?
...USPTO should release all raw data and metadata for public consumption. If Google or anyone else want to build a frontend to it, let them do so.