No. To be accurate, the idea of adjusting for externalities is an attempt to compel those who directly get the benefits, to pay for them
No, because, without the conversion of a resource into a product such as energy or goods, then the community suffers. If there is no coal plant, you have perfect air, but you freeze to death in winter, can't see at night... you know, live in the stone ages. So, I have a coal plant, belching filth out into the air. I deliver the benefit of electricity. I light the streets and homes and bring heat and people like that and they pay for it.
Now, some people who get that electricity don't care that I dump soot into the air, in fact, most don't. But a few do... and so, they actually go and press to regulate my plant to benefit themselves, and in doing so pass a product (cleaner electricity), to everyone else, that no one wants.
Can we possibly consider options like driving smaller cars and switching to high efficiency bulbs before we go back to good ole London town..... I know it's fun to watch pigeons coughing up blood but sadly so do people when it gets bad.
It's a good point, but, think of the children!:-) If we didn't have as many old people, social security and medicare payments would be a lot lower. I mean, if we all died at 65 because of air quality, we could have nearly a trillion dollars a year -extra- that we could spend on our schools and benefit our children over the elderly.
Given the laws of supply and demand.... the price of coal is not goint to be 1880s levels
The real price of coal is probably lower because in the 1880s they were still using thousands of miners shovels and now they just blast the top off the mountain off, use a giant tractor to dump the stuff into a freight train a mile long, and whole working of the mine to delivery probably takes less 1000 people per trainload of coal. I mean, in the 1880s, they still were rolling out airbrakes for trains and even then the locomotives required a separate fireman and a guy in the caboose and so on. Now it can just be one guy driving the whole train.
And then there's the increased health-care expenditures and other such costs conveniently hidden by current economic systems.
It's not "hidden". It's that, given a choice, most people don't actually care enough about the environment to want to pay for it. Greens say that "oh, the real costs of the environment aren't captured, its a fallacy of capitalism because people don't feel they need it..", but, people don't need $100 shoes anyway, but they buy them. Similarly, if you had a car that was built 100% Green by American labor in perfect work conditions, with zero accidents, people would still choose the car that was $2000 less that was built in a sweat shop with a limb removal rate of %20 in a polluted smogville, if they could get it. All this talk about trying to adequately "capture the costs" of the environment is really more along the lines of trying to compel people to pay them.
for a lot cheaper. All I need is a bunch of guys with shovels, and a boat, and we can give the world's poor good old coal. It's our environmental priorities, which we choose, that make energy more expensive. If we all could tolerate soot filled cities, like London in 1880, we could have dirt cheap heat and light and electricity just by burning coal and sometimes making steam with it for power.
The point is, when people make announcements like this, its not to give poor people the most energy, it is rather to give them energy that is fundamentally more expensive, but to lower that window as much as possible.
So let's not say that we are giving the poor the "cheapest energy possible", because, that's not what we're doing.
See, I don't think MS overextended Vista architecture at all. I think Vista is more like, they reworked a bunch of core stuff but didn't put enough into the user world to make people want to go buy it retail. With that said, I have Vista SP1 on a PC and I think its way better than XP ever was or even could be. It's still no Ubuntu Linux, but then again, you can't blame them for trying!
Spoken like someone who believes that writing unmaintainable code is the best form of job security
No, I'm arguing that the practice of layering code in particular, and data hiding in general, makes code more expensive to maintain. If you want to have a good program code, rather than try and write a bazillion layers, write as simple as possible and then have lots of code to test it. Given the same overall number of lines of code, your approach gets you a system that looks good on paper, but is completely unproven, but I'll have a completely automated testing regime to go with mine. Which is better?
If there is a god, then, the USA is the best because we are following His will to spread liberty throughout the land and let people discover Christ of their own volition. Thus, it pleases God that George Bush invades Iraq to bring the flame of liberty.
Now, if there is no god, there is no notion of equality, because equality is a logical construction of the soul that says we are equal because the most important thing we have is the thing we cannot measure.
So, we measure.
We look at men and women, different ethno-cultures, and we can see that each has had varying degrees of economic success and skills. It's only natural then that better cultures should dominate the weaker and, rather than calling imperialism evil, it only seems rather fitting that the advances made by superior cultures should be imposed upon the weaker.
Given those measurements, one can easily see that in per-capita GDP, size of military, number of cable tv channels, that the Iraqi culture was inferior and it was good that George Bush the GREAT invaded Iraq to bring American capitalism to them.
The point really is, of course, that even if you succeeded in getting rid of God, you'll never get rid of imperialism. If anything, you'd make it a lot more arguable. If we got no souls, there's no point of safeguarding them through self restraint.
Yes, you can be one of those libs that equates jumping at a strange sound like it might be the cops when you are all high and then realize it's the pizza that you forgot you ordered.. but, that sort of paranoia and trying to make some kind of a culture out of it is just silly for those who don't smoke weed or don't like pizza.
To my knowledge there has never been any correlation found between brain size and intelligence in humans. If you have a citation I would like to see it for my own edification.
Ah but by experiment we know that reduction in brain size leads to a loss of intelligence in most people, so it stands to reason that brain size matters.
Besides, don't underestimate the importance of clarity and modularity in architecture
I've seen so many systems that were expensive to build because they offered so many degrees of freedom for future expansion, that they stayed expensive to maintain because of all of those degrees of freedom. Conversely, the badly designed terrible little programs that aren't all broken out seem to be the ones that really succeed and it makes me wonder if today's software, is, in fact, over-engineered. There's all of these layers and these layers -never- really deliver the economic benefit to which they were supposed to deliver.
they're called for or not, and too little in clarity, modularity and maintainability
I've been around the block long enough to know that what this often is an excuse for corporate environments to hold better developers back to try and force a levelling of a pay scale. If you paid developers based on their ability to produce working systems, you would find that some developers produce far more than others. But.... now we have to riddle our code with wrapped access methods, ultra long symbol names, case sensitivity and standards made by morons for morons, and all of it adds -ZERO- features to the finished product. Sure, you can argue that it makes "better" code, but that "better" code has NO MORE EXTRA FEATURES. It only allows retards to work on it. And really, is that a feature?
Come on now. The guy is by no means a hardcode liberal. No gay marriage, no decriminalization of pot, equivocates on the subject of abortion, is a devout Christian. Man I wish he were for some of those things.
You should read some of his stuff from when he was a community activist and in the illinois state senate. He's most certainly pro-pot, pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion and his devout christianity has more politics than it does, well, christianity. And he's certainly into minority rights.
See now, when I run for Senate in Delaware, as a Republican, you should support me. I think the social issues are a distraction, and would instead on a long term strategy of breaking AARP so that we could start making some real cuts in entitlements and have an America whose young people are not strangled by lobbyists for the elderly.
Unfortunately, the best chance we had to do away with these pyramid schemes was under Ronnie, an otherwise great president who failed miserably in that regard.
Yeah, if we would have let Bush privatize social security, we would be so much better off. At least he got farther than Reagan did on that score. We need to frame the debate in terms of how many days you have to work to support your parents and grandparents, in their retirement, just to get a feel for it. Then we could go on and do some proposals like, people with more kids should get more social security than people without or with less. Basically, just get the facts out there that social security is a multigenerational system and there isn't a next generation big enough.
The US' centre of political gravity is WAY off base.
I would prefer to think that the rest of the world is way too far to the left!:-) But yeah, the frame of reference is different... there's a lot of people that look at government stepping in in the USA and pretty much feel that it has no right to do so. Oooh, I could rattle off a number of federal agencies that I could shut down because they have no right to exist, and Europeans would think us mad to do so, for sure.
I'm a staunch Republican, but, I think trying to characterize his policy shifts as a sort of a flip flopper is rather inconsistent with what he's trying to do. Obama is just a left wing pol trying to guide his opinion about how government should be run in response to an evolving set of facts on the ground and I really don't have a problem with him changing his mind as long as he stays consistent with his core beliefs of being a hardcore liberal.
Where Kerry had a problem was that he made a political career out of being a total pacifist, lead anti-war protests across the USA and was instrumental in ending the USA's commitment to Viet Nam, but then he turned around and voted for the Invasion of Iraq in 2002 to get pick up a few votes and then ran not as a Dove but as a Wartime leader during the Democratic convention. That's a huge flip flop.
But what Obama is doing is nothing of the sort. He might, ideally, like, to get rid of NASA because he'd rather spend the money on something else... a lot of Dems feel that way. Walter Mondale famously tried to gut the Apollo moon landings because he wanted bread and butter for the poor. So, its not a big flip flop for Obama to shift on NASA back and forth because the whole left wing has been doing it for a long time.
Given the current crisis, I'd vote for Obama on that alone. What economic knowledge he's demonstrated makes him far more qualified a candidate than McCain or Clinton, despite some of his other failings.
The big show stopper for Obama in his space program is a unilateral termination of all space defense research. His proposal is to build stuff that dodges attacks, "talk" about disarmament with Chinese and the trusty Russians and Iranians... which, even if Bush was a moron about seeing into Putin's soul, he at least had the sense to not trust it. Obama would. McCain won't. Given that the biggest crack on Bush is that he's been an ideologue when Realpolitik is needed, then, it seems we want someone who can engage in peace through strength, trust but verify, and that's going to be McCain, not Obama.
Even though I am a Republican, I might have supported Senator Clinton as a Dem largely because she is shrewd enough to see that, but only in the case if McCain drooled too much. But Obama is just too far to the left.
As far as lowering spending goes, the biggest problem the USA has, is, overwhelmingly entitlements. Just look at the growth of Medicare and social security. Those two items continue to grow by leaps and bounds every year. Obama's plan to lift the caps on social security is a start in the right direction but what really needs to happen is the feds have to start throwing people off of social security disability (which is the biggest racket -ever-) and also cap medicare payouts to something that is halfway sane.
Baby boomers did not have enough children to pay for their retirements and... you know, you can't have a single child expect to pay for full time nursing home care for two parents and that's what's happening, slowly but surely right now.
I wonder how many liberals do self service checkout? Can we get a poll of Obama supporters that do the self service checkout, and in doing so undercut all the -union- labor that works in the supermarkets? If you want to support the Dems, and organized labor, then, you need to support things that support labor and so if a store is backed up because they've got one person doing checkout, then you need to embarrass that store into action. And it helps too, if you pull up to the store in a car built in the USA by union workers. Sure, voting Dem to wash your hands of your own buying decisions might be one way to improve labor, but, I think this Republican that always buys American and waits in the line behind the human checkout does more for labor in the long run... because at least I pay for it.
Stores that do this, too, just don't understand that the whole reason people do retail these days is because of the people. A supermarket is a social occasion, and, actually talking to a checkout person for 5 seconds is, well, a human experience. I was loyal to my Wawa (a convenience store) for the longest time largely because the person who worked there took 2 seconds to throw in a sausage egg and cheese into the oven for my wife when they had run out of the ones they'd already made. You can't get that kind of flexibility out of a robot.
Which is better for me as a customer, having someone in checkout that just grabs my tomatoes and enters the price, bags them, or, a stupid robot that makes me do everything. This technology doesn't benefit me at all, it benefits the store. I refuse to use it.
They say they need to bring up the efficiency, but I didn't see where they are at. Are they at.1%, 1%... what's up? I think a plant is 10% while a photovoltaic cell commercially available is around 10-20%. Just wonder how far they have to go.
This isn't "embracing change"--it's deliberate sabotage and looting of the vast wealth of this country, specifically of the now-vanishing middle class because you all have bought into this libertarian econcomic nonsense that you'll do better if you stand alone.
What sucking sound? Seriously, where is the sucking sound that Ross Perot talked about. Right off the wheel, NAFTA has resulted in an enormous gain in trade but right now US trade between US and its NAFTA partners is largely in balance when energy is excluded. Now -that- would not be taking place but in the USA we are not allowed to develop energy resources, but even in left wing Canada, they have no problem turning Alberta into the moon to get at oil sands.
Elsewhere, you can see that over the last few years, US exports are -increasing- rather than decreasing. America right now is actually manufacturing -more than it ever has-.
And, of course I can move from one market freely to another. That's what the internet is for. And, sure, if I wanted to go to India or to China, I most certainly could do that.
Secondly, everyone keeps talking about the vanishing middle class, but, at the same time, it is said that the America's biggest problems are that the middle class seems to have purchased numerous trucks, cars, a mountain of food. I just do not understand the doublethink of the American left that says on one hand that Americans are too poor and are getting ripped off, and then, at the same time, are looting the world through unjust consumption of its natural resources. Can we have a consistent story?
I mean, did the American middle class, forty years ago, have too much to eat, multiple personal trucks, houses exceeding 2500 square feet, multiple flat panel tvs, computers, video game consoles, designer clothes imported all over the world, all while having meat available to eat not just a few times a day, but, for every meal that there is. This is unheard of wealth.
By contrast, the best the left wing is going to give us is total poverty. They want us to have less food, less energy, smaller houses, less cars, less imported products. I mean, where does having "less" of everything, translate into "more" wealth.
Help me out, because, I'm drawing a blank on that one.
Come back when the Taft-Hartley Act is repealed if you want to talk about "freedom".
Sure, right after the Clayton act, the Railway Labor act, Davis Bacon act, Norris LaGuardia act, Byrnes act, Walsh Healy act and Fair Labor Standards Act......or what's left of them.
'Cause the shrinking middle class is tired of seeing our funds be sucked up by other Americans because they had the money and connections to rip us off.
So does that mean you drive an American car? Seriously. I see so many guys with bumper stickers talking about Obama and the need for change, loading up their Toyotas with Chinese junk in the Walmart parking lot. When it really boils down to it, everyone wants to pay less for stuff, unless it is the stuff they happen to make.
Food and gas goes up, who gets richer?
Farmers and guys that work at oil wells. Do you know how many welders, riggers, pipefitters, etc are all making more money as they upgrade farm machinery, pipelines, the whole nine yards. Indeed, rail companies and railroad workers are making out pretty well too.
You know, blue collar types are getting richer at the expense of guys that work in offices. So, if anything, the Bush economy, with higher commodity prices and the devalued dollar, -has- been benefiting farmers, oil well diggers, miners of all kinds, manufacturers, pretty much anyone that works a field or a shovel or a welding torch, and those people have been getting killed now for 40 years because the rest of this country would prefer they work for free.
Actually you see you repeat an old canard yourself, in that you assume that the owners of a business are Republican. Quite often the contrary is true. After all, Obama is getting all that fundraising money from -somewhere-.
See, Republicans, with their free trade and previously open immigration policies, tend to invite competition and change and so many businesses actually would be opposed to change as they would prefer to be locked in.
That's why you see Democrats tending to lead the charge on IP legislation, although Republicans naturally go on board because the picture was dumbed down for us as a law and order thing although of course we know that's not true at all.
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No. To be accurate, the idea of adjusting for externalities is an attempt to compel those who directly get the benefits, to pay for them
No, because, without the conversion of a resource into a product such as energy or goods, then the community suffers. If there is no coal plant, you have perfect air, but you freeze to death in winter, can't see at night... you know, live in the stone ages. So, I have a coal plant, belching filth out into the air. I deliver the benefit of electricity. I light the streets and homes and bring heat and people like that and they pay for it.
Now, some people who get that electricity don't care that I dump soot into the air, in fact, most don't. But a few do... and so, they actually go and press to regulate my plant to benefit themselves, and in doing so pass a product (cleaner electricity), to everyone else, that no one wants.
That's what this is... automatic memory management...bigger libraries... restricting pointers more and more....
I mean, C++ is evolving so badly it makes Pascal suddenly look a lot better as a compile time language.
Can we possibly consider options like driving smaller cars and switching to high efficiency bulbs before we go back to good ole London town.....
I know it's fun to watch pigeons coughing up blood but sadly so do people when it gets bad.
It's a good point, but, think of the children! :-) If we didn't have as many old people, social security and medicare payments would be a lot lower. I mean, if we all died at 65 because of air quality, we could have nearly a trillion dollars a year -extra- that we could spend on our schools and benefit our children over the elderly.
Given the laws of supply and demand.... the price of coal is not goint to be 1880s levels
The real price of coal is probably lower because in the 1880s they were still using thousands of miners shovels and now they just blast the top off the mountain off, use a giant tractor to dump the stuff into a freight train a mile long, and whole working of the mine to delivery probably takes less 1000 people per trainload of coal. I mean, in the 1880s, they still were rolling out airbrakes for trains and even then the locomotives required a separate fireman and a guy in the caboose and so on. Now it can just be one guy driving the whole train.
And then there's the increased health-care expenditures and other such costs conveniently hidden by current economic systems.
It's not "hidden". It's that, given a choice, most people don't actually care enough about the environment to want to pay for it. Greens say that "oh, the real costs of the environment aren't captured, its a fallacy of capitalism because people don't feel they need it..", but, people don't need $100 shoes anyway, but they buy them. Similarly, if you had a car that was built 100% Green by American labor in perfect work conditions, with zero accidents, people would still choose the car that was $2000 less that was built in a sweat shop with a limb removal rate of %20 in a polluted smogville, if they could get it.
All this talk about trying to adequately "capture the costs" of the environment is really more along the lines of trying to compel people to pay them.
for a lot cheaper. All I need is a bunch of guys with shovels, and a boat, and we can give the world's poor good old coal. It's our environmental priorities, which we choose, that make energy more expensive. If we all could tolerate soot filled cities, like London in 1880, we could have dirt cheap heat and light and electricity just by burning coal and sometimes making steam with it for power.
The point is, when people make announcements like this, its not to give poor people the most energy, it is rather to give them energy that is fundamentally more expensive, but to lower that window as much as possible.
So let's not say that we are giving the poor the "cheapest energy possible", because, that's not what we're doing.
See, I don't think MS overextended Vista architecture at all. I think Vista is more like, they reworked a bunch of core stuff but didn't put enough into the user world to make people want to go buy it retail. With that said, I have Vista SP1 on a PC and I think its way better than XP ever was or even could be. It's still no Ubuntu Linux, but then again, you can't blame them for trying!
Spoken like someone who believes that writing unmaintainable code is the best form of job security
No, I'm arguing that the practice of layering code in particular, and data hiding in general, makes code more expensive to maintain. If you want to have a good program code, rather than try and write a bazillion layers, write as simple as possible and then have lots of code to test it. Given the same overall number of lines of code, your approach gets you a system that looks good on paper, but is completely unproven, but I'll have a completely automated testing regime to go with mine. Which is better?
God or no God, the USA is the best.
If there is a god, then, the USA is the best because we are following His will to spread liberty throughout the land and let people discover Christ of their own volition. Thus, it pleases God that George Bush invades Iraq to bring the flame of liberty.
Now, if there is no god, there is no notion of equality, because equality is a logical construction of the soul that says we are equal because the most important thing we have is the thing we cannot measure.
So, we measure.
We look at men and women, different ethno-cultures, and we can see that each has had varying degrees of economic success and skills. It's only natural then that better cultures should dominate the weaker and, rather than calling imperialism evil, it only seems rather fitting that the advances made by superior cultures should be imposed upon the weaker.
Given those measurements, one can easily see that in per-capita GDP, size of military, number of cable tv channels, that the Iraqi culture was inferior and it was good that George Bush the GREAT invaded Iraq to bring American capitalism to them.
The point really is, of course, that even if you succeeded in getting rid of God, you'll never get rid of imperialism. If anything, you'd make it a lot more arguable. If we got no souls, there's no point of safeguarding them through self restraint.
Yes, you can be one of those libs that equates jumping at a strange sound like it might be the cops when you are all high and then realize it's the pizza that you forgot you ordered.. but, that sort of paranoia and trying to make some kind of a culture out of it is just silly for those who don't smoke weed or don't like pizza.
To my knowledge there has never been any correlation found between brain size and intelligence in humans. If you have a citation I would like to see it for my own edification.
Ah but by experiment we know that reduction in brain size leads to a loss of intelligence in most people, so it stands to reason that brain size matters.
Besides, don't underestimate the importance of clarity and modularity in architecture
I've seen so many systems that were expensive to build because they offered so many degrees of freedom for future expansion, that they stayed expensive to maintain because of all of those degrees of freedom. Conversely, the badly designed terrible little programs that aren't all broken out seem to be the ones that really succeed and it makes me wonder if today's software, is, in fact, over-engineered. There's all of these layers and these layers -never- really deliver the economic benefit to which they were supposed to deliver.
they're called for or not, and too little in clarity, modularity and maintainability
I've been around the block long enough to know that what this often is an excuse for corporate environments to hold better developers back to try and force a levelling of a pay scale. If you paid developers based on their ability to produce working systems, you would find that some developers produce far more than others. But.... now we have to riddle our code with wrapped access methods, ultra long symbol names, case sensitivity and standards made by morons for morons, and all of it adds -ZERO- features to the finished product. Sure, you can argue that it makes "better" code, but that "better" code has NO MORE EXTRA FEATURES. It only allows retards to work on it. And really, is that a feature?
Come on now. The guy is by no means a hardcode liberal. No gay marriage, no decriminalization of pot, equivocates on the subject of abortion, is a devout Christian. Man I wish he were for some of those things.
You should read some of his stuff from when he was a community activist and in the illinois state senate. He's most certainly pro-pot, pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion and his devout christianity has more politics than it does, well, christianity. And he's certainly into minority rights.
See now, when I run for Senate in Delaware, as a Republican, you should support me. I think the social issues are a distraction, and would instead on a long term strategy of breaking AARP so that we could start making some real cuts in entitlements and have an America whose young people are not strangled by lobbyists for the elderly.
Unfortunately, the best chance we had to do away with these pyramid schemes was under Ronnie, an otherwise great president who failed miserably in that regard.
Yeah, if we would have let Bush privatize social security, we would be so much better off. At least he got farther than Reagan did on that score. We need to frame the debate in terms of how many days you have to work to support your parents and grandparents, in their retirement, just to get a feel for it. Then we could go on and do some proposals like, people with more kids should get more social security than people without or with less. Basically, just get the facts out there that social security is a multigenerational system and there isn't a next generation big enough.
The US' centre of political gravity is WAY off base.
I would prefer to think that the rest of the world is way too far to the left! :-) But yeah, the frame of reference is different... there's a lot of people that look at government stepping in in the USA and pretty much feel that it has no right to do so. Oooh, I could rattle off a number of federal agencies that I could shut down because they have no right to exist, and Europeans would think us mad to do so, for sure.
I'm a staunch Republican, but, I think trying to characterize his policy shifts as a sort of a flip flopper is rather inconsistent with what he's trying to do. Obama is just a left wing pol trying to guide his opinion about how government should be run in response to an evolving set of facts on the ground and I really don't have a problem with him changing his mind as long as he stays consistent with his core beliefs of being a hardcore liberal.
Where Kerry had a problem was that he made a political career out of being a total pacifist, lead anti-war protests across the USA and was instrumental in ending the USA's commitment to Viet Nam, but then he turned around and voted for the Invasion of Iraq in 2002 to get pick up a few votes and then ran not as a Dove but as a Wartime leader during the Democratic convention. That's a huge flip flop.
But what Obama is doing is nothing of the sort. He might, ideally, like, to get rid of NASA because he'd rather spend the money on something else... a lot of Dems feel that way. Walter Mondale famously tried to gut the Apollo moon landings because he wanted bread and butter for the poor. So, its not a big flip flop for Obama to shift on NASA back and forth because the whole left wing has been doing it for a long time.
Given the current crisis, I'd vote for Obama on that alone. What economic knowledge he's demonstrated makes him far more qualified a candidate than McCain or Clinton, despite some of his other failings.
The big show stopper for Obama in his space program is a unilateral termination of all space defense research. His proposal is to build stuff that dodges attacks, "talk" about disarmament with Chinese and the trusty Russians and Iranians ... which, even if Bush was a moron about seeing into Putin's soul, he at least had the sense to not trust it. Obama would. McCain won't. Given that the biggest crack on Bush is that he's been an ideologue when Realpolitik is needed, then, it seems we want someone who can engage in peace through strength, trust but verify, and that's going to be McCain, not Obama.
Even though I am a Republican, I might have supported Senator Clinton as a Dem largely because she is shrewd enough to see that, but only in the case if McCain drooled too much. But Obama is just too far to the left.
As far as lowering spending goes, the biggest problem the USA has, is, overwhelmingly entitlements. Just look at the growth of Medicare and social security. Those two items continue to grow by leaps and bounds every year. Obama's plan to lift the caps on social security is a start in the right direction but what really needs to happen is the feds have to start throwing people off of social security disability (which is the biggest racket -ever-) and also cap medicare payouts to something that is halfway sane.
Baby boomers did not have enough children to pay for their retirements and... you know, you can't have a single child expect to pay for full time nursing home care for two parents and that's what's happening, slowly but surely right now.
I wonder how many liberals do self service checkout? Can we get a poll of Obama supporters that do the self service checkout, and in doing so undercut all the -union- labor that works in the supermarkets? If you want to support the Dems, and organized labor, then, you need to support things that support labor and so if a store is backed up because they've got one person doing checkout, then you need to embarrass that store into action. And it helps too, if you pull up to the store in a car built in the USA by union workers. Sure, voting Dem to wash your hands of your own buying decisions might be one way to improve labor, but, I think this Republican that always buys American and waits in the line behind the human checkout does more for labor in the long run... because at least I pay for it.
Stores that do this, too, just don't understand that the whole reason people do retail these days is because of the people. A supermarket is a social occasion, and, actually talking to a checkout person for 5 seconds is, well, a human experience. I was loyal to my Wawa (a convenience store) for the longest time largely because the person who worked there took 2 seconds to throw in a sausage egg and cheese into the oven for my wife when they had run out of the ones they'd already made. You can't get that kind of flexibility out of a robot.
Which is better for me as a customer, having someone in checkout that just grabs my tomatoes and enters the price, bags them, or, a stupid robot that makes me do everything. This technology doesn't benefit me at all, it benefits the store. I refuse to use it.
They say they need to bring up the efficiency, but I didn't see where they are at. Are they at .1%, 1%... what's up? I think a plant is 10% while a photovoltaic cell commercially available is around 10-20%. Just wonder how far they have to go.
This isn't "embracing change"--it's deliberate sabotage and looting of the vast wealth of this country, specifically of the now-vanishing middle class because you all have bought into this libertarian econcomic nonsense that you'll do better if you stand alone.
What sucking sound? Seriously, where is the sucking sound that Ross Perot talked about. Right off the wheel, NAFTA has resulted in an enormous gain in trade but right now US trade between US and its NAFTA partners is largely in balance when energy is excluded. Now -that- would not be taking place but in the USA we are not allowed to develop energy resources, but even in left wing Canada, they have no problem turning Alberta into the moon to get at oil sands.
Elsewhere, you can see that over the last few years, US exports are -increasing- rather than decreasing. America right now is actually manufacturing -more than it ever has-.
And, of course I can move from one market freely to another. That's what the internet is for. And, sure, if I wanted to go to India or to China, I most certainly could do that.
Secondly, everyone keeps talking about the vanishing middle class, but, at the same time, it is said that the America's biggest problems are that the middle class seems to have purchased numerous trucks, cars, a mountain of food. I just do not understand the doublethink of the American left that says on one hand that Americans are too poor and are getting ripped off, and then, at the same time, are looting the world through unjust consumption of its natural resources. Can we have a consistent story?
I mean, did the American middle class, forty years ago, have too much to eat, multiple personal trucks, houses exceeding 2500 square feet, multiple flat panel tvs, computers, video game consoles, designer clothes imported all over the world, all while having meat available to eat not just a few times a day, but, for every meal that there is. This is unheard of wealth.
By contrast, the best the left wing is going to give us is total poverty. They want us to have less food, less energy, smaller houses, less cars, less imported products. I mean, where does having "less" of everything, translate into "more" wealth.
Help me out, because, I'm drawing a blank on that one.
Come back when the Taft-Hartley Act is repealed if you want to talk about "freedom".
Sure, right after the Clayton act, the Railway Labor act, Davis Bacon act, Norris LaGuardia act, Byrnes act, Walsh Healy act and Fair Labor Standards Act......or what's left of them.
'Cause the shrinking middle class is tired of seeing our funds be sucked up by other Americans because they had the money and connections to rip us off.
So does that mean you drive an American car? Seriously. I see so many guys with bumper stickers talking about Obama and the need for change, loading up their Toyotas with Chinese junk in the Walmart parking lot. When it really boils down to it, everyone wants to pay less for stuff, unless it is the stuff they happen to make.
Food and gas goes up, who gets richer?
Farmers and guys that work at oil wells. Do you know how many welders, riggers, pipefitters, etc are all making more money as they upgrade farm machinery, pipelines, the whole nine yards. Indeed, rail companies and railroad workers are making out pretty well too.
You know, blue collar types are getting richer at the expense of guys that work in offices. So, if anything, the Bush economy, with higher commodity prices and the devalued dollar, -has- been benefiting farmers, oil well diggers, miners of all kinds, manufacturers, pretty much anyone that works a field or a shovel or a welding torch, and those people have been getting killed now for 40 years because the rest of this country would prefer they work for free.
Actually you see you repeat an old canard yourself, in that you assume that the owners of a business are Republican. Quite often the contrary is true. After all, Obama is getting all that fundraising money from -somewhere-.
See, Republicans, with their free trade and previously open immigration policies, tend to invite competition and change and so many businesses actually would be opposed to change as they would prefer to be locked in.
That's why you see Democrats tending to lead the charge on IP legislation, although Republicans naturally go on board because the picture was dumbed down for us as a law and order thing although of course we know that's not true at all.