You buy what the corporation tells you to buy because it's shiny and you want it.
That's utterly ridiculous.
With monopolies, you get to choose between the Starbuck's, and the Starbuck's across the street (h/t to Lewis Black for this delightful image).
Oh wait, but if I want coffee, I can choose between the two starbucks on both sides of the street, mcdonalds, 7-11, wawa (and wawa coffee is actually pretty good), dunkin donuts, my little independent coffee store on rt 40, and that's just the ready made stuff. In stores, I have an entire shelf filled with 80 different kinds of coffee and if I do not like those stores, I can go online and get any kind of coffee I like, from anywhere on the planet.
No doubt he is looking forward to the £25 congestion charge in the same way that he believes content providers should be looking forward to paying him for the privilege of carrying their traffic on his oversubscribed network
No, he just will relocate his corporate offices out of London. What's the point of investing in a city if it costs more than 50USD just to get to it. I mean, is London really worth 50USD a person? Probably not!
and the people control nothing.... Hell, ask the average Joe Sixpack if they'd like to have their....expense of a bunch of pasty faced nerds not being able to access Slashdot at the same speed, I'm sure they'll be quite happy about it
What you are really saying is that the you do not have control over the vast majority of people want. In America, corporations cater to what people want, or they die and die quickly. Consumers are fickle and they want what they want. So, if Americans want an internet, which exists so that people can watch back episodes of American Idol and follow all of the winners, that is the internet that ISPs are going to bend over backwards to get. What you are asking for, in net neutrality, is for ISPs to ignore mountains of market research, essentially polling as to what people want, in favor of an internet that does what you want it to do, and you want the government to impose that. That's not net neutrality, that is net tyranny. Just because they tyranny works for you, doesn't make it not a tyranny.
The problem is in the US market where there is no competition in the local loop and the cable companies have a long history of behaving badly - as the shareholders of Adelphia know only too well. The consumer does not have effective choice and the Bush administration has consistently backed the interests of corporations above all.
Is it really a problem though? Let's face it, there's a lot to be said for net priorities over net neutrality that makes it a lot more consumer friendly. A modest move towards charging content providers for customer access would have the effect of getting rid of a lot of marginal or crappy content that clogs even google these days.
I mean, I honestly, at this point, would be very happy if my ISP filtered out link farm sites, or, better still, if they just went out of business because the ad revenue was no longer sufficient to make them profitable.
Similarly, I might like it if ISP, in doing so, also had better bandwidth and pipes to specific service providers. I really like watching back episodes of shows on NBC's web site. Now, if my ISP cut some sort of deal with NBC to throw off a bunch of pirated stuff from other sites, like PirateBay, and that in turn brought me the original episodes of the A-Team at original film resolution, then, hey, that could be a winner.
The bottom line is, net neutrality is a feature, and while, it sounds good in principal, it also stands to reason that having a non-neutral internet makes possible offerings that might be more attractive to people than a merely neutral internet. Sorry if that bothers people's anti-corporate sensibilities, but a lot of people do actually eat Big Macs, because they like them, and a lot of people are going to like a net that isn't neutral.
The 1960s were better in some ways and worse in others. 1960s had the realization that social stability at any price, as a matter of policy, had the side effect of locking minorities out of the economy altogether, and keeping women out of any real jobs. So, liberals rebelled against that aspect of social stability, whereas, nascent conservatives realized that the whole notion of stable society had to go. Things would play out over the decades that followed, and still do, but in the 1960s you had the birth of the modern democratic party, which tries to offer social stability but with corrections for its lack of inclusiveness in the 1950s and before, whereas conservatives try to retain social stability through the family unit - guns and god, but otherwise adopt a free trade system.
In the 1970s and 1980s, of course, were a disaster in some ways as decades of stability revealed that the USA basically slept at the switch while the world caught up and passed us by in some ways. Computers and IT and a restructured economy lead by the Reagan revolution re-introduced social mobility to America and honestly, Clinton really ran things the same way as Reagan did, at the big picture level. Bush the Jr continued the trend, but now, with China in the picture, the depression over Iraq, Americans wonder if they can actually compete at all. This is particularly true on the left wing, where modernization from IT has been disasterous. Poor blacks completely missed the boat on the technology express, and literary types are finding that IT and a new approach to thinking about copyright is actually making their livelihood (writing), obsolete. It's no surprise that Obama's essential promise is to turn back the clock on manufacturing by shutting off free trade, and, at the same time, wants to have insanely strong laws on copyrights. He's trying to keep his constituents in liberalia doing the same thing they've always done. But he can't and no one can, because the world's changed.
That's not to say that I think Obama is somehow evil - far from it. And its certainly not to say that McCain is a saint. By I think, overall, free trade is the way to go, and we have to be able to modernize and respond to changes brought by improvements in technology, rather than try to suppress them or shunt them with global taxes and regulations in the name of the environment.
Go read some history. Just because unions were co-opted and abused at some point does not make them all bad. If it weren't for US unions we'd all still be worked nearly to death - it was decades of fight, including significant loss of life from union members, that brought us to 8-hour working day for example.
Unions didn't bring any of that. As a rule, unions have historically been completely ineffective and they still are. The big steel strike against Carnegie, for example, was ultimately broken by a bunch of Pinkertons. Federal regulators bought those gains.
People look at today's dynamic world and forget the previous era of social stability at any price and its consequences. Democrats, in their zeal to protect the so-called bottom of society (which was really just the city people at the expense of the rural), completely bled America dry of any social mobility. Nobody really got rich, because taxes were too high, and workers lived in houses and apartments today that are now considered ghettos. Stability came at a terrible price that we are still paying. While other countries were re-tooling with the latest dies and presses, while the Japanese were beginning to experiment with the American invented transistor, American manufacturing firms kept the same presses, dies, and processes, and, RCA, for example, kept right on making consumer electronics with tubes, Goodyear kept right on making tires the same way they had always been made, as did GM, Ford, Chrysler and countless other manufacturing concerns. But nobody cared, because, if you were a worker and came up with something innovative, the union would smack you down, and the whole notion of a caste system perpetuated by the liberal separation of worker and other people basically lobotomized workers while at the same time encouraged managers to ignore them.
The entire experiment was a failure and the 1970s was the watershed although we still haven't sorted out the mess completely. Foreign manufacturers began shipping better quality goods and Americans immediately understood that the system they were in was not as good, and could not produce goods with the same quality, and went with the foreign stuff. Japanese radios and TV sets made with transistors were better than RCA appliances made with tubes. Foreign cars, made with newer presses, had higher quality fits on body panels, and really, new tooling just made the whole car better and with lighter materials. And, most people don't remember this, but, union made tires in Akron OH, that did not have steel belts, could not last nearly as long as those fancy belted tires made by Michelin.
So the whole rust belt was wiped out. It really, really was. I lived in Akron when all the rubber companies packed up and shut down. Unions really could not get that with tires that lasted 50,000 miles, rather than 10,000 miles, you didn't need as many people making tires because you didn't need as many tires.
Later I had a part time job working at RCA in Camden working on a program to sell TUBES to RCA dealers and this was in the 1980s. It was like working at a grave. Everyone knew the Japanese were killing them and they had got where they got with decades of stagnation and sloth. They knew the only thing RCA had to offer was Aerospace and Defense and they knew that the brand in consumer electronics was hollow and so when GE bought them out, it was as if awaiting judgement, knowing that the obsolete plants from Camden to Indianopolis were all going to be shut down because nobody wanted TVs with bad pictures and flaky tubes when trinitrons with transistors were so much better.
I sat across from a guy who worked in the same office with the same secretary for 30 years, and that was America back then. As a result of trying to achieve a perfect egalitarian society and to protect the worker at any price, we tried to have this world where nothing changed, and nothing did, and the rest of the world got better.
Yes, today's global world can be stress filled at times and I c
Yes. I saw it first hand. Did you? No, but my parents did. And when they talk about their past, all they talk about is, how poor they were then. In fact, all -everyone- I know who lived in that era talks about is, how poor they were then. Yeah, my wife's grandmother and my grandmothers all complain about the price of food, but even my grandmother noted that it wasn't until recently (like the last 30 years), that she even had meat whenever she wanted it.
Where in this endless competition to work more do our lives actually improve? It won't until we choose cooperation over competition.
You worry too much about what other people have and not nearly enough about your own happiness. You can't go through your life measuring yourself by the yardstick of other's possessions. You need to make peace with yourself, because, until you do, you are just dragging everyone else around you into your inner wars.
Seriously. At the end of the day, for all of its talk about brotherhood, there is no one more obsessed with what someone else has than a liberal.
You can work less now, if you want, if you are willing to have less. You can choose to spend your time any way you want. It is your life. If you want to be happy, be happy, go ahead... but don't get bitter because your choice to work less has you clipping coupons every now and then or that maybe you can't be as up in the pecking order of euro-styled sports sedans.
I'm not talking about immigration. We're talking about something akin to 'ringers' being brought in to drive down wages. H1-B workers are not immigrants, they are not coming here to work to become US citizen and stay here, they are temporary workers that drive down wages, send money home and leave eventually.
I know a lot of H1-B workers that use the H1-B just as a way to try and get themselves into the USA.
We need to Unionize the entire country. If we even have a fighting chance against corporate America. The sooner people realize that Unions are not as bad as the PR teams make them out to be. The sooner we can get stronger like the European Unions.
So what, we can go back to the days of Jimmy Hoffa? People that want to bring unions everywhere have no idea what they are talking about. Just to start with, why not go rent "On the Waterfront", and see what the union is all about.
In the 50's and 60's American dads put in 40 hours a week in a factory with just a high school diploma and families lived pretty wel
Did you see HOW those people lived back then? One TV - black and white, a simple radio, a tiny house and one family car, if any. You had meat maybe once a week, often had to shovel coal for your own furnace. That 40 hours in a factory was often backbreaking work too. Factories weren't air-conditioned places like they were to do and your life was completely regimental. You had entire cities, like Akron Ohio, that quite literally set all of their clocks to the factory whistle and clock tower. Toot toot, time for everyone in Akron to eat lunch.
Dude, the 1950s sucked. Medical care was barbaric by today's standards. You got a doctor and a stethoscope and that was about it. There was no MRI, PET Scan, CAT Scan... just the basic x-ray, and those damned things were so high powered that they probably gave cancer to a ton of people. Antibiotics were just coming out, and really, the only medicine publicly available was really just good old booze.
And look at what toys a kid got in those days. Maybe an electric train, with a couple of cars, and a few other things. But there were no video games. How could you romanticize a time that had no video games? That's crazy talk.
That is why all of these World War II high school era graduates either got the GI Bill or at least voted to and worked for programs to educate their children, so they wouldn't have to live the same way.
With all of the improvements in productivity that have come about since then, why are we not now on a standard 32-hour workweek? We should have been there 20 years ago.
Because, if you worked 32 hours, I would still work 40, so I could get a raise. If you work 40, I'll work 48, because I want my son to have more. This is America, competition matters, and if you want to have more, work more.
Now with college degrees, Moms and Dads put in 80-Plus, and can't even achieve the same living standards they had as children
What? I would think that two new cars, a big mcmansion, video games, the latest paris fashions shipped to Walmart, computers, i-pods, designer brand tennis shoes, access to swimming pools... or even basic stuff, like multiple bathrooms per house... a master bedroom with its own bathroom... all this sort of stuff, they didn't have in the 1950s...
Oh, by the way, in the 1950s, kids still got polio and the average family still went hungry. You had potatoes and beans to eat, most of the time. Meat was a luxury thing. Now you get that on demand. Yeah, that was some standard of living back then. My mother and father grew up in the 1950s, and they were dirt poor. Their parents were factory workers, good union jobs, like you romanticize, and the whole way of life sucked. So they left, and so did many other people.
it is xenophobia - a complete lack of interest in people who are taking your jobs
How can we even say that the computer industry has reached a point yet where the IT world is now a zero sum game. Do we have Star Trek yet? Have we solved NP-Complete yet? Can everyone talk to everyone securely yet. There is more software to be invented yet, than has been. There is so, so much to do. We have only just begun and there is plenty of room in this field for European, Indian and American programmers both.
I think the larger question is...why when we in the US have PLENTY of citizens
Well we have PLENTY of citizens, but they do not like to do computer programming. Last time I checked, the only people that came here to the USA involuntarily were African Americans. The rest of us are ancestors of some "driving down the wages to citizens and giving them to foreigners that are just sending home is not helping matters..."
This ridiculous, xenophobic crap has polluted the American discource since the Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam bitched about the new British arrivals in what would eventually be renamed New York. Yet, despite these waves of low wage immigrants, the United States has managed to become the riches single nation on the planet earth. I've got 13 aircraft carriers, a man on the moon, a kick ass freeway system and gasoline that even today is cheaper than any of our allies to say that a policy of open ended immigration works and works stunningly well.
My grandmother, as did many grandparents, sent money overseas back to Europe to their families when they had it. Family is an AMERICAN value. Remember?
I too, work with a lot of immigrants in Computer Programming, and for the most part I have found these people, whereever they come from, be it Malaysia, Viet Nam, China, India, Japan, Ireland, Scotland, England, Germany, and Switzerland, to be hardworking, decent, law abiding, industrious, imaginative, family oriented, and in short the sort of people that the USA should be proud to have. These people want to work, value family, and want to be Americans. I think that, rather than making these people jump through hoops like dogs, we should be recruiting these people from around the world, agressively, and we should be honored to make them citizens of our country, and not the other way around.
By the way too, my uncle in law did THREE combat tours in Viet Nam, earning a silver star, a couple of purple hearts. He's not a computer programmer, but he got his degree at Khe Sahn. But hey, he's just a stinking Mexican... so now you can take that stereotype about lazy hispanic people and blow that out your ass too, while you were at it.
I really don't understand this idea in the US of every state doing everything individually in their own little wa
It's really best to think of the US Constitution as a treaty between the states that allows for the creation of a strong federal government but with limited powers. Thus, the commerce clause argument that both left and right wingers always have.
The only reason that the USA wound up with a strong federal government was because the previous "federal" government, the Articles of Confederation, was an abject failure and almost doomed the USA to perpetual inter-state bickering. The US Constitution changed all that, and eventually, the EU will most likely evolved into something like it.
So there we already have a precedent of a US citizen being detained without cause, on US soil.
Getting concerned yet? You should be.
I won't even bother to point out that you'd have to be a selfish bastard, as well as ignorant to think only American's have the right to Habeas Corpus.
Ok. Check this out. The USA has a -long- tradition of temporary suspensions of some civil liberties during war time. Last time I checked, the USA is in a war.
As much as the left wing bashes Bush for, honestly, going after Padilla, whose just a stupid muslim gangsta anyway, they've neglected that Lincoln not only suspended Habeus Corpus in the civil war in general, but he flat out executed a shitpot of confederate spies - no trial. Just whacked them. Then, in World War II, you had Roosevelt go and throw all the Japs into camps. What was their crime? And this guy has his head stamped on every US dime.
After the war is over, and peace breaks out, then the USA's civil liberties go back.
I have no problem saying that terrorists or Iraq or Afghan insurgents do not get Habeus Corpus. It's a battlefield, and if a US soldier -thinks- they might get shot at by you, then they should shoot you first. Sorry, its a war. War sucks. But, I don't see any Arab organization actually arguing in favor of any civil rights for anybody.... so really, when it boils down to it, American military rules of engagement are most likely a step up in civil rights for most arabs.
What new products have come from the US lately? The only innovative brands I know are MS, Intel, AMD and Pfizer&co.
Uh, Apple anyone? Maybe you didn't notice that whole iTunes / iPod thing...Sony certainly missed it, so its understandable.
If you want manufacturing perfection, you go German.
German manufacturing perfection is a myth. The Japanese are the best, Americans are number 2, and the Europeans, in general, trail badly.
Movies? (Have you seen the quality of movies lately)
I was never really big into movies in general, but I would argue that we are in a good time for science fiction, for sure.
What does the US have to offer, except root DNS and porn?
MIT. Caltech. Harvard. Yale. UPenn, CMU...the list of great American universities is enormous.
Battlestar Galactica, by itself, proves American genius.
On the commercial side - Intel, AMD, Pfizer is not a bad place to be. I would add GE, who makes kick ass locomotives, fuel efficient jet engines, and appliaces. And, hey, Halliburton made 5 billion dollars last quarter, as rising demand for petroleum brings increased demand for specialized extraction technologies... but really, there's a lot of good American companies. Hey, I'd take GM over Daimler, any day of the week. We might also throw in Boeing, that little thing called Google, Yahoo, nVidia....
As your population increases, but the amount of available work does not,
more and more people will want to work,
but there is simply nothing for them to do.
You miss the point, again, completely. You think that work is some magical thing that is doled to a fixed number of people, and that, as the number of people increase, there's going to be less jobs. This is not the case at all. There's always new products, new ideas, higher standards through competition, that will lift employment up. In fact, those things are the ONLY things that creates jobs. Have some faith in the free market.
And also because we don't integrate people into a melting pot but trough metissage (read: people from different communities get married), we are not exactly racist people.
So does that mean Germany will be repealing laws that bar the swastika? What's the harm in free speech, if attitudes are so different these days?
I'd rather live in a society which is not over-populated and workforce scarcity comes from a large percentage of the population being old people and children.....snip....Especially not when God forbids it.
I'm assuming that by your sarcastic comment about God, that you might be of the more liberal bent. Thus, I view the rest of your comment through that lens.
I think it is important, because, your whole comment betrays an appalling lack of faith in humanity and for people to make their own decisions. Like most liberals, you seem to look at economic activity as if it were a perpetually fixed pie, and, shockingly, do this despite overwhelming experience to the contrary. Did personal computers exist 30 years ago? No. Back then, liberals completely missed the computerization of the world and of course, its implications, because they were attempting to rearrange a 1970s economy right as it was going out the window. No doubt, liberals will miss the next big thing as well.
You don't need government to direct people, or population. These things will take care of themselves through the free market. When the earth gets too crowded and land too dear, then people will wind up doing what it takes to settle the oceans, or, on Mars, or even the Moon, and somebody is going to get really rich doing it. As far as we know, scientifically, there is an entire galaxy that is uninhabited, or at least very sparsely so, and for that reason, there's no reason to think that the human population expansion need not to be controlled at all.
Money aside, I thought the Russians suffered the highest death toll?
They did, and Poland was up there too, thanks to the Holocaust. Poland does bring up World War II in diplomatic tussles with Germany. I remember reading that Germany made an argument that it had a higher population that Poland and was therefor entitled to more voting rights in the EU, to which Poland retorted, "yes, because you murdered all of our people."
"Buddy has left the preferences" "Buddy is in the neighbor's trash" "Buddy is running into the street" "Buddy is in the same position as a Chevy Suburban" "Buddy is stopped on the street" "A google satellite photo is attached with a picture of Buddy" "Google Adwords has selected "Shovel" as something that you might need with Buddy."
If size were all that mattered, the smart thing for the USA and EU to do would be to begin long term work on a common framework - like a transatlantic EU++, or NAEU. (North American European Union).
Then, you have a population of nearly a billion, who couldn't agree on a single damned thing....
Actually, the population of the EU is increasing. Fast. We may not be doing an awful lot of breeding, but look at those borders go! We're the only major power on earth with an active policy of territorial expansion.
True enough, but I think those days came to an abrupt end in the last NATO summit when NATO balked at another round of expansion. Like Russia would ever tolerate including a border state like the Ukraine in NATO. That's crazy talk.
And, let's get serious. Europeans aren't really ever going to let Turkey into the EU... are they? You think Greece is ever going to say, "hey, lets put a few hundred years of Ottoman Occupation behind us...", or, Austria might just say, "that siege of vienna just an old thing..."
Slashdot Mirror
You buy what the corporation tells you to buy because it's shiny and you want it.
That's utterly ridiculous.
With monopolies, you get to choose between the Starbuck's, and the Starbuck's across the street (h/t to Lewis Black for this delightful image).
Oh wait, but if I want coffee, I can choose between the two starbucks on both sides of the street, mcdonalds, 7-11, wawa (and wawa coffee is actually pretty good), dunkin donuts, my little independent coffee store on rt 40, and that's just the ready made stuff. In stores, I have an entire shelf filled with 80 different kinds of coffee and if I do not like those stores, I can go online and get any kind of coffee I like, from anywhere on the planet.
Please, next stupid example!
No doubt he is looking forward to the £25 congestion charge in the same way that he believes content providers should be looking forward to paying him for the privilege of carrying their traffic on his oversubscribed network
No, he just will relocate his corporate offices out of London. What's the point of investing in a city if it costs more than 50USD just to get to it. I mean, is London really worth 50USD a person? Probably not!
and the people control nothing.... Hell, ask the average Joe Sixpack if they'd like to have their ....expense of a bunch of pasty faced nerds not being able to access Slashdot at the same speed, I'm sure they'll be quite happy about it
What you are really saying is that the you do not have control over the vast majority of people want. In America, corporations cater to what people want, or they die and die quickly. Consumers are fickle and they want what they want. So, if Americans want an internet, which exists so that people can watch back episodes of American Idol and follow all of the winners, that is the internet that ISPs are going to bend over backwards to get. What you are asking for, in net neutrality, is for ISPs to ignore mountains of market research, essentially polling as to what people want, in favor of an internet that does what you want it to do, and you want the government to impose that. That's not net neutrality, that is net tyranny. Just because they tyranny works for you, doesn't make it not a tyranny.
The problem is in the US market where there is no competition in the local loop and the cable companies have a long history of behaving badly - as the shareholders of Adelphia know only too well. The consumer does not have effective choice and the Bush administration has consistently backed the interests of corporations above all.
Is it really a problem though? Let's face it, there's a lot to be said for net priorities over net neutrality that makes it a lot more consumer friendly. A modest move towards charging content providers for customer access would have the effect of getting rid of a lot of marginal or crappy content that clogs even google these days.
I mean, I honestly, at this point, would be very happy if my ISP filtered out link farm sites, or, better still, if they just went out of business because the ad revenue was no longer sufficient to make them profitable.
Similarly, I might like it if ISP, in doing so, also had better bandwidth and pipes to specific service providers. I really like watching back episodes of shows on NBC's web site. Now, if my ISP cut some sort of deal with NBC to throw off a bunch of pirated stuff from other sites, like PirateBay, and that in turn brought me the original episodes of the A-Team at original film resolution, then, hey, that could be a winner.
The bottom line is, net neutrality is a feature, and while, it sounds good in principal, it also stands to reason that having a non-neutral internet makes possible offerings that might be more attractive to people than a merely neutral internet. Sorry if that bothers people's anti-corporate sensibilities, but a lot of people do actually eat Big Macs, because they like them, and a lot of people are going to like a net that isn't neutral.
What city and all 50s? Were the 60s better?
The 1960s were better in some ways and worse in others. 1960s had the realization that social stability at any price, as a matter of policy, had the side effect of locking minorities out of the economy altogether, and keeping women out of any real jobs. So, liberals rebelled against that aspect of social stability, whereas, nascent conservatives realized that the whole notion of stable society had to go. Things would play out over the decades that followed, and still do, but in the 1960s you had the birth of the modern democratic party, which tries to offer social stability but with corrections for its lack of inclusiveness in the 1950s and before, whereas conservatives try to retain social stability through the family unit - guns and god, but otherwise adopt a free trade system.
In the 1970s and 1980s, of course, were a disaster in some ways as decades of stability revealed that the USA basically slept at the switch while the world caught up and passed us by in some ways. Computers and IT and a restructured economy lead by the Reagan revolution re-introduced social mobility to America and honestly, Clinton really ran things the same way as Reagan did, at the big picture level. Bush the Jr continued the trend, but now, with China in the picture, the depression over Iraq, Americans wonder if they can actually compete at all. This is particularly true on the left wing, where modernization from IT has been disasterous. Poor blacks completely missed the boat on the technology express, and literary types are finding that IT and a new approach to thinking about copyright is actually making their livelihood (writing), obsolete. It's no surprise that Obama's essential promise is to turn back the clock on manufacturing by shutting off free trade, and, at the same time, wants to have insanely strong laws on copyrights. He's trying to keep his constituents in liberalia doing the same thing they've always done. But he can't and no one can, because the world's changed.
That's not to say that I think Obama is somehow evil - far from it. And its certainly not to say that McCain is a saint. By I think, overall, free trade is the way to go, and we have to be able to modernize and respond to changes brought by improvements in technology, rather than try to suppress them or shunt them with global taxes and regulations in the name of the environment.
Go read some history. Just because unions were co-opted and abused at some point does not make them all bad. If it weren't for US unions we'd all still be worked nearly to death - it was decades of fight, including significant loss of life from union members, that brought us to 8-hour working day for example.
Unions didn't bring any of that. As a rule, unions have historically been completely ineffective and they still are. The big steel strike against Carnegie, for example, was ultimately broken by a bunch of Pinkertons. Federal regulators bought those gains.
People look at today's dynamic world and forget the previous era of social stability at any price and its consequences. Democrats, in their zeal to protect the so-called bottom of society (which was really just the city people at the expense of the rural), completely bled America dry of any social mobility. Nobody really got rich, because taxes were too high, and workers lived in houses and apartments today that are now considered ghettos. Stability came at a terrible price that we are still paying. While other countries were re-tooling with the latest dies and presses, while the Japanese were beginning to experiment with the American invented transistor, American manufacturing firms kept the same presses, dies, and processes, and, RCA, for example, kept right on making consumer electronics with tubes, Goodyear kept right on making tires the same way they had always been made, as did GM, Ford, Chrysler and countless other manufacturing concerns. But nobody cared, because, if you were a worker and came up with something innovative, the union would smack you down, and the whole notion of a caste system perpetuated by the liberal separation of worker and other people basically lobotomized workers while at the same time encouraged managers to ignore them.
The entire experiment was a failure and the 1970s was the watershed although we still haven't sorted out the mess completely. Foreign manufacturers began shipping better quality goods and Americans immediately understood that the system they were in was not as good, and could not produce goods with the same quality, and went with the foreign stuff. Japanese radios and TV sets made with transistors were better than RCA appliances made with tubes. Foreign cars, made with newer presses, had higher quality fits on body panels, and really, new tooling just made the whole car better and with lighter materials. And, most people don't remember this, but, union made tires in Akron OH, that did not have steel belts, could not last nearly as long as those fancy belted tires made by Michelin.
So the whole rust belt was wiped out. It really, really was. I lived in Akron when all the rubber companies packed up and shut down. Unions really could not get that with tires that lasted 50,000 miles, rather than 10,000 miles, you didn't need as many people making tires because you didn't need as many tires.
Later I had a part time job working at RCA in Camden working on a program to sell TUBES to RCA dealers and this was in the 1980s. It was like working at a grave. Everyone knew the Japanese were killing them and they had got where they got with decades of stagnation and sloth. They knew the only thing RCA had to offer was Aerospace and Defense and they knew that the brand in consumer electronics was hollow and so when GE bought them out, it was as if awaiting judgement, knowing that the obsolete plants from Camden to Indianopolis were all going to be shut down because nobody wanted TVs with bad pictures and flaky tubes when trinitrons with transistors were so much better.
I sat across from a guy who worked in the same office with the same secretary for 30 years, and that was America back then. As a result of trying to achieve a perfect egalitarian society and to protect the worker at any price, we tried to have this world where nothing changed, and nothing did, and the rest of the world got better.
Yes, today's global world can be stress filled at times and I c
Yes. I saw it first hand. Did you?
No, but my parents did. And when they talk about their past, all they talk about is, how poor they were then. In fact, all -everyone- I know who lived in that era talks about is, how poor they were then. Yeah, my wife's grandmother and my grandmothers all complain about the price of food, but even my grandmother noted that it wasn't until recently (like the last 30 years), that she even had meat whenever she wanted it.
Where in this endless competition to work more do our lives actually improve? It won't until we choose cooperation over competition.
You worry too much about what other people have and not nearly enough about your own happiness. You can't go through your life measuring yourself by the yardstick of other's possessions. You need to make peace with yourself, because, until you do, you are just dragging everyone else around you into your inner wars.
Seriously. At the end of the day, for all of its talk about brotherhood, there is no one more obsessed with what someone else has than a liberal.
You can work less now, if you want, if you are willing to have less. You can choose to spend your time any way you want. It is your life. If you want to be happy, be happy, go ahead... but don't get bitter because your choice to work less has you clipping coupons every now and then or that maybe you can't be as up in the pecking order of euro-styled sports sedans.
I'm not talking about immigration. We're talking about something akin to 'ringers' being brought in to drive down wages. H1-B workers are not immigrants, they are not coming here to work to become US citizen and stay here, they are temporary workers that drive down wages, send money home and leave eventually.
I know a lot of H1-B workers that use the H1-B just as a way to try and get themselves into the USA.
We need to Unionize the entire country. If we even have a fighting chance against corporate America. The sooner people realize that Unions are not as bad as the PR teams make them out to be. The sooner we can get stronger like the European Unions.
So what, we can go back to the days of Jimmy Hoffa? People that want to bring unions everywhere have no idea what they are talking about. Just to start with, why not go rent "On the Waterfront", and see what the union is all about.
In the 50's and 60's American dads put in 40 hours a week in a factory with just a high school diploma and families lived pretty wel
Did you see HOW those people lived back then? One TV - black and white, a simple radio, a tiny house and one family car, if any. You had meat maybe once a week, often had to shovel coal for your own furnace. That 40 hours in a factory was often backbreaking work too. Factories weren't air-conditioned places like they were to do and your life was completely regimental. You had entire cities, like Akron Ohio, that quite literally set all of their clocks to the factory whistle and clock tower. Toot toot, time for everyone in Akron to eat lunch.
Dude, the 1950s sucked. Medical care was barbaric by today's standards. You got a doctor and a stethoscope and that was about it. There was no MRI, PET Scan, CAT Scan... just the basic x-ray, and those damned things were so high powered that they probably gave cancer to a ton of people. Antibiotics were just coming out, and really, the only medicine publicly available was really just good old booze.
And look at what toys a kid got in those days. Maybe an electric train, with a couple of cars, and a few other things. But there were no video games. How could you romanticize a time that had no video games? That's crazy talk.
That is why all of these World War II high school era graduates either got the GI Bill or at least voted to and worked for programs to educate their children, so they wouldn't have to live the same way.
With all of the improvements in productivity that have come about since then, why are we not now on a standard 32-hour workweek? We should have been there 20 years ago.
Because, if you worked 32 hours, I would still work 40, so I could get a raise. If you work 40, I'll work 48, because I want my son to have more. This is America, competition matters, and if you want to have more, work more.
Now with college degrees, Moms and Dads put in 80-Plus, and can't even achieve the same living standards they had as children
What? I would think that two new cars, a big mcmansion, video games, the latest paris fashions shipped to Walmart, computers, i-pods, designer brand tennis shoes, access to swimming pools... or even basic stuff, like multiple bathrooms per house... a master bedroom with its own bathroom... all this sort of stuff, they didn't have in the 1950s...
Oh, by the way, in the 1950s, kids still got polio and the average family still went hungry. You had potatoes and beans to eat, most of the time. Meat was a luxury thing. Now you get that on demand. Yeah, that was some standard of living back then. My mother and father grew up in the 1950s, and they were dirt poor. Their parents were factory workers, good union jobs, like you romanticize, and the whole way of life sucked. So they left, and so did many other people.
it is xenophobia - a complete lack of interest in people who are taking your jobs
How can we even say that the computer industry has reached a point yet where the IT world is now a zero sum game. Do we have Star Trek yet? Have we solved NP-Complete yet? Can everyone talk to everyone securely yet. There is more software to be invented yet, than has been. There is so, so much to do. We have only just begun and there is plenty of room in this field for European, Indian and American programmers both.
I think the larger question is...why when we in the US have PLENTY of citizens
Well we have PLENTY of citizens, but they do not like to do computer programming. Last time I checked, the only people that came here to the USA involuntarily were African Americans. The rest of us are ancestors of some "driving down the wages to citizens and giving them to foreigners that are just sending home is not helping matters..."
This ridiculous, xenophobic crap has polluted the American discource since the Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam bitched about the new British arrivals in what would eventually be renamed New York. Yet, despite these waves of low wage immigrants, the United States has managed to become the riches single nation on the planet earth. I've got 13 aircraft carriers, a man on the moon, a kick ass freeway system and gasoline that even today is cheaper than any of our allies to say that a policy of open ended immigration works and works stunningly well.
My grandmother, as did many grandparents, sent money overseas back to Europe to their families when they had it. Family is an AMERICAN value. Remember?
I too, work with a lot of immigrants in Computer Programming, and for the most part I have found these people, whereever they come from, be it Malaysia, Viet Nam, China, India, Japan, Ireland, Scotland, England, Germany, and Switzerland, to be hardworking, decent, law abiding, industrious, imaginative, family oriented, and in short the sort of people that the USA should be proud to have. These people want to work, value family, and want to be Americans. I think that, rather than making these people jump through hoops like dogs, we should be recruiting these people from around the world, agressively, and we should be honored to make them citizens of our country, and not the other way around.
By the way too, my uncle in law did THREE combat tours in Viet Nam, earning a silver star, a couple of purple hearts. He's not a computer programmer, but he got his degree at Khe Sahn. But hey, he's just a stinking Mexican... so now you can take that stereotype about lazy hispanic people and blow that out your ass too, while you were at it.
I really don't understand this idea in the US of every state doing everything individually in their own little wa
It's really best to think of the US Constitution as a treaty between the states that allows for the creation of a strong federal government but with limited powers. Thus, the commerce clause argument that both left and right wingers always have.
The only reason that the USA wound up with a strong federal government was because the previous "federal" government, the Articles of Confederation, was an abject failure and almost doomed the USA to perpetual inter-state bickering. The US Constitution changed all that, and eventually, the EU will most likely evolved into something like it.
So there we already have a precedent of a US citizen being detained without cause, on US soil.
... so really, when it boils down to it, American military rules of engagement are most likely a step up in civil rights for most arabs.
Getting concerned yet? You should be.
I won't even bother to point out that you'd have to be a selfish bastard, as well as ignorant to think only American's have the right to Habeas Corpus.
Ok. Check this out. The USA has a -long- tradition of temporary suspensions of some civil liberties during war time. Last time I checked, the USA is in a war.
As much as the left wing bashes Bush for, honestly, going after Padilla, whose just a stupid muslim gangsta anyway, they've neglected that Lincoln not only suspended Habeus Corpus in the civil war in general, but he flat out executed a shitpot of confederate spies - no trial. Just whacked them. Then, in World War II, you had Roosevelt go and throw all the Japs into camps. What was their crime? And this guy has his head stamped on every US dime.
After the war is over, and peace breaks out, then the USA's civil liberties go back.
I have no problem saying that terrorists or Iraq or Afghan insurgents do not get Habeus Corpus. It's a battlefield, and if a US soldier -thinks- they might get shot at by you, then they should shoot you first. Sorry, its a war. War sucks. But, I don't see any Arab organization actually arguing in favor of any civil rights for anybody.
Are you saying the number of available jobs will magically increase as the population grows?
That's exactly what I am saying.
The government is currently puring all
Companies that produce high output will
Your thinking is very 1930s....
What new products have come from the US lately? The only innovative brands I know are MS, Intel, AMD and Pfizer&co.
Uh, Apple anyone? Maybe you didn't notice that whole iTunes / iPod thing...Sony certainly missed it, so its understandable.
If you want manufacturing perfection, you go German.
German manufacturing perfection is a myth. The Japanese are the best, Americans are number 2, and the Europeans, in general, trail badly.
Movies? (Have you seen the quality of movies lately)
I was never really big into movies in general, but I would argue that we are in a good time for science fiction, for sure.
What does the US have to offer, except root DNS and porn?
MIT. Caltech. Harvard. Yale. UPenn, CMU...the list of great American universities is enormous.
Battlestar Galactica, by itself, proves American genius.
On the commercial side - Intel, AMD, Pfizer is not a bad place to be. I would add GE, who makes kick ass locomotives, fuel efficient jet engines, and appliaces. And, hey, Halliburton made 5 billion dollars last quarter, as rising demand for petroleum brings increased demand for specialized extraction technologies... but really, there's a lot of good American companies. Hey, I'd take GM over Daimler, any day of the week. We might also throw in Boeing, that little thing called Google, Yahoo, nVidia....
As your population increases, but the amount of available work does not,
more and more people will want to work,
but there is simply nothing for them to do.
You miss the point, again, completely. You think that work is some magical thing that is doled to a fixed number of people, and that, as the number of people increase, there's going to be less jobs. This is not the case at all. There's always new products, new ideas, higher standards through competition, that will lift employment up. In fact, those things are the ONLY things that creates jobs. Have some faith in the free market.
And also because we don't integrate people into a melting pot but trough metissage (read: people from different communities get married), we are not exactly racist people.
So does that mean Germany will be repealing laws that bar the swastika? What's the harm in free speech, if attitudes are so different these days?
I'd rather live in a society which is not over-populated and workforce scarcity comes from a large percentage of the population being old people and children.....snip....Especially not when God forbids it.
I'm assuming that by your sarcastic comment about God, that you might be of the more liberal bent. Thus, I view the rest of your comment through that lens.
I think it is important, because, your whole comment betrays an appalling lack of faith in humanity and for people to make their own decisions. Like most liberals, you seem to look at economic activity as if it were a perpetually fixed pie, and, shockingly, do this despite overwhelming experience to the contrary. Did personal computers exist 30 years ago? No. Back then, liberals completely missed the computerization of the world and of course, its implications, because they were attempting to rearrange a 1970s economy right as it was going out the window. No doubt, liberals will miss the next big thing as well.
You don't need government to direct people, or population. These things will take care of themselves through the free market. When the earth gets too crowded and land too dear, then people will wind up doing what it takes to settle the oceans, or, on Mars, or even the Moon, and somebody is going to get really rich doing it. As far as we know, scientifically, there is an entire galaxy that is uninhabited, or at least very sparsely so, and for that reason, there's no reason to think that the human population expansion need not to be controlled at all.
Money aside, I thought the Russians suffered the highest death toll?
They did, and Poland was up there too, thanks to the Holocaust. Poland does bring up World War II in diplomatic tussles with Germany. I remember reading that Germany made an argument that it had a higher population that Poland and was therefor entitled to more voting rights in the EU, to which Poland retorted, "yes, because you murdered all of our people."
USA - 2033 - 0 survivors.
EUR - 2033 - 0 survivors.
China - 2033 - 4 Billion.
Obviously, we need to make a bigger bomb, so we can get that all down to zero. That way, it will be:
USA - 2033 - 0 survivors.
EUR - 2033 - 0 survivors.
China - 2033 - 0 survivors.
Falkland Islands - 4 billion people.
ctually, odd as it may seem both Austria and Greece support Turkey joining the EU. It appears all is forgiven. Awww, Bless those Europeans eh?
That is pretty nice actually.... but, whose against it then? The French? Why?
My GPS Tracker sent me this, about Buddy:
"Buddy has left the preferences"
"Buddy is in the neighbor's trash"
"Buddy is running into the street"
"Buddy is in the same position as a Chevy Suburban"
"Buddy is stopped on the street"
"A google satellite photo is attached with a picture of Buddy"
"Google Adwords has selected "Shovel" as something that you might need with Buddy."
Actually, the population of the EU is increasing
If size were all that mattered, the smart thing for the USA and EU to do would be to begin long term work on a common framework - like a transatlantic EU++, or NAEU. (North American European Union).
Then, you have a population of nearly a billion, who couldn't agree on a single damned thing....
Actually, the population of the EU is increasing. Fast. We may not be doing an awful lot of breeding, but look at those borders go! We're the only major power on earth with an active policy of territorial expansion.
True enough, but I think those days came to an abrupt end in the last NATO summit when NATO balked at another round of expansion. Like Russia would ever tolerate including a border state like the Ukraine in NATO. That's crazy talk.
And, let's get serious. Europeans aren't really ever going to let Turkey into the EU... are they? You think Greece is ever going to say, "hey, lets put a few hundred years of Ottoman Occupation behind us...", or, Austria might just say, "that siege of vienna just an old thing..."