It doesn't matter how skilled you are as a laborer if there are a great many more laborers who are willing and able to do your job. Unskilled laborers are always in that situation, but if you are a game developer or investment banker, you still face the same buyers market as people with the skills to be hired are pouring out colleges much faster than they are being absorbed by the jobs market. So to that extent, the analogy to coal mining or textiles holds.
It's not like you could feed your family just by giving up on skilled labor and going to work in the "coal mines" of unskilled labor (fast food, I guess)! Then you'd be competing in an even larger pool of applicants.
Just because it's a cliche doesn't make it invalid. Coal miners are symbolic of a specific upheaval in labor-capital relations that was a part of industrial revolution. We're living through a new revolution now, one that's faster and global. So far, workers are losing, and if problems like this don't get solved, you should expect another upheaval that makes the wildcat cole miner strikes look like a tea party.
That's very interesting, although I'd like to see that explanation in a referendum. Not to be overly pragmatic, but I shudder to think how easy it would be for the current crop of Republicans to make a false dichotomy out of something as American as "One man one vote" and an elitist (even French!) notion like "pairwise matrices."
One of my my first thoughts after my lights went out (well, not really first) was "I wonder if that worm had anything to do with this." But at the time I doubted that they ran power plants on Windows so it seemed like a very idle thought -- until I found out that the problem started with FirstEnergy, that they owned Davis-Besse, and that they had already had problems because of Slammer! That got me really scared and mad at the people who are running our important systems.
According to our Windows sysadmin, the updater often reports that a patch has been successfully applied when it hasn't been, and there is no easy way to check if that "success" was true or not. So there may be a lot of admins out there who patch religiously and don't even know that a lot of their patches have silently failed. Apparently the updater only checks one registry key to figure out if the patch has been applied and never looks at file versions or checksums, or any of the obvious and reliable ways to determine real patch status.
The problem with this argument, actually, is that the supposedly closed and enslaving proprietary formats are very frequently hacked open by those that want to use a different program.
Until you are stopped by laws and courts that favor the "rights" of corporations over individuals. Look how far the notion of copyright is being extended, to toner cartridges for instance. Market share does gives you the money and status to throw your weight around like that.
It's for reasons like this that even if you aren't interested or concerned about the politics of it, choosing software (or any product) that is more open is a small but important act of dissent. I don't mean to make this point to you personally or to encourage you to do something that you're already inclined to do anyway, I'm just saying that making this kind choice should not to be discouraged or underestimated, and that there are reasons to make it beyond whether or not readers for various formats are available yet.
If I have to hire a programmer to write a reader, then I may as well just stay with MS office.
I know this isn't the point you're making and that you don't want to hire a programmer to write a reader (and you're right that you should be able to get plug-ins from the OpenOffice website), but I just want to say that it an open format is better for human society than a closed format. The fact that you could hire a programmer to do what you want to do, thus retaining the exercise of your free will, is important (or even that I could and you might benefit). It is much better than a world in which you are constrained in more and more of your daily activities by what is possible with mass-produced products that the marketplace has decided are the winners.
A couple of posts below someone stated that Microsoft is winning the war, which is true, but the importance of choosing applications like OpenOffice and/or AbiWord, is not so that they might win the war over Microsoft, but so that our lives stop being treated like a battlefield by people we don't know and have nothing to do with!
It will be a major victory (for us, not over Microsoft) when Microsoft realizes that what people want are open formats and interoperability, and that they'll make their software choices based on fearutes and quality. Of course people have to want that. I want it enough that I sacrifice a little convenience to use not-quite-ready but more open software. And I want you to want that. I don't think it takes very much courage to make that choice.
Also, I'm a firm beleiver that it's better to hire people than to buy from corporations. I'd much rather transact my business one on one with a human being who gets the full benefit of what I pay him or her than be one of a million blips in the bank account of a corporation that milks every ounce of "productivity" from its workers.
but they are working in retail -- a market where the customer determines how many hours the employees need to work a week
That's misguided! Being in the retail market may determine how hours the store needs to be open per week. Wal-Mart management determines how many people it takes to accomplish that.
Of course they make that determination in their own self-interest, while the kind of workers who work at Wal-Mart or K-mart often lack the ability -- due to lack of any work that pays a living wage in the area -- to act in their own self-interest. That's a recipe for exploitation, and we shouldn't put up with it as customers, consumers, or citizens.
Just because they sell the most per square foot doesn't mean its good for society. Humanity doesn't exist to make money for Wal-Mart.
I don't have to buy much of anything from any one place, I can always go online and buy it somewhere else.
For now. But if Wal-Mart and its ilk can, they will dominate the internet as completely as they dominate brick-and-mortar retail. I hope that that will be impossible, and I still think that they never will be able to achieve that kind of domination, but I'm not as sure as I used to be.
Big businesses don't have to buy up small ones to show growth. That is to appease the investors that bought shares expecting 20% returns every year. We need to get out of the "quick fix" mindset to fully understand the markets (not the stock market).
On the one hand I totally agree. On the other hand, markets do not cure all ills.
The company I work for (weird - one of my customers is a fastener distributor in Ashland), is growing due to everyone busting their ass off to improve our market situation.
Good for your company (honestly, no sarcasm). However, the number of companies like that are shrinking. And yes, that is wierd.
The better world for your children line is tired.
It may be tired but I mean it, and I make a lot of choices based on it.
Look at what you were given by your parents, with an entire generation set to do what you just said...
Yup. I cannot express my frustration with the all-talk no-walk baby boomers. But what will the outcome be if we give in to cynicism because they turned out to be lame?
We the American consumer do a lot a of stupid things. A lot of economic theory assumes a "rational actor" who only does what is in his best self interest, based on perfect knowledge of his situation. Any psychologist will tell you that real people are not rational actors and we usually don't have perfect knowledge.
When did it become such an awful thing to go to a computer store for a computer and a bicycle shop for a bicycle?
As far a Tucson is concerned, 850,000 people is a lot for 2 Wal-Marts (that the first figure I could find for the population of Tucson). Ashland, the town I mentioned above with two Wal-Marts within 10 minutes of each other, has that many for 86,000! I have relatives in plenty of places where there is only Wal-Mart, and nowhere else to shop except for porn. People used to own their own businesses, now they work at Wal-Mart.
It's called the death of the middle class. I guess we all have to adapt to minimum wage or die.
I'll repeat what I said in another post. When you buy from chains like Wal-Mart you are exporting money from your community. Don't say Wal-mart creates jobs because they don't. They generally cost more jobs at the other stores that are driven out of business than they create at the new Wal-Mart, then they depress local wages because they now have less competition in the labor market.
Buy from your neighbors, that puts your money back into your community.
Wal-mart isn't a company about absorbing huge losses.
Not overall, but you bet they can lose money on DVD rental in the short term if the prize in monopolization of the market in the long term. That the risk Netflix takes by being n business. What will you do when Netflix is out of business, Wal-Mart is the only place to get Anime (except for the anime that isn't "wholesome" enough for them to carry), but their title selection sucks, which it can because they don't have any competition anymore.
Caveat: I like Netflix but I don't know anything about how they treat their employees. Maybe Netflix is a worse place to work than Wal-Mart. In NYC, where I live there are mostly two kinds of video-stores: crappy ones and Blockbuster, and Blockbuster is crappy. So renting from a mom-and-pop video store is ot an option.
although sam walton isn't around anymore to make sure they stick to his philosphies anymore, the company is still held by his family.
yeah, wal-mart is huge, but how did they get that way? by actually meeting the needs of the communities they serve.
Sam Walton's philosophy. Here are a few high notes of that philosophy (from alternet.org):
The average worker makes $15,000/year, working full time.
In a world that is increasingly about unreliable part-time work, a whopping 70% of Wal-Marts employees work full-time. How do that do it? By defining full-time to mean 28 hrs a week!.
Employee turnover is over 50%/year with some stores hitting 100% -- having to replace every worker every year. Sounds like a great place with a great philosophy!
When meat cutters in Texas got sick of how they were treated at Wal-Mart and voted to unionize, Wal-Mart closed all of its meat-cutting departments
It's "We buy American Campaign" is a sham. They are the world's largest importer of Chinese made goods. Their low prices are thanks to impoverished Chinese people working 16 hour days for $0.13/hr.
There is more to life than selling the most. And while it isn't Wal-Mart's job to make people happy, it is our job to protect ourselves and realize that places like Wal-Mart sell crap, no one that works there knows anything about what they sell, and working there is crap. When you spend money at your local Wal-Mart, you are basically exporting money from your town. They only part of that money that gets put back into your community is the chump change that passes for wages.
Ask M$ what it's like to go into a business losing money hand over fist while waiting for competition to fail...
I'm not sure what your point is. They are a prime example, since they've reached a point where their market penetration feeds off of itself rather than the overall quality or innovativeness of their products.
Most communities are not allowing Wal-Mart to move in (I live in CT and this is true, as well as in Washington state that I know of off the top of my head).
Most? Try "a handful" or "a lucky few." My wife is from a small town in Virginia (Ashland) where the local small-businesses bitterly fought Wal-Mart. They lost, a lot of their businesses are ruined, but at least residents are saved the 10 minutes it took to drive to the next nearest Wal-Mart.
How does Netflix making money, as it does quite nicely, not count any more? That is the only reason why they are in business.
Look at another popular current Slashdot topic: SCO. A lot of people subscribe to the theory that SCO just wants to look good enough to be bought. Markets are saturated, big businesses have to buy smaller ones to show growth, and smaller ones have to be bought if the executives are going to make any money because they will never survive against the big boys. That isn't life, that's a game -- problem is business provides people their livelihood, and they're losing they're livelihoods fast.
Face it already, Utopia does not exist. Adapt to the world or die. Seems simple enough.
Ah, they sterotypical response of someone without the courage to stand up and change his circumstances. I'm sorry if that sounds like a flame, but any sentence that ends "...or die" just rubs me the wrong way. I will gladly lag behind in your great race to the bottom if the pile, I plan to do all I can to leave a better world for my children.
What is so unfair about Wal-Mart moving into the online DVD rental business?
There's nothing specifically unfair about Wal-Mart get into the online DVD rental, except that they can absorb huge losses while they wait for their competition to die.
That may seem like it's just the breaks of being in business, but Wal-Mart's brick-and-mortar store strategy is to open up so many Wal-Mart's in an area that it cuts into everyone's bottom line, even that of the other Wal-Mart's. Then when all the mom and pops are gone and any other competitors -- surprise! -- all the Wal-Mart's but one are closed. Net effect, fewer jobs and zero choice about where to take your business.
This is a "vertical" example of the same thing. Now that many American's have no place to shop and work other than Wal-Mart, they have to leech into other sectors of the economy in order to grow, and growth is the only important thing in American business these days. Doing what you do well (as Netflix does, in my opinion) doesn't count any more. Whatever you do, you have to do it more and more, no matter how bad you get at it because you're doing too much.
This is bad because only being able to choose what Wal-Mart sells is no real choice, and because Wal-Mart has very specific ideas about what you should be able to buy.
I agree whole heartedly that fast food is BAD. I simply used McDonald's as an example... I simply meant that if you are going to eat out and ask you child/children where they would like to eat, McDonald's will likely be the answer.
Fair enough. I think as parents we especially have to be prepared for this, because the goal of advertising aimed at children is to get the children to nag their parents into spending money.
My daughter is 18 months old, so we've hardly run into peer-pressure yet. As powerful as peer-pressure is, though, when I was 16 my friends and I were driving around looking for food and one guy refused to go to any fast food restaurant. At first he wouldn't say why but finally told us he didn't want to support restaurants that were causing the destruction of the Amazon by buying cheap South American beef (thus encouraging South American ranchers to cut down more and more jungle to create grazing for cattle). It was a small act, but this was a friend that I really respected and it had a profound influence on me.
I hope to be able to raise my daughter (and twins coming in September!) not to have to do and to have everything that her friends do (though I know I'll have to give in on a lot). I also hope that she'll be respected by her peers and influence them by little acts such as not reflexively eating fast food.
And the chains and brands in school... Man! what a travesty of education!
Your most frequented resturant in the near future will be McDonald's.
McDonald's is about the worst food there is for the health of children, adults, or the planet. Go read Fast Food Nation and see if you want to take your children there.
Home-cooking is a hard lifestyle change for families where both parents work, but here are my tips:
Shop often, buy, huge amounts and keep lots of vegetables, fruit, and fish in the house. It is so easy to boil, steam, or just cut up enough for a child portion, then give them some of your dinner.
Baby food is for suckers. Get lots of little tupperware containers and follow this recipe. 1) Pick a veggie. 2) Boil. 3) Puree
Make a lot and save it, especially on the weekends. Grilling a couple of hamburgers? Make a dozen and freeze or refrigerate the rest. (To hate McDonald's is not to hate hamburgers. They're not great for your health or for the planet [go read Diet for a Small Planet] but realistically, they taste great. ALWAYS use half chuck/half sirloin, the difference is huge) Roasting a chicken? Roast four. Making a tuna sandwich. Make 4 cans of tuna.
If you have a farm co-op or community supported agriculture in your area, join it. You will get all the veggies you need that way.
Inattention to the food we eat, how we prepare it, and where it comes from is one of the worst aspects of our (American) culture. It would be great if more people would make an effort to start their children out on the right foot, which naturally affects the way the parents eat as well.
I've been doing this for a while (probably over two years) and I don't think I've ever once gotten spam to an address that I'd given when buying something online or registering with a website.
I still get a ton of spam because my email address can be found on a lot of web pages, but it at least gives me hope that people who are doing real business on the web are conducting themselves pretty well.
OK. They used to, though. I did it for a while before (*gasp*) email (1990-91?) and they would send sample letters which I, and many people I bet, often copied with minimal changes (they were good letters!).
I wonder if they stopped because it was too easy for too many people to send exactly the same letter? I mean in (*gasp*) the old days even if you were copying it you were still writing it with your hands or typing it with your fingers so why not make a few small changes anyway? But now I'm sure a lot of people would just cut-n-paste.
I think there's a difference between letters to the editor and other kinds of communication mentioned in the article, such as letters to congressional representatives. When you send a letter to your representative or senator, you're really just voting, in a way. I don't think they really read them -- they just tabulate for and against on specific issues. The fact that the internet makes it easier for people to participate in this kind of democracy is great (as long as people read the letters they sign). Amnesty International has a program called Freedom Writers which is very similar, and I don't think anyone would want a dictator to ignore a landslide of letters in support of a political prisoner, just because it was obvious astroturfing by Amnesty International
But letters to the editor are treated as if they come from individuals. So, while encouraging people to write to their newspapers is one thing, encouraging them to write this to their newspaper, because the audience of these letters is partly the editors but also partly the general public, seems much more like the creation of propaganda -- like hiring actors to say something everywhere everyday until people believe it's true because they keep hearing it. Insofar as editors are paying attention to public opinion they should take these letters into account, but their job is, I hope, to be more thoughtful than that.
If buying it isn't a problem, XMetal works pretty well for DocBook. You can view your document as a tree (i.e., structured); with minimal block formatting and visible tags; as something like WYSIWYG, formatted with a CSS stylesheet; and, preview it as HTML in browser (IE for sure -- I don't know if you could get it to use Mozilla) formatted with an XSL stylesheet. The new version adds PDF preview which I assume is done through XSL-FO, but I haven't used it.
It's not the fastest or smoothest editor to use, but it does a good job of balancing the spirit of XML with the niceness of seeing formatted text as you work.
It might also be that he is concerned about his actions bringing harm to others. Civil disobedience is one thing when you are taking risks only for yourself. Perhaps he was willing to risk being fired, but still had to consider if it was fair for him to put HP in legal jeopardy over a stand he was making on his own principles.
The only method by which this approximation can be perfected is the scientific one.
Things get really messy once you start questioning the idea that there is actually an objective reality to begin with. Don't do that. If you assume that there is no objective reality, the first assumption you make is subject to this theory
What we need to understand is that if you assume there is an objective reality, the first assumption you make is subject to that theory. That doesn't mean that acting like there is an objective reality doesn't work almost all of the time. It just means that that assumption may cause problems further down the line, say when you get into politics
This is the big problem with science and the modern world. We see a lot of concrete progress thanks to science and scientists, but we forget that the scientific method is philosophical and at it's heart theoretical. Because what we observe accords with what we expected to observe doesn't mean that we have observed anything in its totality. To even say that our "approximation" can be perfected through science makes a big assumption about the horizon of reality. I mean, in quantum mechanics we've already come to the point where the link between science and observation is much more complicated, since the scientist has to take his/her own observation into account. Once we arrive at this point we can no longer accept the objectivity of our observation as a simple fact--it doesn't mean it's gone, just much more complicated and something we have to theorize about!
Anyway, that was too much of a digression. What I'm saying is that science can alsways be used to support an ideology because we will never perfect our approximation. Just because it's science doesn't mean it isn't guessing. If you believe uncritically in the objectivity of science -- not "science" the abstract ideal but "science" the human, social, and not-ideal activity, you are very naive and need to think more critically. Scientific thinking is, by necessity, reductivist (you have to reduce the issue to a question you can answer experimentally), but in politics scienctific reduction can be used to exclude questions you don't want to answer. "Product X is harmless", you might say, knowing you didn't test it on women. children, or in combination with product Y, though you know most people use the two in combination. It is a fact that Product X showed no harmful effects in the study. It is not the totality of the situation. It is not objective reality.
That fact that tobacco-company employed scientists can make scientific observations which just happen to back up the interests of their employer should make us think about the interconnections of money, power, and what we choose to construe as "scientific" and "factual". Science in politics is just like statistics in the newspaper, people massage their data-gathering to prove their own point and call it "fact".
Just consider: the opposite of the tobacco-company scientist is equally true, so if you happen to hate the tobacco companies and are backed up by your science, how are we to decide between duelling analyses? More science! How do you do more science? Spend money! Who's got the most money? The corporations!
What Rusty is pointing out is that it is increasingly more difficult to break out of that particular vicious circle as more and more of our science, culture, and politics becomes intertwined with corporations. We have to make decisions for ourselves, but, as a political society, we are less now the makers of informed decisions, and more the consumers of canned debate between the "left" and the "right", with any other viewpoints eschewed as "crap", "communist" or "postmodern" (BTW, while Rusty's arguments are relativist, they are not really postmodern) and that online communities hold a promise for getting around corporate media, the centralized disseminators of ideas and opinions which all too often are really those ideas which best benefit the corporation who disseminate them. How is that "crap" as so many here have called it.
Think of it this way: in Latin a regula is a "ruler" or, abstractly, a "rule." The adjective regularis means "pertaining to rules" or "having rules" (maybe "rule-based"). A liber regularis is not a "regular book" but a "rule book", so you could think of regular expressions (expressiones regulares) as "rule-expressions," "expressions of rules" (i.e. the rules for what is considered a match)
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It doesn't matter how skilled you are as a laborer if there are a great many more laborers who are willing and able to do your job. Unskilled laborers are always in that situation, but if you are a game developer or investment banker, you still face the same buyers market as people with the skills to be hired are pouring out colleges much faster than they are being absorbed by the jobs market. So to that extent, the analogy to coal mining or textiles holds.
It's not like you could feed your family just by giving up on skilled labor and going to work in the "coal mines" of unskilled labor (fast food, I guess)! Then you'd be competing in an even larger pool of applicants.
Just because it's a cliche doesn't make it invalid. Coal miners are symbolic of a specific upheaval in labor-capital relations that was a part of industrial revolution. We're living through a new revolution now, one that's faster and global. So far, workers are losing, and if problems like this don't get solved, you should expect another upheaval that makes the wildcat cole miner strikes look like a tea party.
That's very interesting, although I'd like to see that explanation in a referendum. Not to be overly pragmatic, but I shudder to think how easy it would be for the current crop of Republicans to make a false dichotomy out of something as American as "One man one vote" and an elitist (even French!) notion like "pairwise matrices."
This is called Instant Runoff Voting and it's supported by John McCain and Howard Dean.
Why would you expect people who can't keep holes from forming in their reactor vessel to plug holes in their firewall?
One of my my first thoughts after my lights went out (well, not really first) was "I wonder if that worm had anything to do with this." But at the time I doubted that they ran power plants on Windows so it seemed like a very idle thought -- until I found out that the problem started with FirstEnergy, that they owned Davis-Besse, and that they had already had problems because of Slammer! That got me really scared and mad at the people who are running our important systems.
According to our Windows sysadmin, the updater often reports that a patch has been successfully applied when it hasn't been, and there is no easy way to check if that "success" was true or not. So there may be a lot of admins out there who patch religiously and don't even know that a lot of their patches have silently failed. Apparently the updater only checks one registry key to figure out if the patch has been applied and never looks at file versions or checksums, or any of the obvious and reliable ways to determine real patch status.
The problem with this argument, actually, is that the supposedly closed and enslaving proprietary formats are very frequently hacked open by those that want to use a different program.
Until you are stopped by laws and courts that favor the "rights" of corporations over individuals. Look how far the notion of copyright is being extended, to toner cartridges for instance. Market share does gives you the money and status to throw your weight around like that.
It's for reasons like this that even if you aren't interested or concerned about the politics of it, choosing software (or any product) that is more open is a small but important act of dissent. I don't mean to make this point to you personally or to encourage you to do something that you're already inclined to do anyway, I'm just saying that making this kind choice should not to be discouraged or underestimated, and that there are reasons to make it beyond whether or not readers for various formats are available yet.
If I have to hire a programmer to write a reader, then I may as well just stay with MS office.
I know this isn't the point you're making and that you don't want to hire a programmer to write a reader (and you're right that you should be able to get plug-ins from the OpenOffice website), but I just want to say that it an open format is better for human society than a closed format. The fact that you could hire a programmer to do what you want to do, thus retaining the exercise of your free will, is important (or even that I could and you might benefit). It is much better than a world in which you are constrained in more and more of your daily activities by what is possible with mass-produced products that the marketplace has decided are the winners.
A couple of posts below someone stated that Microsoft is winning the war, which is true, but the importance of choosing applications like OpenOffice and/or AbiWord, is not so that they might win the war over Microsoft, but so that our lives stop being treated like a battlefield by people we don't know and have nothing to do with!
It will be a major victory (for us, not over Microsoft) when Microsoft realizes that what people want are open formats and interoperability, and that they'll make their software choices based on fearutes and quality. Of course people have to want that. I want it enough that I sacrifice a little convenience to use not-quite-ready but more open software. And I want you to want that. I don't think it takes very much courage to make that choice.
Also, I'm a firm beleiver that it's better to hire people than to buy from corporations. I'd much rather transact my business one on one with a human being who gets the full benefit of what I pay him or her than be one of a million blips in the bank account of a corporation that milks every ounce of "productivity" from its workers.
but they are working in retail -- a market where the customer determines how many hours the employees need to work a week
That's misguided! Being in the retail market may determine how hours the store needs to be open per week. Wal-Mart management determines how many people it takes to accomplish that.
Of course they make that determination in their own self-interest, while the kind of workers who work at Wal-Mart or K-mart often lack the ability -- due to lack of any work that pays a living wage in the area -- to act in their own self-interest. That's a recipe for exploitation, and we shouldn't put up with it as customers, consumers, or citizens.
Just because they sell the most per square foot doesn't mean its good for society. Humanity doesn't exist to make money for Wal-Mart.
I don't have to buy much of anything from any one place, I can always go online and buy it somewhere else.
For now. But if Wal-Mart and its ilk can, they will dominate the internet as completely as they dominate brick-and-mortar retail. I hope that that will be impossible, and I still think that they never will be able to achieve that kind of domination, but I'm not as sure as I used to be.
Big businesses don't have to buy up small ones to show growth. That is to appease the investors that bought shares expecting 20% returns every year. We need to get out of the "quick fix" mindset to fully understand the markets (not the stock market).
On the one hand I totally agree. On the other hand, markets do not cure all ills.
The company I work for (weird - one of my customers is a fastener distributor in Ashland), is growing due to everyone busting their ass off to improve our market situation.
Good for your company (honestly, no sarcasm). However, the number of companies like that are shrinking. And yes, that is wierd.
The better world for your children line is tired.
It may be tired but I mean it, and I make a lot of choices based on it.
Look at what you were given by your parents, with an entire generation set to do what you just said...
Yup. I cannot express my frustration with the all-talk no-walk baby boomers. But what will the outcome be if we give in to cynicism because they turned out to be lame?
We the American consumer do a lot a of stupid things. A lot of economic theory assumes a "rational actor" who only does what is in his best self interest, based on perfect knowledge of his situation. Any psychologist will tell you that real people are not rational actors and we usually don't have perfect knowledge.
When did it become such an awful thing to go to a computer store for a computer and a bicycle shop for a bicycle?As far a Tucson is concerned, 850,000 people is a lot for 2 Wal-Marts (that the first figure I could find for the population of Tucson). Ashland, the town I mentioned above with two Wal-Marts within 10 minutes of each other, has that many for 86,000! I have relatives in plenty of places where there is only Wal-Mart, and nowhere else to shop except for porn. People used to own their own businesses, now they work at Wal-Mart.
It's called the death of the middle class. I guess we all have to adapt to minimum wage or die.
I'll repeat what I said in another post. When you buy from chains like Wal-Mart you are exporting money from your community. Don't say Wal-mart creates jobs because they don't. They generally cost more jobs at the other stores that are driven out of business than they create at the new Wal-Mart, then they depress local wages because they now have less competition in the labor market.
Buy from your neighbors, that puts your money back into your community.
Wal-mart isn't a company about absorbing huge losses.
Not overall, but you bet they can lose money on DVD rental in the short term if the prize in monopolization of the market in the long term. That the risk Netflix takes by being n business. What will you do when Netflix is out of business, Wal-Mart is the only place to get Anime (except for the anime that isn't "wholesome" enough for them to carry), but their title selection sucks, which it can because they don't have any competition anymore.
Caveat: I like Netflix but I don't know anything about how they treat their employees. Maybe Netflix is a worse place to work than Wal-Mart. In NYC, where I live there are mostly two kinds of video-stores: crappy ones and Blockbuster, and Blockbuster is crappy. So renting from a mom-and-pop video store is ot an option.
although sam walton isn't around anymore to make sure they stick to his philosphies anymore, the company is still held by his family. yeah, wal-mart is huge, but how did they get that way? by actually meeting the needs of the communities they serve.
Sam Walton's philosophy. Here are a few high notes of that philosophy (from alternet.org):
There is more to life than selling the most. And while it isn't Wal-Mart's job to make people happy, it is our job to protect ourselves and realize that places like Wal-Mart sell crap, no one that works there knows anything about what they sell, and working there is crap. When you spend money at your local Wal-Mart, you are basically exporting money from your town. They only part of that money that gets put back into your community is the chump change that passes for wages.
Ask M$ what it's like to go into a business losing money hand over fist while waiting for competition to fail...
I'm not sure what your point is. They are a prime example, since they've reached a point where their market penetration feeds off of itself rather than the overall quality or innovativeness of their products.
Most communities are not allowing Wal-Mart to move in (I live in CT and this is true, as well as in Washington state that I know of off the top of my head).
Most? Try "a handful" or "a lucky few." My wife is from a small town in Virginia (Ashland) where the local small-businesses bitterly fought Wal-Mart. They lost, a lot of their businesses are ruined, but at least residents are saved the 10 minutes it took to drive to the next nearest Wal-Mart.
How does Netflix making money, as it does quite nicely, not count any more? That is the only reason why they are in business.
Look at another popular current Slashdot topic: SCO. A lot of people subscribe to the theory that SCO just wants to look good enough to be bought. Markets are saturated, big businesses have to buy smaller ones to show growth, and smaller ones have to be bought if the executives are going to make any money because they will never survive against the big boys. That isn't life, that's a game -- problem is business provides people their livelihood, and they're losing they're livelihoods fast.
Face it already, Utopia does not exist. Adapt to the world or die. Seems simple enough.
Ah, they sterotypical response of someone without the courage to stand up and change his circumstances. I'm sorry if that sounds like a flame, but any sentence that ends "...or die" just rubs me the wrong way. I will gladly lag behind in your great race to the bottom if the pile, I plan to do all I can to leave a better world for my children.
What is so unfair about Wal-Mart moving into the online DVD rental business?
There's nothing specifically unfair about Wal-Mart get into the online DVD rental, except that they can absorb huge losses while they wait for their competition to die.
That may seem like it's just the breaks of being in business, but Wal-Mart's brick-and-mortar store strategy is to open up so many Wal-Mart's in an area that it cuts into everyone's bottom line, even that of the other Wal-Mart's. Then when all the mom and pops are gone and any other competitors -- surprise! -- all the Wal-Mart's but one are closed. Net effect, fewer jobs and zero choice about where to take your business.
This is a "vertical" example of the same thing. Now that many American's have no place to shop and work other than Wal-Mart, they have to leech into other sectors of the economy in order to grow, and growth is the only important thing in American business these days. Doing what you do well (as Netflix does, in my opinion) doesn't count any more. Whatever you do, you have to do it more and more, no matter how bad you get at it because you're doing too much.
This is bad because only being able to choose what Wal-Mart sells is no real choice, and because Wal-Mart has very specific ideas about what you should be able to buy.
I agree whole heartedly that fast food is BAD. I simply used McDonald's as an example... I simply meant that if you are going to eat out and ask you child/children where they would like to eat, McDonald's will likely be the answer.
Fair enough. I think as parents we especially have to be prepared for this, because the goal of advertising aimed at children is to get the children to nag their parents into spending money.
My daughter is 18 months old, so we've hardly run into peer-pressure yet. As powerful as peer-pressure is, though, when I was 16 my friends and I were driving around looking for food and one guy refused to go to any fast food restaurant. At first he wouldn't say why but finally told us he didn't want to support restaurants that were causing the destruction of the Amazon by buying cheap South American beef (thus encouraging South American ranchers to cut down more and more jungle to create grazing for cattle). It was a small act, but this was a friend that I really respected and it had a profound influence on me.
I hope to be able to raise my daughter (and twins coming in September!) not to have to do and to have everything that her friends do (though I know I'll have to give in on a lot). I also hope that she'll be respected by her peers and influence them by little acts such as not reflexively eating fast food.
And the chains and brands in school... Man! what a travesty of education!
Your most frequented resturant in the near future will be McDonald's.
McDonald's is about the worst food there is for the health of children, adults, or the planet. Go read Fast Food Nation and see if you want to take your children there.
Home-cooking is a hard lifestyle change for families where both parents work, but here are my tips:
Inattention to the food we eat, how we prepare it, and where it comes from is one of the worst aspects of our (American) culture. It would be great if more people would make an effort to start their children out on the right foot, which naturally affects the way the parents eat as well.
Wouldn't it be easier to add an option to specify preferred browser into Mozilla Mail preferences?
Or just the system default browser. It's Bug #108455.
I've been doing this for a while (probably over two years) and I don't think I've ever once gotten spam to an address that I'd given when buying something online or registering with a website.
I still get a ton of spam because my email address can be found on a lot of web pages, but it at least gives me hope that people who are doing real business on the web are conducting themselves pretty well.
OK. They used to, though. I did it for a while before (*gasp*) email (1990-91?) and they would send sample letters which I, and many people I bet, often copied with minimal changes (they were good letters!).
I wonder if they stopped because it was too easy for too many people to send exactly the same letter? I mean in (*gasp*) the old days even if you were copying it you were still writing it with your hands or typing it with your fingers so why not make a few small changes anyway? But now I'm sure a lot of people would just cut-n-paste.
I think there's a difference between letters to the editor and other kinds of communication mentioned in the article, such as letters to congressional representatives. When you send a letter to your representative or senator, you're really just voting, in a way. I don't think they really read them -- they just tabulate for and against on specific issues. The fact that the internet makes it easier for people to participate in this kind of democracy is great (as long as people read the letters they sign). Amnesty International has a program called Freedom Writers which is very similar, and I don't think anyone would want a dictator to ignore a landslide of letters in support of a political prisoner, just because it was obvious astroturfing by Amnesty International
But letters to the editor are treated as if they come from individuals. So, while encouraging people to write to their newspapers is one thing, encouraging them to write this to their newspaper, because the audience of these letters is partly the editors but also partly the general public, seems much more like the creation of propaganda -- like hiring actors to say something everywhere everyday until people believe it's true because they keep hearing it. Insofar as editors are paying attention to public opinion they should take these letters into account, but their job is, I hope, to be more thoughtful than that.
If buying it isn't a problem, XMetal works pretty well for DocBook. You can view your document as a tree (i.e., structured); with minimal block formatting and visible tags; as something like WYSIWYG, formatted with a CSS stylesheet; and, preview it as HTML in browser (IE for sure -- I don't know if you could get it to use Mozilla) formatted with an XSL stylesheet. The new version adds PDF preview which I assume is done through XSL-FO, but I haven't used it.
It's not the fastest or smoothest editor to use, but it does a good job of balancing the spirit of XML with the niceness of seeing formatted text as you work.
It might also be that he is concerned about his actions bringing harm to others. Civil disobedience is one thing when you are taking risks only for yourself. Perhaps he was willing to risk being fired, but still had to consider if it was fair for him to put HP in legal jeopardy over a stand he was making on his own principles.
Don't tell us! Tell the Dallas News (via their contact form) and their parent company, Belo.
Things get really messy once you start questioning the idea that there is actually an objective reality to begin with. Don't do that. If you assume that there is no objective reality, the first assumption you make is subject to this theory
What we need to understand is that if you assume there is an objective reality, the first assumption you make is subject to that theory. That doesn't mean that acting like there is an objective reality doesn't work almost all of the time. It just means that that assumption may cause problems further down the line, say when you get into politics
This is the big problem with science and the modern world. We see a lot of concrete progress thanks to science and scientists, but we forget that the scientific method is philosophical and at it's heart theoretical. Because what we observe accords with what we expected to observe doesn't mean that we have observed anything in its totality. To even say that our "approximation" can be perfected through science makes a big assumption about the horizon of reality. I mean, in quantum mechanics we've already come to the point where the link between science and observation is much more complicated, since the scientist has to take his/her own observation into account. Once we arrive at this point we can no longer accept the objectivity of our observation as a simple fact--it doesn't mean it's gone, just much more complicated and something we have to theorize about!
Anyway, that was too much of a digression. What I'm saying is that science can alsways be used to support an ideology because we will never perfect our approximation. Just because it's science doesn't mean it isn't guessing. If you believe uncritically in the objectivity of science -- not "science" the abstract ideal but "science" the human, social, and not-ideal activity, you are very naive and need to think more critically. Scientific thinking is, by necessity, reductivist (you have to reduce the issue to a question you can answer experimentally), but in politics scienctific reduction can be used to exclude questions you don't want to answer. "Product X is harmless", you might say, knowing you didn't test it on women. children, or in combination with product Y, though you know most people use the two in combination. It is a fact that Product X showed no harmful effects in the study. It is not the totality of the situation. It is not objective reality.
That fact that tobacco-company employed scientists can make scientific observations which just happen to back up the interests of their employer should make us think about the interconnections of money, power, and what we choose to construe as "scientific" and "factual". Science in politics is just like statistics in the newspaper, people massage their data-gathering to prove their own point and call it "fact".
Just consider: the opposite of the tobacco-company scientist is equally true, so if you happen to hate the tobacco companies and are backed up by your science, how are we to decide between duelling analyses? More science! How do you do more science? Spend money! Who's got the most money? The corporations!
What Rusty is pointing out is that it is increasingly more difficult to break out of that particular vicious circle as more and more of our science, culture, and politics becomes intertwined with corporations. We have to make decisions for ourselves, but, as a political society, we are less now the makers of informed decisions, and more the consumers of canned debate between the "left" and the "right", with any other viewpoints eschewed as "crap", "communist" or "postmodern" (BTW, while Rusty's arguments are relativist, they are not really postmodern) and that online communities hold a promise for getting around corporate media, the centralized disseminators of ideas and opinions which all too often are really those ideas which best benefit the corporation who disseminate them. How is that "crap" as so many here have called it.
Think of it this way: in Latin a regula is a "ruler" or, abstractly, a "rule." The adjective regularis means "pertaining to rules" or "having rules" (maybe "rule-based"). A liber regularis is not a "regular book" but a "rule book", so you could think of regular expressions (expressiones regulares) as "rule-expressions," "expressions of rules" (i.e. the rules for what is considered a match)