The scene: A Roman citizen stands with the group of Centurians charged with guarding the gate, all of whom are actually of Germanic origin.
Zoom in. Tight shot on the citizen.
Roman Citizen: Barbarians at the gate? You got me out of bed to show me barbarians at the gate? Well I don't see any barbarians at the bloody gate! I'm going back to bed.
Zoom out.
Fin
And we do mean Fin.
Don't worry, you won't feel a thing. You're going to die in your sleep.
I clean daily, and I'm very good at it, so dust doesn't build up in the first place.
I also give individual attention to each book as I use it, so each one tends to get "personal" care every month or so. Except for maybe a thousand or so of the paperback "pulp" types.
Did I mention that I do an insane amount of reading?
Of course I'm disposable. I'm a middle aged man whose parents were disposed of and who has been disposed of himself on a number of occasions.
I knew I was disposable before I began to "play the game" in my early teens and never expected anything else.
I'm sorry if you had to learn that the hard way, but then most do I'm afraid.
There are no silver bullets, under any system. Learning to take care of yourself is your best option. I mean that literally. Learn as many skills as you can that can be applied to directly taking care of yourself; and learn as many skills as you can trade as an independent.
If you rely on the corporate welfare systems as a worker ant you will suffer the fate of all unneeded worker ants.
Learn to throw pots, fix bicycles, build cabinets and mow lawns. Don't go into debt for anything you can't pay with a month's "disposable" income.
Most of all get the hell out of the software industry. It's a house of cards.
There are two groups in Congress for whom it is still a live issue, the relgious types (Don't tamper with God. I must have sinned in the womb. Stuff like that)and the eco-nuts (and as a bonifide tree hugger these people drive me nuts. They're an embaressment to my beliefs).
There's no real motion yet, because there's nothing really to move against yet, but these people make the odd wave about it. When it comes time it's going to be a knock down, drag out fight.
Tons of wingnut outfits are going to be calling their congresscritter over this issue too.
The problem with playing sports is that then all of these odd unenforcable rules which they feel compeled to enforce effect you directly.
This is only being made worse by the current trend to incorporate every sport under the sun as a private business. What the hell ever happened to the nonprofit governing body which served as a trust?
Even worse are the "Beg-a-thon" events. I don't want to race for heart disease. I want to race to race. What the hell is wrong with that?
Why, it's nearly enough to drive one to just go to the park with some friends and play for the fun of it.
The short answer is that the rugged individualist, the one who minds his own business does not become top dog.
Perhaps you are confusing individualist with control freak.
Individualists are pretty much immune to such.
I personally know of dozens of examples but can't demonstrate them to you because these people are all busy minding their own business and thus have no publicly demonstrable face.
Thoreau is a notable example because he chose to make his business, in part, writing and lecturing about it. He also made pencils and was a surveyor.
I would dearly love to answer you post, and have been thinking about how I might go about for a couple of hours now.
The best I've come up with is by writing a book on the subject.
I'm afraid it won't be done tonight.
I'll say I think you're right about Western wages though. Unless they are propped up for a bit at the point of a gun (heaven forbid, we'd never do anything like that) they are bound to fall.
They are artificial in the first place.
You can't take the wealth of the world and throw it in a landfill forever.
Yes, I am aware of the difference and did not confuse the two, although the setting may obscure that fact.
You may be unaware, because it is not quite so pressing an issue to you, that members of Congress, big Cee, are already making uneasy noises about all of this as well and it was that to which I refered when I said congress.
If you can tell me the difference between the government owing the corporations and the corporations owning the government I'd like to hear it.
Then we'll take up what the possible difference between these states and fascism is. It isn't a pleasant subject.
You make one fundamental assumption that is false though. Capitalism and Corporatism are not the same thing. Free trade is the natural human state. Modern corporations are government contructs upheld at the point of a gun.
They are serfdom, not capitalism.
Capitalism is simply the right to mind your own business.
Corporatism invokes you to mind their business under the promise of the protection of the liege lord.
Note carefully the difference between the two.
Read Thoreau's "Life Without Principle" (in this case principle is used in the economic sense. We'd probably say capital instead).
On it's surface it seems to revile business in its every word, but this is misleading. Thoreau was actually a capitalist and businessman. Every rugged individualist is really. It simply goes with the territory. If you insist on being your own man you must, of necessity, take care of your own business. Or retire from the world, which is what Thoreau did not do.
It is, at its heart, one of the most stunning paens to capitalism every written.
You'll find it a refreshing alternative to Ayn Rand and much better literature, especially since it's only a handful of pages long but says more of real value.
Please note that the bodies piled at the border will be citizens of your country, not some other's.
Then, once the bodies are there, how does your "gv'mnt" get its goods out to foreign markets?
Your recipe isn't one for domestic wealth, it's one for complete destruction. America's wealth depends entirely on it's foreign trade and always has, right from day one.
Tobacco, lumber and cheap labor went out. Manufactured goods came in.
America has never supported itself and is in less of a position now to do so than every before in its history.
So go ahead. Build your gulag. But be prepared to have to pedal a bike to work in the fields . . . and to power the single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling of your shack.
I have Cystic Fibrosis and Celiac Disease. Gene therapy may, at some point in the future, be the only thing that can save my life.
Is it dangerous? Well, for me it's only dangerous in the negative sense, if I don't get it I could die.
It kinda focuses my attention on the issue.
I could, of course, be dead before any possible real therapy becomes available. This doesn't make me feel better about possible congressional roadblocks to its development, oddly enough.
As for its use in sports the issue is handled easily enough if it can be detected by simple tests. We already segregate atheletic events into genetic classes. Create some new ones.
Problem solved.
If it can't be tested for or possitively certified in some simple way, well, then making rules against it is pointless.
Sporting regulations are already full of object lessons in what happens when you try to regulate the unenforcable.
With global worker rights then workers all over the world will have rights.
That would include those to whom the offshore work is going, who have right to. ..work.
You will also need monocultural global economy for it to work. You are perhaps thinking that that the reason jobs are going overseas is because workers are being exploited by being underpaid, i.e. being payed less than you are ( and thus being able to outbid you on your own job).
This is falacious reaoning. Most of these workers are taking the jobs because they are the best paying jobs available in their local economy where prices on life's necessities are quite divergent from our own. As are their ideas on just what constitutes a necessity.
Poor countries are not, I repeat not analogous to poor sections of rich countries and cannot be treated as such.
Paying someone $40/hr in a $1/hr local economy isn't treating those workers "fairly." It's totally destroying the local economny with runaway inflation, bringing misery to those that can't get those jobs, must pay $40/hr prices, but still make $1/hr. Revolutions have been fomented over much less.
The fact of the matter is that the rest of the world loves being thus "taken advantage of." You earn your $40/hr in a rich local economy that has become rich, at least in part, by taking advantage of poorer nations who now find themselves in a place to compete to get some of that back.
Your job will come back when all nations are equally rich, or all nations are equally poor, and thus share a common economy.
And you can't mandate that. It has to evolve. Or hundreds of millions will suffer. Even die.
You'll also find that most people who wish to protect American jobs think they can do it by opposing a global economy. I can't but feel that most of these people are fairly well off, always have been, have never lived extensively in a third world nation as a local would and thus generally being somewhat clueless as to how things really work, here or there.
Do you want to preserve American jobs and promote global worker's rights?
Go to Mexico. Build houses for the poor while earning a local wage for it.
You might learn something.
KFG
This isn't an event or a sport
on
Urban Challenge
·
· Score: 1
It's a product to "promote bonding" and "team building" for those incapable of bonding or building teams on their own.
Or, more likely, it will be sold to managers who feel "left out of the team" and thus feel it's the rest of the office's fault, little realizing that the office is a well oiled team who's main business is trying to get work done without managment wasting their time with "team building exercises."
It looks as equally manufactured, artificial, plastic and fun as all other such bonding/team building exercises.
Which is to say I'd rather go have some entirely unecessary root canal work done.
I've got an idea. Instead of giving these doofwads fifty bucks a head to manipulate you so you can bond with your workmates/troubled teen, why not take that money and put it all into beer, potato salad and Doritos, make up your own event. . . and have fun.
People like to say that Microsoft is hated because they are big and successful.
Balderdash. Microsoft has been one of the most hated software companies ever since their inception as a pissant little outfit making interpreters for hobbiest computers.
Why? Because of the way they behave.
Nowadays I think the situation is turned around, the only reason some people seem to like them is because they are big.
Too big to ignore.
I can't think of any other reason to put up with the sort of treatment they give their customers.
I think if microsoft made it so all data from the outside was tainted and wouldn't run, few would complain, if it's a choice between that and self-propagating email worms.
That's called, "Pulling out the ethernet cable."
I think we can be a bit less extreme than that on the boxen we wish to have connected and I'd hazzard a guess that millions would complain if all data from outside was suddenly tainted and wouldn't run.
Email text itself is data from the outside.
Perhaps you meant something else?
That said I can't think of anyone I know who would honestly miss the autorun feature, marketers were the primary customer for that, but any number who would complain if they couldn't even click on things to run them from email.
It's "convienient".
And there's no real cure for social engineering. Kevin Mitnick proved that even IT professionals are highly susceptable to that.
The reason is simple really. Microsoft is a consumer grade software company (trying to outgrow that, with rather iffy results so far)and is thus naturally market driven; and market driving.
"Consumer demand" (or what they can force the consumer into "demanding")is king. They aren't a technology company at all and claims they make of such are simply part of the marketing.
Security has no meaning to them other than as an advertisable "feature."
As such they have made certain decisions regarding the architecture of their operating systems that make no sense from a technological point of view.
Please note that even Ballmer's current vomiting up of "initiatives" is pure market speak and doesn't actually mean anything with regards to their software.
Fixing the situation isn't merely a matter of plugging the holes. It would take a true change of philosophy company wide, a complete restructuring of the OS and, most problematic of all, removing certain things that customers have come to expect as standard features and will bitch over losing.
"Hey, where did the autorun of executables from email go!?"
Go figure.
People want security, but not at the price of being secure. How many home users keep a box with sensitive data isolated from the net? That would require some disk swapping now and again. How inconvienient.
Let us not grow over snide in our disdain, however, and always keep as an object lesson in our minds that it was a ludicrous design decision in Gnu emacs that allowed the Lawrence Berkeley Labs network to be rooted.
We can all make mistakes.
Fotunately the Lawrence Livermore Labs ( where they keep all the "Nuclear Wessels") was isolated from the web and thus uneffected by the intrusion.
It's not a bad idea to take that as an object lesson as well.
I got it. It just wasn't funny, subtle or an empire.
I never so much as cracked a smile. As they say, dying is easy, comedy is hard.
Still, response to this review certainly goes a long way toward explaining why some of the best satire I've posted here has been modded down as a troll, or even offtopic, while some offhand stupid joke about boogers or something that I toss out gets modded up as funny.
We seem to have more than our fair share of humorless, grue sniffing morons on "staff."
May they spend their eternity in the front row of a Gallagher concert.
Slashdot Mirror
(assuming there are any) will catch my reference, but here goes anyway:
Valenti: Ok, you can vote, but don't let me catch you watching!
KFG
Well, for starters, I'm talking pro capitalism.
Everyone else is charging me with being a global economy capitalist tool.
Go figure.
KFG
The Fall of Rome
A Screenplay by KFG
Act 1: Scene 1
Fade in: The gates of Rome, circa 400.
The scene: A Roman citizen stands with the group of Centurians charged with guarding the gate, all of whom are actually of Germanic origin.
Zoom in. Tight shot on the citizen.
Roman Citizen: Barbarians at the gate? You got me out of bed to show me barbarians at the gate? Well I don't see any barbarians at the bloody gate! I'm going back to bed.
Zoom out.
Fin
And we do mean Fin.
Don't worry, you won't feel a thing. You're going to die in your sleep.
KFG
I clean daily, and I'm very good at it, so dust doesn't build up in the first place.
I also give individual attention to each book as I use it, so each one tends to get "personal" care every month or so. Except for maybe a thousand or so of the paperback "pulp" types.
Did I mention that I do an insane amount of reading?
KFG
Of course I'm disposable. I'm a middle aged man whose parents were disposed of and who has been disposed of himself on a number of occasions.
I knew I was disposable before I began to "play the game" in my early teens and never expected anything else.
I'm sorry if you had to learn that the hard way, but then most do I'm afraid.
There are no silver bullets, under any system. Learning to take care of yourself is your best option. I mean that literally. Learn as many skills as you can that can be applied to directly taking care of yourself; and learn as many skills as you can trade as an independent.
If you rely on the corporate welfare systems as a worker ant you will suffer the fate of all unneeded worker ants.
Learn to throw pots, fix bicycles, build cabinets and mow lawns. Don't go into debt for anything you can't pay with a month's "disposable" income.
Most of all get the hell out of the software industry. It's a house of cards.
I'm dead serious.
KFG
There are two groups in Congress for whom it is still a live issue, the relgious types (Don't tamper with God. I must have sinned in the womb. Stuff like that)and the eco-nuts (and as a bonifide tree hugger these people drive me nuts. They're an embaressment to my beliefs).
There's no real motion yet, because there's nothing really to move against yet, but these people make the odd wave about it. When it comes time it's going to be a knock down, drag out fight.
Tons of wingnut outfits are going to be calling their congresscritter over this issue too.
The problem with playing sports is that then all of these odd unenforcable rules which they feel compeled to enforce effect you directly.
This is only being made worse by the current trend to incorporate every sport under the sun as a private business. What the hell ever happened to the nonprofit governing body which served as a trust?
Even worse are the "Beg-a-thon" events. I don't want to race for heart disease. I want to race to race. What the hell is wrong with that?
Why, it's nearly enough to drive one to just go to the park with some friends and play for the fun of it.
Now what kind of sports is that?
KFG
If you read classics ebooks are already free, and in plain text.
In my house a DRMed Danielle Steele download for ten bucks gets trumped by a plain text free Dickens or Leacock every day of the week.
You want to make money off of me from ebooks?
Sell me a good, high quality plain text tablet for under a hundred bucks, then go away and leave me alone.
KFG
I read an insane amount of books. I have so many books my inside divider walls are made from them.
I have one big space with floor to ceiling bookshelves from which I have constructed my "rooms."
If I switched to ebooks I'd have to build and decorate!
KFG
Sorry, I made the mistake of reading the website for these people. I was revolted.
I'll bet your lasertag place either didn't have a website or it was a much more fun one.
KFG
I already gave my example. Have you read it yet?
The short answer is that the rugged individualist, the one who minds his own business does not become top dog.
Perhaps you are confusing individualist with control freak.
Individualists are pretty much immune to such.
I personally know of dozens of examples but can't demonstrate them to you because these people are all busy minding their own business and thus have no publicly demonstrable face.
Thoreau is a notable example because he chose to make his business, in part, writing and lecturing about it. He also made pencils and was a surveyor.
He had no "employees."
By choice.
KFG
I would dearly love to answer you post, and have been thinking about how I might go about for a couple of hours now.
The best I've come up with is by writing a book on the subject.
I'm afraid it won't be done tonight.
I'll say I think you're right about Western wages though. Unless they are propped up for a bit at the point of a gun (heaven forbid, we'd never do anything like that) they are bound to fall.
They are artificial in the first place.
You can't take the wealth of the world and throw it in a landfill forever.
KFG
Yes, I am aware of the difference and did not confuse the two, although the setting may obscure that fact.
You may be unaware, because it is not quite so pressing an issue to you, that members of Congress, big Cee, are already making uneasy noises about all of this as well and it was that to which I refered when I said congress.
I handled the sporting issue quite seperately.
KFG
If you can tell me the difference between the government owing the corporations and the corporations owning the government I'd like to hear it.
Then we'll take up what the possible difference between these states and fascism is. It isn't a pleasant subject.
You make one fundamental assumption that is false though. Capitalism and Corporatism are not the same thing. Free trade is the natural human state. Modern corporations are government contructs upheld at the point of a gun.
They are serfdom, not capitalism.
Capitalism is simply the right to mind your own business.
Corporatism invokes you to mind their business under the promise of the protection of the liege lord.
Note carefully the difference between the two.
Read Thoreau's "Life Without Principle" (in this case principle is used in the economic sense. We'd probably say capital instead).
On it's surface it seems to revile business in its every word, but this is misleading. Thoreau was actually a capitalist and businessman. Every rugged individualist is really. It simply goes with the territory. If you insist on being your own man you must, of necessity, take care of your own business. Or retire from the world, which is what Thoreau did not do.
It is, at its heart, one of the most stunning paens to capitalism every written.
You'll find it a refreshing alternative to Ayn Rand and much better literature, especially since it's only a handful of pages long but says more of real value.
KFG
I can see why you post as an AC.
Please note that the bodies piled at the border will be citizens of your country, not some other's.
Then, once the bodies are there, how does your "gv'mnt" get its goods out to foreign markets?
Your recipe isn't one for domestic wealth, it's one for complete destruction. America's wealth depends entirely on it's foreign trade and always has, right from day one.
Tobacco, lumber and cheap labor went out. Manufactured goods came in.
America has never supported itself and is in less of a position now to do so than every before in its history.
So go ahead. Build your gulag. But be prepared to have to pedal a bike to work in the fields . . . and to power the single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling of your shack.
KFG
I have Cystic Fibrosis and Celiac Disease. Gene therapy may, at some point in the future, be the only thing that can save my life.
Is it dangerous? Well, for me it's only dangerous in the negative sense, if I don't get it I could die.
It kinda focuses my attention on the issue.
I could, of course, be dead before any possible real therapy becomes available. This doesn't make me feel better about possible congressional roadblocks to its development, oddly enough.
As for its use in sports the issue is handled easily enough if it can be detected by simple tests. We already segregate atheletic events into genetic classes. Create some new ones.
Problem solved.
If it can't be tested for or possitively certified in some simple way, well, then making rules against it is pointless.
Sporting regulations are already full of object lessons in what happens when you try to regulate the unenforcable.
Give up. Learn to live with it.
That's what I hope to be able to do.
KFG
With global worker rights then workers all over the world will have rights.
.work.
That would include those to whom the offshore work is going, who have right to. .
You will also need monocultural global economy for it to work. You are perhaps thinking that that the reason jobs are going overseas is because workers are being exploited by being underpaid, i.e. being payed less than you are ( and thus being able to outbid you on your own job).
This is falacious reaoning. Most of these workers are taking the jobs because they are the best paying jobs available in their local economy where prices on life's necessities are quite divergent from our own. As are their ideas on just what constitutes a necessity.
Poor countries are not, I repeat not analogous to poor sections of rich countries and cannot be treated as such.
Paying someone $40/hr in a $1/hr local economy isn't treating those workers "fairly." It's totally destroying the local economny with runaway inflation, bringing misery to those that can't get those jobs, must pay $40/hr prices, but still make $1/hr. Revolutions have been fomented over much less.
The fact of the matter is that the rest of the world loves being thus "taken advantage of." You earn your $40/hr in a rich local economy that has become rich, at least in part, by taking advantage of poorer nations who now find themselves in a place to compete to get some of that back.
Your job will come back when all nations are equally rich, or all nations are equally poor, and thus share a common economy.
And you can't mandate that. It has to evolve. Or hundreds of millions will suffer. Even die.
You'll also find that most people who wish to protect American jobs think they can do it by opposing a global economy. I can't but feel that most of these people are fairly well off, always have been, have never lived extensively in a third world nation as a local would and thus generally being somewhat clueless as to how things really work, here or there.
Do you want to preserve American jobs and promote global worker's rights?
Go to Mexico. Build houses for the poor while earning a local wage for it.
You might learn something.
KFG
It's a product to "promote bonding" and "team building" for those incapable of bonding or building teams on their own.
Or, more likely, it will be sold to managers who feel "left out of the team" and thus feel it's the rest of the office's fault, little realizing that the office is a well oiled team who's main business is trying to get work done without managment wasting their time with "team building exercises."
It looks as equally manufactured, artificial, plastic and fun as all other such bonding/team building exercises.
Which is to say I'd rather go have some entirely unecessary root canal work done.
I've got an idea. Instead of giving these doofwads fifty bucks a head to manipulate you so you can bond with your workmates/troubled teen, why not take that money and put it all into beer, potato salad and Doritos, make up your own event. . . and have fun.
Just a thought.
KFG
People like to say that Microsoft is hated because they are big and successful.
Balderdash. Microsoft has been one of the most hated software companies ever since their inception as a pissant little outfit making interpreters for hobbiest computers.
Why? Because of the way they behave.
Nowadays I think the situation is turned around, the only reason some people seem to like them is because they are big.
Too big to ignore.
I can't think of any other reason to put up with the sort of treatment they give their customers.
KFG
that if I'd kept 30% of my infrastructure running Microsoft software for compatability reasons I should just go ahead and ditch it all?
Or am I just reading that wrong?
KFG
I think if microsoft made it so all data from the outside was tainted and wouldn't run, few would complain, if it's a choice between that and self-propagating email worms.
That's called, "Pulling out the ethernet cable."
I think we can be a bit less extreme than that on the boxen we wish to have connected and I'd hazzard a guess that millions would complain if all data from outside was suddenly tainted and wouldn't run.
Email text itself is data from the outside.
Perhaps you meant something else?
That said I can't think of anyone I know who would honestly miss the autorun feature, marketers were the primary customer for that, but any number who would complain if they couldn't even click on things to run them from email.
It's "convienient".
And there's no real cure for social engineering. Kevin Mitnick proved that even IT professionals are highly susceptable to that.
KFG
The reason is simple really. Microsoft is a consumer grade software company (trying to outgrow that, with rather iffy results so far)and is thus naturally market driven; and market driving.
"Consumer demand" (or what they can force the consumer into "demanding")is king. They aren't a technology company at all and claims they make of such are simply part of the marketing.
Security has no meaning to them other than as an advertisable "feature."
As such they have made certain decisions regarding the architecture of their operating systems that make no sense from a technological point of view.
Please note that even Ballmer's current vomiting up of "initiatives" is pure market speak and doesn't actually mean anything with regards to their software.
Fixing the situation isn't merely a matter of plugging the holes. It would take a true change of philosophy company wide, a complete restructuring of the OS and, most problematic of all, removing certain things that customers have come to expect as standard features and will bitch over losing.
"Hey, where did the autorun of executables from email go!?"
Go figure.
People want security, but not at the price of being secure. How many home users keep a box with sensitive data isolated from the net? That would require some disk swapping now and again. How inconvienient.
Let us not grow over snide in our disdain, however, and always keep as an object lesson in our minds that it was a ludicrous design decision in Gnu emacs that allowed the Lawrence Berkeley Labs network to be rooted.
We can all make mistakes.
Fotunately the Lawrence Livermore Labs ( where they keep all the "Nuclear Wessels") was isolated from the web and thus uneffected by the intrusion.
It's not a bad idea to take that as an object lesson as well.
KFG
Somebody should have told Shel Silverstein about that place.
KFG
I got it. It just wasn't funny, subtle or an empire.
I never so much as cracked a smile. As they say, dying is easy, comedy is hard.
Still, response to this review certainly goes a long way toward explaining why some of the best satire I've posted here has been modded down as a troll, or even offtopic, while some offhand stupid joke about boogers or something that I toss out gets modded up as funny.
We seem to have more than our fair share of humorless, grue sniffing morons on "staff."
May they spend their eternity in the front row of a Gallagher concert.
KFG
that you don't advocate and support laws just as vile and misshappen as the DMCA.
They could come back to zap you.
A bad law is still bad law, even if it at some time accomplishes something you desire.
Let's be careful and try to get it right.
KFG
They want to force Microsoft to install Linux to read it.
KFG