I'm sure everybody making $12/hr has all that and more. They may even get to put food on the table, and live indoors (providing it's a low cost-of-living area).
It doesn't matter. Unions are a right-wing bogeyman that gets blamed regardless of any rational analysis of their effect, or even whether they exist. For table thumping rhetoric, a really good bogeyman needn't b real. All you have to do is get a few million people to reflexively parrot it. This avoids the trouble of actually thinking, which makes some people's heads hurt.
Damn those regulations. Businesses just can't dump their toxic waste directly into the rivers, force workers to clean smartphone screens with known carcinogens and are forced to provide workers compensation and health insurance for their workers. Friggin government red tape!
I completely agree with you, but the problem is that not trashing the place or the employees makes domestic products more expensive. The only answer is to impose penalties on products imported from countries that don't enforce reasonable environmental and labor laws. I figure that will triple the cost of Chinese products, but what the heck. And by labor laws, I don't mean they have to pay workers at American rates. I understand that for factory workers in China $10/day may be good money, and that's part of China's legitimate comparative advantage. Forcing students to work at factories en masse without pay, and various abuses of their paid workers, is another story.
has been negotiated behind closed doors for nearly a year now
There is no excuse for the closed door policy. This is an agreement that could affect hundreds of millions of people, but they're not allowed to know what's going on? It'll be dumped in a "take it or leave it" form. Congress and parliaments openly debate bills, why the secrecy here? Because they're afraid that people will object to certain provisions? Good. It's the right of people to know how agreements that will affect them are being negotiated. Would that make the agreemnet impossible to agree on? Tough, that'll be because it's an agreement people don't want. Try again. Sorry if the democracy stuff makes your lives harder.
You know in the dark ages of Europe people were dying of plague.
The "dark ages"? Nobody who knows anything about history has used that absurd term in at least 50 years. It referred to the early middle ages, roughly 500-100 A.D. If you're referring to the Black Death, that happened about 350 years later. And as to your notion that trade so improved Europe, trade was precisely what caused that epidemic. Italian traders brought it over from the Black Sea, and additional trade spread it throughout Europe. Exception: Poland, because they were smart enough to cut of all trade when it happened, and had very few deaths as a result.
You know what changed the future of Europe? Trade
Long distance trade, that brought spices and silks to the rich, and the plague to Europe? Or are you talking about the post-Columbus trade with the Americas, which brought metals of no practical value to the rich, caused rampant inflation as a result instead of any material benefit, and resulted in up to 90% of the Amerindian population dying from Old World diseases.
the printing press
Hmm, maybe that explains my advocacy of books.
not changes in political systems
You mean the changes in the British political system that allowed for competitive markets, which was a key factor in the Industrial Revolution? The thing that lifted the majority of people out of the poverty that they'd been living in for many centuries was the Industrial Revolution, and its necessary precursors, like the British Agricultural Revolution, and less heralded things like 17th-18th century improvements in smelting metals.
Let's say you are a poor farmer in Africa. You might be able to get information on crop planting...
Right. One of the biggest problems in teaching people better farming techniques is that they are loathe to try anything different. It's not so ridiculous because one bad crop can mean starving, so they're very conservative. You think they're going to say, wow, what a great idea I got from the Internet! Even agricultural agents don't cut it. The best approach is to find one adventuresome farmer (or guarantee to make up for it if his crop fails) and let other people see how it works. If they notice that Charlie has especially good crops of corn, then they'll try it.
People in Africa use phones to get information about markets so they can go to the right market to buy or sell things.
And they'll be able to get the latest stock quotes too. People know where to go to buy and sell things, just like they did for millenia before cell phones. What people in poor parts of rural Africa lack is a decent way to get their products to market. Ugandan honey sells for a premium (something about a smoky flavor and countries w/ honey connoisseurs) but how does a Ugandan apiarist get his product to market? Roads and maybe even trucks would be good - no cell phones or Internet required. It worked to solve India's milk "shortage". In small villages lots of people have a cow, but how to get the milk to the markets in the cities? They instituted a system where a village had a cooler, everybody put their excess milk in it, and every few days a truck came along to pick it up. They even made sure the truckers weren't ripoff middle men, so the farmers got some of the money. No fancy electronics used, and it actually served a purpose without tech lovers in developed countries thinking their favorite tech gadgets could solve the world's problems.
First "someone" isn't enough. It needs to be someone sufficiently educated.
Yes, it's called a virtuous cycle. Educate some people, they can teach more people, etc. It's worked pretty well for thousands of years.
And you need one for about every 30 children or so. And if you are unlucky, all you get out of it is maybe 10 educated people, the others either can't attend, at least not regularly, get too sick, die,...
That was my point about people needing enough to eat and being in good enough health to learn something.
It is incredibly expensive...
Labor rates are pretty cheap there.
simply doesn't scale and as a result in general just does not happen
That must explain why, for example, in colonial America most people were illiterate. Oh, wait, the American colonies were known for having a very high literacy rate, and people from the mother country who came here were amazed at not just the literacy rate, even amongst the poor, but how well read and informed many of them were. And it was done with, wait for this, drum roll... one room school houses. Apparently some of the people who learned there, got a little more education, and then taught in other schools. It was amazing! I forgot to add: they didn't have cell phones or the Internet. Apparently they thought indoor plumbing was a higher priority. Such ignorant fools!
Even in 21st century America cell phones, the Internet, laptops, etc. have done remarkably little to improve education. Do you know that when TV first came along they thought it would be a great educational tool. Long distance classes and so forth may be great at a college level, but do you really think that'll work for a bunch of grade school kids? Maybe when they improve image recognition enough so that it can figure out whether little Bobby in the back needs to go #1 or #2.
Fortunately Lenovo bought what was left of Motorola Comm., and the Moto X is pretty damn good. Lenovo will probably announce that they'll keep the engineering and manufacturing in the US, because the Chinese stuff is crap. Meanwhile "American" companies will ship everything to China.
The real key is education, to enable people to improve their own conditions.
Who said anything about not increasing education? Believe it or not, you can educate people pretty well without mesh networks. Surprisingly, most people in the developed world who are at least 30 or 35 managed to do it. There's this great new tech called "books", which are much easier to setup and maintain, and can even run without electricity! Some guy named Gutenberg developed the tech to make them much cheaper, and I think his patents have expired. Absent books you can give people in the poorest parts of Africa a better education than they have with just someone standing in front of the room and a few slates.
There was noone around giving europeans free food and medicine when people were starving or dying from plagues. Most people had to go it alone and have emerged much stronger as a result. Africa on the other hand is being completely screwed by foreign interference.
Ok, we'll send you back to Europe during the famines of the early 14th century, or the Great Plague of the mid 14th, and you can tell them how it will make them better off in the long run.
Wifi distance is a relative term. With highly directional antennas, that distance can be miles, even without exceeding EIRP restrictions.
You can use up to 52dBm EIRP, but by FCC rules you can only do that w/ a 30dBi antenna. That's very directional, like the kind of stuff that's used for carefully aimed terrestrial microwave links. That's hardly suited for mobile. Cellular mobiles, as opposed to the base stations, generally use omni's, or at least very low gain. MIMO can buy you a little, but it's not magic. Admittedly 52dBm EIRP is an extreme (the tradeoffs are here), but you still have the same basic EIRP vs. directionality issue. The coffee can WiFi antennas are cute, but only useful for fixed point-to-point stuff.
And you're not restricted to Wifi: Any network technology which can carry IP (i.e. all of them) can be used.
What did you have in mind? And remember that the only reason WiFi transceivers are so cheap is because of the enormous production volume.
We don't got no weird foreign £ in 'merica, and even if we's did, many browsers don't support no weird furrin character codes for it. Hope the Queen gets a bad cold.
Mesh networks are cute, but how are you going to get reliable mobile comm? Suppose you're the only one on the road within wifi distance? Or is there some other ISM band protocol you had in mind?
You hdo realize that Africa is far from being this homogeneous place where everyone has the same problems?
Yes, but when people talk specifically about Africa, and mention how improved wireless networks would be so beneficial there, as opposed to anywhere else, it wouldn't make sense if they weren't talking specifically about the poorer parts. Otherwise, why are mesh networks more important in Botswana than Uzbekistan (which has a PPP GDP per capita less than 1/4 of Botswana)?
I would not be surprised in the least to find voice over internet protocol (VOIP) completely taking over once everyone has access to this technology.
There is nothing about VoIP that's inherently cheaper than straight digitized voice streams. VoIP eats up more bandwidth (all the headers and stuff), and RF bandwidth is the most precious commodity there is in wireless. They've done a great job w/ better modulation and coding techniques, but Shannon and Nyquist are still right. Getting more RF bandwidth is great too, but there are still limits. Maybe someday we'll use mm wave for cell phones, but we're a long way from that.
VoIP makes sense for fixed point connections where umpteen zigabit/sec (or whatever they're up to this week) makes bandwidth extremely cheap, but otherwise it sucks. And I haven't even mentioned latency requirements yet.
Nothing to eat, your kids are dying of some horrible disease and you can't the medicine they need, but the datacomm is improving every day! I really, really hate to admit it, but for once Bill Gates is right.
You're absolutely right, but in addition to that the cellphone business (smart or dumb) has always been a crazy business to be in, even crazier than PC/laptop's. There it was about price, so the change was always slower and smoother (might take 5 years to be put out of business).
The cellphone biz is insane. Remember when Nokia was king of the hill? Blackberry, Motorola, etc., etc. It's probably better business to be a component supplier. The margins may get thin as the prices go down, but it's all about performance and price. Chip sets (the RF/DSP stuff, not ARM's), displays, etc.
Electronics: the only business where prices go down.
I wish there were more like it. They keep telling us that inflation is low because smart phones are getting cheaper, and a pair of socks is $0.05 cheaper because they're now made in a country where people earn $2/day instead of $3. Never mind that nobody can afford medical insurance (yes, before Obamacare too, w/ double-digit inflation), and going to college (let alone grad school) means mortgaging your children's children.
Here's one for you who complain about old fart stories. Between a partial scholarship, federal grants (yes grants, not loans, and my family was working class, not poor) and employer tuition payments (100% if you got a 'B' or better), I got my BSEE and MSEE without paying a cent in tuition. I'm not gloating, because it was not because of anything brilliant that I did. I wish we still had it because my kids are approaching college age. But inflation is low!
The problem is that we still have a secret ballot, so they won't know where the money cam from.
Here's an alternative: Since the Supremes have ruled that money = speech, and we have Constitutionally protected Freedom of Speech in this country, they can't stop you from delivering a suitcase full of money to your favorite politician(s).
The Supreme Court thinks that money = speech. It's amazing that amongst nine judges and their research staff nobody could find a dictionary or a thesaurus. I'll send them nine sets and see if it does any good.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure everybody making $12/hr has all that and more. They may even get to put food on the table, and live indoors (providing it's a low cost-of-living area).
In Republican controlled Texas?
It doesn't matter. Unions are a right-wing bogeyman that gets blamed regardless of any rational analysis of their effect, or even whether they exist. For table thumping rhetoric, a really good bogeyman needn't b real. All you have to do is get a few million people to reflexively parrot it. This avoids the trouble of actually thinking, which makes some people's heads hurt.
Damn those regulations. Businesses just can't dump their toxic waste directly into the rivers, force workers to clean smartphone screens with known carcinogens and are forced to provide workers compensation and health insurance for their workers. Friggin government red tape!
I completely agree with you, but the problem is that not trashing the place or the employees makes domestic products more expensive. The only answer is to impose penalties on products imported from countries that don't enforce reasonable environmental and labor laws. I figure that will triple the cost of Chinese products, but what the heck. And by labor laws, I don't mean they have to pay workers at American rates. I understand that for factory workers in China $10/day may be good money, and that's part of China's legitimate comparative advantage. Forcing students to work at factories en masse without pay, and various abuses of their paid workers, is another story.
Need more coffee. Since I fixed it, why did I post the PP as AC?
has been negotiated behind closed doors for nearly a year now
There is no excuse for the closed door policy. This is an agreement that could affect hundreds of millions of people, but they're not allowed to know what's going on? It'll be dumped in a "take it or leave it" form. Congress and parliaments openly debate bills, why the secrecy here? Because they're afraid that people will object to certain provisions? Good. It's the right of people to know how agreements that will affect them are being negotiated. Would that make the agreemnet impossible to agree on? Tough, that'll be because it's an agreement people don't want. Try again. Sorry if the democracy stuff makes your lives harder.
Map makers have messed up the world for years. Most maps distort the actual size of the continents.
Use a globe.
Oh, I thought that was his middle initial. Didn't make any sense otherwise.
You know in the dark ages of Europe people were dying of plague.
The "dark ages"? Nobody who knows anything about history has used that absurd term in at least 50 years. It referred to the early middle ages, roughly 500-100 A.D. If you're referring to the Black Death, that happened about 350 years later. And as to your notion that trade so improved Europe, trade was precisely what caused that epidemic. Italian traders brought it over from the Black Sea, and additional trade spread it throughout Europe. Exception: Poland, because they were smart enough to cut of all trade when it happened, and had very few deaths as a result.
You know what changed the future of Europe? Trade
Long distance trade, that brought spices and silks to the rich, and the plague to Europe? Or are you talking about the post-Columbus trade with the Americas, which brought metals of no practical value to the rich, caused rampant inflation as a result instead of any material benefit, and resulted in up to 90% of the Amerindian population dying from Old World diseases.
the printing press
Hmm, maybe that explains my advocacy of books.
not changes in political systems
You mean the changes in the British political system that allowed for competitive markets, which was a key factor in the Industrial Revolution? The thing that lifted the majority of people out of the poverty that they'd been living in for many centuries was the Industrial Revolution, and its necessary precursors, like the British Agricultural Revolution, and less heralded things like 17th-18th century improvements in smelting metals.
Let's say you are a poor farmer in Africa. You might be able to get information on crop planting ...
Right. One of the biggest problems in teaching people better farming techniques is that they are loathe to try anything different. It's not so ridiculous because one bad crop can mean starving, so they're very conservative. You think they're going to say, wow, what a great idea I got from the Internet! Even agricultural agents don't cut it. The best approach is to find one adventuresome farmer (or guarantee to make up for it if his crop fails) and let other people see how it works. If they notice that Charlie has especially good crops of corn, then they'll try it.
People in Africa use phones to get information about markets so they can go to the right market to buy or sell things.
And they'll be able to get the latest stock quotes too. People know where to go to buy and sell things, just like they did for millenia before cell phones. What people in poor parts of rural Africa lack is a decent way to get their products to market. Ugandan honey sells for a premium (something about a smoky flavor and countries w/ honey connoisseurs) but how does a Ugandan apiarist get his product to market? Roads and maybe even trucks would be good - no cell phones or Internet required. It worked to solve India's milk "shortage". In small villages lots of people have a cow, but how to get the milk to the markets in the cities? They instituted a system where a village had a cooler, everybody put their excess milk in it, and every few days a truck came along to pick it up. They even made sure the truckers weren't ripoff middle men, so the farmers got some of the money. No fancy electronics used, and it actually served a purpose without tech lovers in developed countries thinking their favorite tech gadgets could solve the world's problems.
First "someone" isn't enough. It needs to be someone sufficiently educated.
Yes, it's called a virtuous cycle. Educate some people, they can teach more people, etc. It's worked pretty well for thousands of years.
And you need one for about every 30 children or so. And if you are unlucky, all you get out of it is maybe 10 educated people, the others either can't attend, at least not regularly, get too sick, die, ...
That was my point about people needing enough to eat and being in good enough health to learn something.
It is incredibly expensive ...
Labor rates are pretty cheap there.
simply doesn't scale and as a result in general just does not happen
That must explain why, for example, in colonial America most people were illiterate. Oh, wait, the American colonies were known for having a very high literacy rate, and people from the mother country who came here were amazed at not just the literacy rate, even amongst the poor, but how well read and informed many of them were. And it was done with, wait for this, drum roll ... one room school houses. Apparently some of the people who learned there, got a little more education, and then taught in other schools. It was amazing! I forgot to add: they didn't have cell phones or the Internet. Apparently they thought indoor plumbing was a higher priority. Such ignorant fools!
Even in 21st century America cell phones, the Internet, laptops, etc. have done remarkably little to improve education. Do you know that when TV first came along they thought it would be a great educational tool. Long distance classes and so forth may be great at a college level, but do you really think that'll work for a bunch of grade school kids? Maybe when they improve image recognition enough so that it can figure out whether little Bobby in the back needs to go #1 or #2.
Clinton was a Democrat? Are you sure?
Fortunately Lenovo bought what was left of Motorola Comm., and the Moto X is pretty damn good. Lenovo will probably announce that they'll keep the engineering and manufacturing in the US, because the Chinese stuff is crap. Meanwhile "American" companies will ship everything to China.
The real key is education, to enable people to improve their own conditions.
Who said anything about not increasing education? Believe it or not, you can educate people pretty well without mesh networks. Surprisingly, most people in the developed world who are at least 30 or 35 managed to do it. There's this great new tech called "books", which are much easier to setup and maintain, and can even run without electricity! Some guy named Gutenberg developed the tech to make them much cheaper, and I think his patents have expired. Absent books you can give people in the poorest parts of Africa a better education than they have with just someone standing in front of the room and a few slates.
There was noone around giving europeans free food and medicine when people were starving or dying from plagues. Most people had to go it alone and have emerged much stronger as a result. Africa on the other hand is being completely screwed by foreign interference.
Ok, we'll send you back to Europe during the famines of the early 14th century, or the Great Plague of the mid 14th, and you can tell them how it will make them better off in the long run.
Wifi distance is a relative term. With highly directional antennas, that distance can be miles, even without exceeding EIRP restrictions.
You can use up to 52dBm EIRP, but by FCC rules you can only do that w/ a 30dBi antenna. That's very directional, like the kind of stuff that's used for carefully aimed terrestrial microwave links. That's hardly suited for mobile. Cellular mobiles, as opposed to the base stations, generally use omni's, or at least very low gain. MIMO can buy you a little, but it's not magic. Admittedly 52dBm EIRP is an extreme (the tradeoffs are here), but you still have the same basic EIRP vs. directionality issue. The coffee can WiFi antennas are cute, but only useful for fixed point-to-point stuff.
And you're not restricted to Wifi: Any network technology which can carry IP (i.e. all of them) can be used.
What did you have in mind? And remember that the only reason WiFi transceivers are so cheap is because of the enormous production volume.
We don't got no weird foreign £ in 'merica, and even if we's did, many browsers don't support no weird furrin character codes for it. Hope the Queen gets a bad cold.
Mesh networks are cute, but how are you going to get reliable mobile comm? Suppose you're the only one on the road within wifi distance? Or is there some other ISM band protocol you had in mind?
You hdo realize that Africa is far from being this homogeneous place where everyone has the same problems?
Yes, but when people talk specifically about Africa, and mention how improved wireless networks would be so beneficial there, as opposed to anywhere else, it wouldn't make sense if they weren't talking specifically about the poorer parts. Otherwise, why are mesh networks more important in Botswana than Uzbekistan (which has a PPP GDP per capita less than 1/4 of Botswana)?
Use it wisely and you can still transfer information with it.
I would not be surprised in the least to find voice over internet protocol (VOIP) completely taking over once everyone has access to this technology.
There is nothing about VoIP that's inherently cheaper than straight digitized voice streams. VoIP eats up more bandwidth (all the headers and stuff), and RF bandwidth is the most precious commodity there is in wireless. They've done a great job w/ better modulation and coding techniques, but Shannon and Nyquist are still right. Getting more RF bandwidth is great too, but there are still limits. Maybe someday we'll use mm wave for cell phones, but we're a long way from that.
VoIP makes sense for fixed point connections where umpteen zigabit/sec (or whatever they're up to this week) makes bandwidth extremely cheap, but otherwise it sucks. And I haven't even mentioned latency requirements yet.
Nothing to eat, your kids are dying of some horrible disease and you can't the medicine they need, but the datacomm is improving every day! I really, really hate to admit it, but for once Bill Gates is right.
I used to have a dumb phone, but I traded it in for two tin cans and a string.
You're absolutely right, but in addition to that the cellphone business (smart or dumb) has always been a crazy business to be in, even crazier than PC/laptop's. There it was about price, so the change was always slower and smoother (might take 5 years to be put out of business).
The cellphone biz is insane. Remember when Nokia was king of the hill? Blackberry, Motorola, etc., etc. It's probably better business to be a component supplier. The margins may get thin as the prices go down, but it's all about performance and price. Chip sets (the RF/DSP stuff, not ARM's), displays, etc.
Electronics: the only business where prices go down.
I wish there were more like it. They keep telling us that inflation is low because smart phones are getting cheaper, and a pair of socks is $0.05 cheaper because they're now made in a country where people earn $2/day instead of $3. Never mind that nobody can afford medical insurance (yes, before Obamacare too, w/ double-digit inflation), and going to college (let alone grad school) means mortgaging your children's children.
Here's one for you who complain about old fart stories. Between a partial scholarship, federal grants (yes grants, not loans, and my family was working class, not poor) and employer tuition payments (100% if you got a 'B' or better), I got my BSEE and MSEE without paying a cent in tuition. I'm not gloating, because it was not because of anything brilliant that I did. I wish we still had it because my kids are approaching college age. But inflation is low!
Just put the greenbacks into the ballot boxes ...
The problem is that we still have a secret ballot, so they won't know where the money cam from.
Here's an alternative: Since the Supremes have ruled that money = speech, and we have Constitutionally protected Freedom of Speech in this country, they can't stop you from delivering a suitcase full of money to your favorite politician(s).
The Supreme Court thinks that money = speech. It's amazing that amongst nine judges and their research staff nobody could find a dictionary or a thesaurus. I'll send them nine sets and see if it does any good.