We've been on the Do Not Call list for about 3 years (or however long its been in service). We receive 5-8 calls a week from telemarketers on our home telephone as well as our mobile numbers (all numbers areon the Do Not Call list).
I've called every single candidate and their respective parties and asked that I be removed from their automated call list.
The NRCC is the worst offender here, and the only one who has consistently ignored my requests that they stop calling us..
I can't hang up on them. They tie/lock up the line. I've hung up, waited 30 seconds, picked up, they're still talking. Hung up again, waited 2 minutes, picked up and they're still talking. Their automated calls last about 8 minutes long.
They completely fill our answering machine, so REAL phone calls can't be left.
They call us at all hours of the day and night. 7am, 10pm, it doesn't matter. I have a young daughter and my wfie has elderly parents. When we receive a call at 10pm, 11pm at night, we automatically think someone is hurt or in the hospital. Damn the NRCC for adding this stress to our lives!
They ignore our requests to remove us from their list, multiple times (3 requests this week alone!)
Since they block their incoming number, I can't trace them (but law enforcement can)
So now, I've decided to file police reports against the calls, after using *57 to track and trace them. Since they block their numbers, they are violating the law, and law enforcement will take care of it.
Also, I've openly let them know that for every call I receive after I've asked them not to call, I will convince another person NOT to vote for their candidate (so far, that's about 12 calls or 12 people who will not vote for their candidates in the last two weeks).
If they can't listen to their constituents, why should I vote for them?
I'd be worried their encryption algorithm had some sort of back door / administrative override password to let, say, law enforcement decrypt people's drives if they wanted to. For example, Apple's FileVault encryption can be decrypted with at least two separate passwords -- your login password and the "master" password you can set as an emergency recovery option -- so who knows if these drives wouldn't have a master password safely kept by Seagate and available to your friendly neighborhood DHS spooks?
Not only is it possible, its mandatory for them to have a back door.
Pedophiles and law enforcement on fishing expeditions aside, is there some way that you could protect yourself from being forced to provide access to your data?
Well, this IS post-9/11 times, so the quick answer is "NO!".
If you refuse a request for your keys, you go to jail.
If you refuse further requests, you are now a "Non-combatant", and you lose your citizenship (yes, even Americans who are declared "Non-combatants" lose their citizenship).
As a non-citizen, you are now subject to the new Torture Laws, so you'll be sent to some other country to divulge your keys.
Just because someone says they WANT to see what you have, doesn't mean they should. Does the government have a reason to see my email? My files? My source code? NO.
Is it worth it to continue to use, support and encourage the use of strong encryption? YES!
This country was not founded by spinless people who gave in when they were threatened with pain or death.
You do realize that those same extremists, the ones that are using the Muslim religion, twisted to suit their needs, as a shield, are the same ones we trained, financed and helped defeat Russia when it tried to invade Afghanistan, right? Read your history books.
Oh, and this puppet government we put into Iraq... we tried the same thing in Iran back in the 50's, and that's what led to the Iran Hostage Affair in the 70's. Again, look it up. These people are pissed off BECAUSE WE MADE THEM SO.
That being said, the same "terr'ists" that were accused of flying those planes into buildings in New York have been verifiably spotted by several dozen people since that time. Check the news, google it, its out there. You've had the biggest wool sweater pulled over your eyes by the government you trust to protect you.
You might want to do some reading on Operation Northwoods also, to get an idea of what our government is capable of, and has planned before in the past.
And to summarize, WE ARE NOT AT WAR, its not just saying it that makes it so, its a legal treaty. It also provides some protections and restrictions on what we can and cannot do. The president is breaking the law, violating the Constition and various other moral and social issues with every step he makes.
Don't protect him, just open your eyes and see what's really going on. Don't continue to be a sheep.
Clearly you do not understand that we are at war. Anything that the Whitehouse defines as terrorism related or critical to our war effort is off limits to your constitutional whining. to suggest otherwise indicates that you clearly need some waterboarding, you filthy enemy combatant.
Actually, we're not at war. Congress has not declared War on the state of Iraq, nor have they signed any documents that effect, even if Dubya repeats the "We are at war" phrase over and over and over. We're not at war unless Congress signs papers to that effect. Period.
1. Arresting the messenger doesn't help security- it makes people more afraid to point out security holes.
You proved their point. If they arrest enough people who report enough security holes, the reporting will stop.. and hence, the "holes" have all been closed.
2. Security holes don't shrink by pretending they don't exist
See #1 above. If they scare enough people into submission, they'll shrink, because nobody will want to report them, for fear of retaliation, and being branded with the "T" word, or the "Non-combatant" word (which now means you lose your citizenship and are subject to torture, whee!)
3. Just before elections isn't the best time to make people in Silicon Valley rethink democrats on security. Markey has usually been thoughtful on security- he should rethink his policy of calling for arresting the messenger.
Anyone who is seriously considering voting for Democrats OR Republicans this time around, needs a serious history lesson. Voting third party is just as bad, because they'll be powerless, but what we have, and the alternative, is worse. Two sides of the same evil coin.
Democracy by definition is a representative government and the majority of the citizens support laws that are in agreement with their beleifs and lifestyles. Since these arrests and restrictions aren't being passed in accordance with those beliefs, we are not in a democracy any longer, and so we should continue to fight to get our government back.
Don't let the government, who WE put into power, push you down. Don't let them try to silence you, so they can slip by unabated. It is OUR job to keep them in check, not the reverse.
This earlier Slashdot thread also has lots of accurate commentary and links as well. I suggest reading those also.
In short, the CDDL is great, as long as you don't want to:
a.) Incorporate it with anything covered by the GPL or the LGPL (so most of Linux is out),
b.) Distribute it to the public
c.) Sell anything built with CDDL code commercially
Doesn't sound very useful to me (and several thousand other developers who agree with me), and in fact, with OSI's discussions of changes to the model, they may end up deprecating the CDDL anyway.
The OSI has explicitly stated that one of its new policy goals "will be to promote unrestricted reusability of code." The CDDL is incompatible with that strategy. (More on that over here).
Open has very different terms, and CDDL is not one of them, period. I'm not saying it has to be GPL or BSD licensed, but CDDL is simply an unworkable license, since it is incompatible with the majority of Open Source licenses out there.
Opening Java might sound all well and good, but not if you can't do anything at all with it, without violating the license terms.
There was a case in the last 10 years or so in the US, and I can't find the reference right now (its 8:30am;), but someone set a precedent, based on taking it to the Supreme Court, arguing that fingerprints are considered property, and cannot be taken without the consent of the holder.
Can someone who is a bit more awake, seek this case out for me and post a link?
We've seen what happens when we give the government everything it wants... abuse, lies and deceit. I don't hate the government, I just hate the corrupt, power-hungry people running it.
Now let's try something different, an actual democracy in the US..
Democracy by definition is a representative government and the majority of the citizens support laws that are in agreement with their beleifs and lifestyles. Since these kind of laws and "guidelines" aren't being passed in accordance with those beliefs, we are not in a democracy any longer, and so we should continue to fight to get our government back.
In that capacity, I think if ISPs are going to start retaining data, we'll just have to start encrypting it with some nice strong algorithms. Heck, double-encrypt the data with some non-overlapping methods.
You take, we take back. That's how a democracy works.
It's just we've all been sitting "behind the wall" to see true increases. When the amount of mail that makes it past the filters doubles, total traffic may have increased 10 times or more.
I use dspam and haven't seen a single spam hit my Inbox in at least 3 years now. Not a SINGLE spam, and while a few false positives get trapped in the quarantine (JCPenny coupon emails for our daughter's photographs there or other vendor-specific offers), those are easy to retrain so any more go straight to the Inbox instead. My users love the interface and lack of spam, and I love not being involved in manually whitelisting every week.
I just recently added Graymilter in front of that, and now we see even less.. You can see the results to judge for yourself.
Not only do we no longer receive ANY spam in our Inboxes, but we also gain a huge amount of bandwidth and cpu cycles back because we're not accepting, processing and quarantining mail we are going to reject anyway.
I have no problem sharing and posting my email address in public, on mailing lists or anywhere else now because frankly... we've solved the spam problem.
The whole system works great, and I don't have to "reinvent the mail system of the Internet" to do it. Only those who can't properly configure their tools would suggest such an idea.
We don't actually "elect" the government, as you know. Our votes go towards influencing our state representatives to select the candidates they want to put into office. It has rarely ever been used, but in the past, the were a case or two where the representative of the state specifically voted for the candidate who received LESS votes from the citizens of that state.
But no, I don't believe we shouldn't have to engage with our own government. That is precisely what makes a democracy work. Democracy by definition, means removing and constantly checking those in power. Our current administration will fight to the death to make sure that we don't remove the power they think they've gained through their illegal efforts.
Democracy by definition is a representative government and the majority of the citizens support laws that are in agreement with their beleifs and lifestyles. Since these laws aren't being passed in accordance with those beliefs, we are not in a democracy any longer, and so we should continue to fight to get our government back.
Don't you agree? Without checks and balances, we can't ensure that the government continues to support our beliefs and our lifestyle.
So now we just counter this illegal wiretapping (yes, its still illegal, even though they've passed a law that makes it "legal") with extra strong encryption and CivilDisobedience.
Use TrueCrypt with the AES-Twofish-Serpent algorithm on your PC (Linux, Mac or Windows). If you want to use something simliar on BSD, look into GELIencryption for those partitions.
Disclaimer: I don't personally know how strong these algorithms are on these handsets, so use at your own risk.
With VoIP, you could easily layer whatever encryption you want on top of it. Bounce your call through a few foreign routers, run it through Privoxy, Tor and i2p and you should be good to go. Yes, it will incur some latency.. but I'd rather sacrifice speed for security or privacy, wouldn't you? Here is an article on securing VoIP. Worthwhile reading if you're using it or considering it.
And you probably got the poor performance too. Why not stick with VMware Workstation, its much, MUCH faster (especially on single-proc machines) and supports a lot more than Server does (currently).
Re:If contamination were a problem, we would be de
on
Self Cleaning Mouse
·
· Score: 0
So I bet, such a self-cleaning mouse, or even completely sterile desks deployed everywhere wouldn't have any impact on the infection rates.
Oh it would have an effect, just not the one you think it would.
If we all grew up in an environment where these devices were prevalent, devoid of bacteria and organisms in our air and on our surfaces, the first time our grandchildren came in contact with them, they'd probably die.
Witness the huge rise in children who are developing lifelong, serious allergy problems, because their parents never let them leave the house or touch pets or anything else for the first few years of their lives. Children NEED to be exposed to allergens, toxins, bacteria.. to develop and strengthen an immune system.
There is a similar parallel.. when people are prescribed antibiotics, and don't finish ALL of the pills to completion. I've seen this dozens of times, where someone is prescribed 60 pills, 2/day, and after 1 week of taking the pills they feel better, so they stop taking the rest of them.
A month later, they're in the hospital, because the virus in their system was diminished, then was exposed to the antibiotics but was not killed, and it grew stronger.. and now no antibiotics work to kill it off. If you run the full course as prescribed, you completely eradicate the virus from your system, and it doesn't get a chance to grow stronger and kill you.
We need immune systems, and we need to be exposed to bacteria and viruses to continue to grow stronger ourselves.
With that said, I do wish Americans would learn the truth about the entire basis of their consumer society, i.e. all major department stores and the ethical vacuum in which they work, both within borders and without.
Here's a tip: Stop referring to customers as consumers. We don't "consume" goods, we are customers of those goods. As long as we are seen as some ever-hungry bacteria that simply exists to "consume", we will continue to be treated as such.
We are CUSTOMERS, not consumers. Repeat that 10 times, every time you want to use the word "consumer" incorrectly.
Let's go with your flawed theory for a moment here...
Yeah, as my subject line reads, my Cheerios must be from China too. Whats next? Claim that Wal-Mart put all the mom & pop grocery stores out of business? Sorry, I don't buy that line. I love Wal-Mart superstores. Why? Because they cut my grocery bills from 20-40% depending on what I am buying. Kroger, Publix, Ingles, and the rest can go to hell. I have seen the identical item a third less at Wal-Mart. Who are you going to claim they are exploiting by selling Cereal for less? What about orange juice and milk?
Let's say your mother worked at one of those mom-n-pop stores, which was forced to close down, because everyone started getting their groceries and tire changes at the Wal*Mart down the block. Now your mother is out of work, and Wal*Mart is already full-staffed with their Latino and Mexican and other employees. No jobs open for her and the other 500 people in town that Wal*Mart displaced.
Now who buys your Cheerios, at 1/3 of the price she was used to getting them at? Oh sure, she might get that job at Wal*Mart, but she'll also be making 1/3 less, because Wal*Mart can't afford to pay her what they're paying their other high-school graduate staff. Will you be able to afford those 1/3 off Cheerios (and other necessities such as soap, toothpaste, toilet paper and so on) when she's making 1/2 of what she used to? Will you have to work at Wal*Mart too, just so you can maintain the same standard of living that you did before they moved into town?
Let's try another analogy: When Wal*Mart is driving down prices, the non-local customers will benefit from the price drops, but what about the hundreds of thousands of jobs that Wal*Mart just erased, by opening up shop in town? Where do those people find new jobs?
This is where the system doesn't work. Sure, this forces everyone to be more frugal, work harder for less. But what if they dropped their prices by 90%, and were the ONLY place to get certain products? What now? Work for free?
I agree that here in the US of A, many people are fat and lazy and used to their 3 cars and $500k/year incomes, but for those of us already struggling making $50k to $60k and STILL just a sliver above the poverty level, it doesn't work. When the system costs 30% more than what they're willing to pay their citizens for, what do you do?
We can't afford to live and thrive, because they can't pay us enough to just meet the minimal standard of living.
They can't afford to pay us enough to just survive, because the jobs are moving overseas and to other countries.
We can't find jobs, because there are no jobs left, and the cost of living is steadily rising.
So seriously, what do you do? What is your "Cheaper Cheerios" answer? How do I feed my family and provide for my infant daughter?
Slashdot Mirror
Unless, as I've stated in my previous reply, you specifically ask that they stop calling you... and they continue to call.
We've been on the Do Not Call list for about 3 years (or however long its been in service). We receive 5-8 calls a week from telemarketers on our home telephone as well as our mobile numbers (all numbers areon the Do Not Call list).
I've called every single candidate and their respective parties and asked that I be removed from their automated call list.
The NRCC is the worst offender here, and the only one who has consistently ignored my requests that they stop calling us..
So now, I've decided to file police reports against the calls, after using *57 to track and trace them. Since they block their numbers, they are violating the law, and law enforcement will take care of it.
Also, I've openly let them know that for every call I receive after I've asked them not to call, I will convince another person NOT to vote for their candidate (so far, that's about 12 calls or 12 people who will not vote for their candidates in the last two weeks).
If they can't listen to their constituents, why should I vote for them?
And so I won't.
Not only is it possible, its mandatory for them to have a back door.
Well, this IS post-9/11 times, so the quick answer is "NO!".
If you refuse to divulge your keys you will just be arrested and forced to divulge them.
If you refuse a request for your keys, you go to jail.
If you refuse further requests, you are now a "Non-combatant", and you lose your citizenship (yes, even Americans who are declared "Non-combatants" lose their citizenship).
As a non-citizen, you are now subject to the new Torture Laws, so you'll be sent to some other country to divulge your keys.
Just because someone says they WANT to see what you have, doesn't mean they should. Does the government have a reason to see my email? My files? My source code? NO.
Is it worth it to continue to use, support and encourage the use of strong encryption? YES!
This country was not founded by spinless people who gave in when they were threatened with pain or death.
Too bad it doesn't work on Firefox 1.5.x or 2.x on Linux with the latest Java plugin from Sun.
Woops!
When did we change the defintion of "Patriot" to whistleblowers?
Ah, more sheep.
You do realize that those same extremists, the ones that are using the Muslim religion, twisted to suit their needs, as a shield, are the same ones we trained, financed and helped defeat Russia when it tried to invade Afghanistan, right? Read your history books.
Oh, and this puppet government we put into Iraq... we tried the same thing in Iran back in the 50's, and that's what led to the Iran Hostage Affair in the 70's. Again, look it up. These people are pissed off BECAUSE WE MADE THEM SO.
That being said, the same "terr'ists" that were accused of flying those planes into buildings in New York have been verifiably spotted by several dozen people since that time. Check the news, google it, its out there. You've had the biggest wool sweater pulled over your eyes by the government you trust to protect you.
You might want to do some reading on Operation Northwoods also, to get an idea of what our government is capable of, and has planned before in the past.
And to summarize, WE ARE NOT AT WAR, its not just saying it that makes it so, its a legal treaty. It also provides some protections and restrictions on what we can and cannot do. The president is breaking the law, violating the Constition and various other moral and social issues with every step he makes.
Don't protect him, just open your eyes and see what's really going on. Don't continue to be a sheep.
Actually, we're not at war. Congress has not declared War on the state of Iraq, nor have they signed any documents that effect, even if Dubya repeats the "We are at war" phrase over and over and over. We're not at war unless Congress signs papers to that effect. Period.
You proved their point. If they arrest enough people who report enough security holes, the reporting will stop.. and hence, the "holes" have all been closed.
See #1 above. If they scare enough people into submission, they'll shrink, because nobody will want to report them, for fear of retaliation, and being branded with the "T" word, or the "Non-combatant" word (which now means you lose your citizenship and are subject to torture, whee!)
Anyone who is seriously considering voting for Democrats OR Republicans this time around, needs a serious history lesson. Voting third party is just as bad, because they'll be powerless, but what we have, and the alternative, is worse. Two sides of the same evil coin.
Democracy by definition is a representative government and the majority of the citizens support laws that are in agreement with their beleifs and lifestyles. Since these arrests and restrictions aren't being passed in accordance with those beliefs, we are not in a democracy any longer, and so we should continue to fight to get our government back.
Don't let the government, who WE put into power, push you down. Don't let them try to silence you, so they can slip by unabated. It is OUR job to keep them in check, not the reverse.
You might want to read some more before you make a blanket generalization like this.
This earlier Slashdot thread also has lots of accurate commentary and links as well. I suggest reading those also.
In short, the CDDL is great, as long as you don't want to:
a.) Incorporate it with anything covered by the GPL or the LGPL (so most of Linux is out),
b.) Distribute it to the public
c.) Sell anything built with CDDL code commercially
Doesn't sound very useful to me (and several thousand other developers who agree with me), and in fact, with OSI's discussions of changes to the model, they may end up deprecating the CDDL anyway.
The OSI has explicitly stated that one of its new policy goals "will be to promote unrestricted reusability of code." The CDDL is incompatible with that strategy. (More on that over here).
Open has very different terms, and CDDL is not one of them, period. I'm not saying it has to be GPL or BSD licensed, but CDDL is simply an unworkable license, since it is incompatible with the majority of Open Source licenses out there.
Opening Java might sound all well and good, but not if you can't do anything at all with it, without violating the license terms.
Thanks, but no.
There was a case in the last 10 years or so in the US, and I can't find the reference right now (its 8:30am ;), but someone set a precedent, based on taking it to the Supreme Court, arguing that fingerprints are considered property, and cannot be taken without the consent of the holder.
Can someone who is a bit more awake, seek this case out for me and post a link?
THEY might forget about these things, but we certainly won't. Our time has come.
You mean like SpamMimic? Steganography in spam is a pretty common trick in these times.
With the sheer volume of spam flowing across everyone's routers, 1 or 2 messages in a group of 900 per-day, would be easily missed.
We've seen what happens when we give the government everything it wants... abuse, lies and deceit. I don't hate the government, I just hate the corrupt, power-hungry people running it.
Now let's try something different, an actual democracy in the US..
Democracy by definition is a representative government and the majority of the citizens support laws that are in agreement with their beleifs and lifestyles. Since these kind of laws and "guidelines" aren't being passed in accordance with those beliefs, we are not in a democracy any longer, and so we should continue to fight to get our government back.
In that capacity, I think if ISPs are going to start retaining data, we'll just have to start encrypting it with some nice strong algorithms. Heck, double-encrypt the data with some non-overlapping methods.
You take, we take back. That's how a democracy works.
I use dspam and haven't seen a single spam hit my Inbox in at least 3 years now. Not a SINGLE spam , and while a few false positives get trapped in the quarantine (JCPenny coupon emails for our daughter's photographs there or other vendor-specific offers), those are easy to retrain so any more go straight to the Inbox instead. My users love the interface and lack of spam, and I love not being involved in manually whitelisting every week.
I just recently added Graymilter in front of that, and now we see even less.. You can see the results to judge for yourself.
Not only do we no longer receive ANY spam in our Inboxes, but we also gain a huge amount of bandwidth and cpu cycles back because we're not accepting, processing and quarantining mail we are going to reject anyway.
I have no problem sharing and posting my email address in public, on mailing lists or anywhere else now because frankly... we've solved the spam problem.
The whole system works great, and I don't have to "reinvent the mail system of the Internet" to do it. Only those who can't properly configure their tools would suggest such an idea.
Residents of DC don't get to vote in elections? When did that start?
We don't actually "elect" the government, as you know. Our votes go towards influencing our state representatives to select the candidates they want to put into office. It has rarely ever been used, but in the past, the were a case or two where the representative of the state specifically voted for the candidate who received LESS votes from the citizens of that state.
But no, I don't believe we shouldn't have to engage with our own government. That is precisely what makes a democracy work. Democracy by definition, means removing and constantly checking those in power. Our current administration will fight to the death to make sure that we don't remove the power they think they've gained through their illegal efforts.
Democracy by definition is a representative government and the majority of the citizens support laws that are in agreement with their beleifs and lifestyles. Since these laws aren't being passed in accordance with those beliefs, we are not in a democracy any longer, and so we should continue to fight to get our government back.
Don't you agree? Without checks and balances, we can't ensure that the government continues to support our beliefs and our lifestyle.
Cat. Mouse. Cat. Mouse.
So now we just counter this illegal wiretapping (yes, its still illegal, even though they've passed a law that makes it "legal") with extra strong encryption and Civil Disobedience.
Use TrueCrypt with the AES-Twofish-Serpent algorithm on your PC (Linux, Mac or Windows). If you want to use something simliar on BSD, look into GELI encryption for those partitions.
For phones, you could look into encryption handsets or telephone scramblers. There's this one too, or the Cryptophone GSM Phone Encryption solution. Google around, there's quite a few hundred solutions in this space... stack them together for even more security.
Disclaimer: I don't personally know how strong these algorithms are on these handsets, so use at your own risk.
With VoIP, you could easily layer whatever encryption you want on top of it. Bounce your call through a few foreign routers, run it through Privoxy, Tor and i2p and you should be good to go. Yes, it will incur some latency.. but I'd rather sacrifice speed for security or privacy, wouldn't you? Here is an article on securing VoIP. Worthwhile reading if you're using it or considering it.
Cat. Mouse. Cat. Mouse.
Now its OUR turn.
You take from us, we take back.
And you probably got the poor performance too. Why not stick with VMware Workstation, its much, MUCH faster (especially on single-proc machines) and supports a lot more than Server does (currently).
Oh it would have an effect, just not the one you think it would.
If we all grew up in an environment where these devices were prevalent, devoid of bacteria and organisms in our air and on our surfaces, the first time our grandchildren came in contact with them, they'd probably die.
Witness the huge rise in children who are developing lifelong, serious allergy problems, because their parents never let them leave the house or touch pets or anything else for the first few years of their lives. Children NEED to be exposed to allergens, toxins, bacteria.. to develop and strengthen an immune system.
There is a similar parallel.. when people are prescribed antibiotics, and don't finish ALL of the pills to completion. I've seen this dozens of times, where someone is prescribed 60 pills, 2/day, and after 1 week of taking the pills they feel better, so they stop taking the rest of them.
A month later, they're in the hospital, because the virus in their system was diminished, then was exposed to the antibiotics but was not killed, and it grew stronger.. and now no antibiotics work to kill it off. If you run the full course as prescribed, you completely eradicate the virus from your system, and it doesn't get a chance to grow stronger and kill you.
We need immune systems, and we need to be exposed to bacteria and viruses to continue to grow stronger ourselves.
Here's a tip: Stop referring to customers as consumers . We don't "consume" goods, we are customers of those goods. As long as we are seen as some ever-hungry bacteria that simply exists to "consume", we will continue to be treated as such.
We are CUSTOMERS , not consumers. Repeat that 10 times, every time you want to use the word "consumer" incorrectly.
Let's go with your flawed theory for a moment here...
Let's say your mother worked at one of those mom-n-pop stores, which was forced to close down, because everyone started getting their groceries and tire changes at the Wal*Mart down the block. Now your mother is out of work, and Wal*Mart is already full-staffed with their Latino and Mexican and other employees. No jobs open for her and the other 500 people in town that Wal*Mart displaced.
Now who buys your Cheerios, at 1/3 of the price she was used to getting them at? Oh sure, she might get that job at Wal*Mart, but she'll also be making 1/3 less, because Wal*Mart can't afford to pay her what they're paying their other high-school graduate staff. Will you be able to afford those 1/3 off Cheerios (and other necessities such as soap, toothpaste, toilet paper and so on) when she's making 1/2 of what she used to? Will you have to work at Wal*Mart too, just so you can maintain the same standard of living that you did before they moved into town?
Let's try another analogy: When Wal*Mart is driving down prices, the non-local customers will benefit from the price drops, but what about the hundreds of thousands of jobs that Wal*Mart just erased, by opening up shop in town? Where do those people find new jobs?
This is where the system doesn't work. Sure, this forces everyone to be more frugal, work harder for less. But what if they dropped their prices by 90%, and were the ONLY place to get certain products? What now? Work for free?
I agree that here in the US of A, many people are fat and lazy and used to their 3 cars and $500k/year incomes, but for those of us already struggling making $50k to $60k and STILL just a sliver above the poverty level, it doesn't work. When the system costs 30% more than what they're willing to pay their citizens for, what do you do?
We can't afford to live and thrive, because they can't pay us enough to just meet the minimal standard of living.
They can't afford to pay us enough to just survive, because the jobs are moving overseas and to other countries.
We can't find jobs, because there are no jobs left, and the cost of living is steadily rising.
So seriously, what do you do? What is your "Cheaper Cheerios" answer? How do I feed my family and provide for my infant daughter?