Do you believe that intellectual property has value? If I produce a product that would sell for $5 without branding, but with my valuable brand, it sells instead for $10, wouldn't that imply my brand alone (few employees, few government services) is responsible for $5 of that $10?
Is it immoral that the division of my company that produced the product only pays taxes on the $5 that they actually produced, and not the full $10? If I sold my brand to a separate company, with the agreement that we pay some fraction of that $5 in licensing fees, does that materially change things for anyone?
Tax systems operate with the expectation of rationality, not morality. If you believe our system of taxation is immoral, the solution is to change the tax system, not to call rational actors immoral and expect them to change their behavior.
Many of the things people are upset about aren't even immoral, from the perspective of the other country. Localities create tax incentives to cause companies to change their behavior. This could be to install solar panels, or to locate jobs in a community that's starving for them. When a business seeks a place to set up shop, it's looking at its operating expenses, including taxes. If a community needs jobs, and creates tax incentives to cause businesses to create them, and businesses react to that by moving there (at the expense of another community that would have gotten those jobs instead), is that immoral?
Let's say I have a company. We produce widgets in locality A, and earn $10M a year selling them. I need to build a new factory, and see that my operating costs in locality A will be $2M, but locality B is starving for factory jobs, and so they've agreed to give me tax incentives that, combined with the costs of managing a remote factory, cost-of-living differences, etc., means my costs will be $1M by putting this factory in locality B. The people of locality A are outraged, because they've been deprived of jobs, and label my actions "immoral". Would you agree?
Separately, I realize that my brand is a huge contributor to my company's success. If I tried to sell my widgets under a brand that no one has ever heard of, I'd only make $5M. So my brand is worth $5M/year to me. My tax liability in locality A for that $5M contribution to my earnings is high. I could move my brand to an IP division, and set up licensing so that the manufacturing side of my company licenses the brand for some significant fraction of $5M, and the IP division sees a large profit for the use of the IP. Since everyone lives in locality A, this doesn't actually change anything for tax purposes, but what if my IP division could operate much more cheaply somewhere else? It only has a few employees.
"But you'd be depriving A of tax revenues on that other $5M!" But the manufacturing side didn't produce a $10M product, they produced a $5M product. It was my IP that provided the other $5M. My employees don't use double the government services just because their product has a popular brand attached to it. Why is it immoral that I only realize profit in locality A that matches what was actually produced in locality A?
The tax system is designed with rational behavior in mind. If you don't like it, don't just cry and label all of these rational actors "immoral" in the expectation that they're going to change their behavior with your system of morals as their guide. Change the system so that it becomes rational for corporations to pay taxes in ways that match your moral system.
Set clear rules about what things should block code reviews, and what things should not. My employer has a fairly rigid style guide, and I like it that way. Many of the things we ask people to fix in our code reviews would probably be things most programmers would consider "irrelevant stuff", but they do improve readability (thus maintainability).
You can prevent code reviews from being skipped by building your system to require them. If you feel you need an exception process to submit things without review, make that process ring alarm bells and require an after-the-fact review (possibly with a manager sign-off). There are technical solutions to these problems.
Alternatively, consider pair programming (so that the other member of the pair does the code reviews), or pseudo-pair programming, where you work independently but you're still focused on (prioritize) each other's code reviews when they arrive.
I have gone so far as to fix unreadable code so as to make it clearer what was happening, add documentation, etc., and send the code review to the original author. This communicates the problem to the author while simultaneously solving it, and often times, communication is enough for the original author to prioritize readability in the future. I know if someone sent me some code reviews to fix crap I'd written, I'd probably scan through the rest of what they're working on and try to fix it up preemptively.
That's nice in theory, but in practice, the "top priority" of code is to meet the deadline and get shipped. Everything after that is secondary.
This depends entirely on where you work. If your organization prioritizes short-term product deadlines over long-term maintainability costs, that's a business decision that programmers aren't really in a great position to influence. Not every business is run that way. If you're really a good programmer, and value these types of things, you might consider seeking these places out.
I work at a major software company. We are engineering-focused and engineering-driven. We have a fairly rigid style guide and our source code repository enforces code reviews by people that have proven themselves capable of writing readable, maintainable code. Alarm bells go off when you add code that isn't unit tested, and reviewers can and do ask that you step up and write tests before submitting. All of this conspires to make you a better coder. After a few painful projects, you're pumping out readable AND testable code just as quickly as you were before you joined.
While the OP discusses what appears to be a social problem, there are technical solutions that get most of the way toward solving this problem.
Moving things to Mars is always going to be incredibly expensive, and if there are people willing to take the trip knowing that they'll have to work with severe power and resource restrictions, then those things are luxuries and the money can be spent on sending more useful and mission-critical things to Mars instead.
The next major milestone on Mars will be self-sufficiency. Once you can live off the land and energy production becomes cheap, you can start producing more luxury items and make fewer sacrifices, but it will be quite a while before it becomes cost-effective to build up enough infrastructure for effectively limitless fresh water, heat, power, etc.
My biggest complaint is companies dictating to farmers what to grow, how to grow it, and producing plants that cannot grow on their own, you must buy our special seeds and special "germination spray" each year....
None of this is forced onto farmers. Farmers always have the ability to switch away from GM seed and are never required to start their farming business with GM seed. Farmers choose to buy seed from companies that dictate how they use it, because that seed produces a product that makes them more money, either by being more valuable, or costing less for them to grow. Generally, consumers prefer the GM produce, either because they feel it's "better", or because it's cheaper.
The very concept is just wrongful. It's already a species that doesn't do well farmed. You end up with an inferior product.
What do you mean by "inferior"? Even assuming that the resulting salmon will be less tasty than the unfarmed, wild salmon, if the modified salmon is considerably cheaper, then people may still find that it's a better value. If the product is truly inferior and not worth the price, it will fail on the market and the problem will be solved that way.
In my opinion the superficial style elements mentioned in the summary only help the pedantic control freak types.
OTOH, the superficial style elements should be the easy ones to adapt to. If you haven't learned the organization's style guide, expect a code review to be a bit painful. Ideally, that should stop once you learn to anticipate what the reviewer is likely to bitch about, and alter your coding style accordingly. If you've utterly failed to do that, resulting in painful code review after painful code review, that's a sign to me that you're incapable of working in that organization.
There are some bits of personal flair that I don't think anyone is interested in forcing, but consistency in things like variable names does indeed help everyone else that's reading your code. If someone doesn't realize that Alice's coding style is to use trailing underscores for member fields, but Bob's style is to use a leading lower-case m, it's never going to be clear who wrote what and whether something that looks like a local variable is actually a local variable unless you know *everyone*'s personal style, and you know that none of them conflict and all of them actually signal things like this.
Disagree. There are different naming conventions for things like constants and class members. The point of these conventions is to make it clear from the name of the variable what the variable represents. If you aren't confident that the code base is consistently following the same conventions, you have no confidence that something that appears to be a local variable is actually a local variable, which means you need to spend more time poking through code in order to understand it.
Consistency begets readability, and readability begets maintainability.
If there's no icon on the notification bar, then GPS should not be on and it should not be draining your battery. Check the 'battery usage' screen (if this exists on your version of Android) to see what's responsible for your battery drain. It is unlikely that disabling GPS will improve your battery life if you aren't using any apps that also use GPS, but with as many Android devices out there as there are, a bug is always possible. I'd encourage you to try and be scientific about it. If your version of Android doesn't have a battery status thing in the settings that plots your battery level over time, get an app that does that, and watch the slope of that line with GPS enabled and disabled (give it a few hours in both settings without using the phone).
It could make sense if all money leaving corporations and ending up with people got taxed at the same rate.
I agree, provided you allow businesses to consider the dividend an expense.
The problem is that a public company is owned by the shareholders. A dollar earned by the company is a dollar earned by the shareholders, and you'll see that reflected in the value of the shares owned by the shareholder. Corporate dividends are paid out of profits. The corporation has already paid an income tax on those profits. It's essentially transferring money from the shareholders to the shareholders, so why should it be taxed a second time? Salaries paid from the corporate to its employees are considered an expense, and only taxed once. Why do dividends deserve the extra tax?
Seriously, if Google really cared about spreading their products as widely as possible they'd be spending cubic dollars on lobbying for copyright and patent reform. But they don't seem really interested in being a leader in doing this.
There is a moral requirement to pay sufficient taxes, so yes it is an outrage that people get away with not doing it. With any luck that hole will soon be fixed legally so it's also a legal requirement too.
It is an outrage against whom? Do you believe that companies should donate money to the government when this objective "moral requirement" requires that they pay more than is legally required?
What if a company is looking to build a new factory, and a locality really needs the jobs, and so they offer a tax break for the company in exchange for building their factory there. Do you think a moral obligation exists for the company to ignore that tax break and pay what they would have paid without it?
I think the OP's point was that you could replace "US" with any other country, and your "benefits of citizenship" argument would still stand. Yet, none of these other countries require that you pay income tax if you neither live nor work there. The US is still an anomaly in that regard.
So if Google stood up and said "we're not playing the patent game anymore", and got rid of all of their patents, what do you think would happen? Until the system changes, it would be kind of stupid to just sit back and get destroyed by everyone else's patent litigation. Participation doesn't mean that their primary goal isn't changing the system.
you should instead write to your politician asking that the European Union finally comes up with a solution for EU-level taxes
In addition, wasn't this system one of the reasons the EU was founded in the first place? Companies didn't like the idea of having to deal with 20 different tax systems as they tried to sell to people all over Europe, so when the EU was founded they said companies located anywhere in the EU could participate in an EU-wide market and not have to worry about 20 different tax systems.
And so, Ireland comes along and decides they want more businesses to settle there, so as to bring them more jobs, so they set a low corporate tax rate, and companies come running. All of this seems to be to be working as intended. If you want to change it, change the way the EU works, don't get all pissy at companies that are using the system as you designed it to be used.
I'm starting to suspect we're using two different definitions of "rule of law". Here are a couple of excerpts from the wikipedia article about it that explain how I'm using it:
Formalists hold that the law must be prospective, well-known, and have characteristics of generality, equality, and certainty.... According to the functional view, a society in which government officers have a great deal of discretion has a low degree of "rule of law", whereas a society in which government officers have little discretion has a high degree of "rule of law"....... according to political science professor Li Shuguang: "The difference....is that, under the rule of law, the law is preeminent and can serve as a check against the abuse of power. Under rule by law, the law is a mere tool for a government, that suppresses in a legalistic fashion."
"Discretionary enforcement" of the law in the US is limited to situations like speeding, or marijuana possession. Due to the (explicit and intentional) separation of roles of police, prosecutor and judiciary, it's hard to prevent enforcement of serious offenses without a grand conspiracy, and even then, the victim can appeal to the FBI and bring another layer of oversight to bear on the problem. It's similarly hard to escape being prosecuted for something serious. In China you have one Party overseeing everything.
Further, understanding a system, and believing it to be applied consistently, is not a requirement for a rule of law. It just means your citizens and your system of justice and equity have grown accustomed to each other. For you, "don't piss off the Party" might be a perfectly understandable rule, and punishment for pissing off the party may be quite consistently metered, but that isn't what rule of law means.
Just because the Chinese write down and consistently enforce some laws does not mean they have a respectable rule of law. The key difference here is that people and companies operating in China must respect both the written law, as well as the Party. Enforcement of the written law is at the discretion of the Party. If you offend the rulers, you are punished at least as surely as if you had violated a written law (and there are plenty of written laws that can be made to apply to any situation where you fall out of the Party's favor, in the event losing your job or your license to operate isn't enough). China's constitution has good intentions, but does practically nothing to restrain the Party from being able to enact any law it desires with no bill of rights or meaningful judiciary able to stop them, and things like licensing of businesses or employment are intentionally at the discretion of the Party.
Regardless of how you define "rule of law", the fact is that operating a business in China puts you at the mercy of the Party, not the laws of China.
Should China have the "rule of law", just because some western countries have it?
No. China should have the rule of law because the rule of law brings stability and predictability to the way people are governed. In the absence of the rule of law, you have governments and police that are arbitrary and unpredictable, acting based on the whims of the rulers rather than on the deliberated and well-documented intent of a legislature. Without the rule of law corruption and greed are allowed to exist without challenge by the people.
Some governments in the west have ignored their own rules too. Just saying.
Science majors in high-demand fields should be given subsidized loads because they are likely to get good paying jobs and will be able to pay off the loans.
By the same token, banks should be climbing over themselves trying to lend to these individuals, because they are low risk, so they shouldn't need subsidized loans.
Agreed. Something else I've observed is that nobody talks to students about the financial implications of their choice. Everyone says "get a degree in something that you'll love doing.. don't think about the money." But you should be thinking about the money. Part of the process of selecting a degree plan should be the economics of the decision:
1. Here's the likely cost of this degree 2. Here are the jobs that recipients of this degree are statistically more likely to get 3. Here are the salaries and the salary trends for this type of job, and an analysis of where things are likely to go in 10 or 20 years. 4. Based on the above, here's how cost-effective the degree is (factoring in the opportunity cost of going to school in the first place) 5. And here are alternatives to your chosen degree or job
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Do you believe that intellectual property has value? If I produce a product that would sell for $5 without branding, but with my valuable brand, it sells instead for $10, wouldn't that imply my brand alone (few employees, few government services) is responsible for $5 of that $10?
Is it immoral that the division of my company that produced the product only pays taxes on the $5 that they actually produced, and not the full $10? If I sold my brand to a separate company, with the agreement that we pay some fraction of that $5 in licensing fees, does that materially change things for anyone?
Tax systems operate with the expectation of rationality, not morality. If you believe our system of taxation is immoral, the solution is to change the tax system, not to call rational actors immoral and expect them to change their behavior.
Many of the things people are upset about aren't even immoral, from the perspective of the other country. Localities create tax incentives to cause companies to change their behavior. This could be to install solar panels, or to locate jobs in a community that's starving for them. When a business seeks a place to set up shop, it's looking at its operating expenses, including taxes. If a community needs jobs, and creates tax incentives to cause businesses to create them, and businesses react to that by moving there (at the expense of another community that would have gotten those jobs instead), is that immoral?
Let's say I have a company. We produce widgets in locality A, and earn $10M a year selling them. I need to build a new factory, and see that my operating costs in locality A will be $2M, but locality B is starving for factory jobs, and so they've agreed to give me tax incentives that, combined with the costs of managing a remote factory, cost-of-living differences, etc., means my costs will be $1M by putting this factory in locality B. The people of locality A are outraged, because they've been deprived of jobs, and label my actions "immoral". Would you agree?
Separately, I realize that my brand is a huge contributor to my company's success. If I tried to sell my widgets under a brand that no one has ever heard of, I'd only make $5M. So my brand is worth $5M/year to me. My tax liability in locality A for that $5M contribution to my earnings is high. I could move my brand to an IP division, and set up licensing so that the manufacturing side of my company licenses the brand for some significant fraction of $5M, and the IP division sees a large profit for the use of the IP. Since everyone lives in locality A, this doesn't actually change anything for tax purposes, but what if my IP division could operate much more cheaply somewhere else? It only has a few employees.
"But you'd be depriving A of tax revenues on that other $5M!" But the manufacturing side didn't produce a $10M product, they produced a $5M product. It was my IP that provided the other $5M. My employees don't use double the government services just because their product has a popular brand attached to it. Why is it immoral that I only realize profit in locality A that matches what was actually produced in locality A?
The tax system is designed with rational behavior in mind. If you don't like it, don't just cry and label all of these rational actors "immoral" in the expectation that they're going to change their behavior with your system of morals as their guide. Change the system so that it becomes rational for corporations to pay taxes in ways that match your moral system.
Set clear rules about what things should block code reviews, and what things should not. My employer has a fairly rigid style guide, and I like it that way. Many of the things we ask people to fix in our code reviews would probably be things most programmers would consider "irrelevant stuff", but they do improve readability (thus maintainability).
You can prevent code reviews from being skipped by building your system to require them. If you feel you need an exception process to submit things without review, make that process ring alarm bells and require an after-the-fact review (possibly with a manager sign-off). There are technical solutions to these problems.
Alternatively, consider pair programming (so that the other member of the pair does the code reviews), or pseudo-pair programming, where you work independently but you're still focused on (prioritize) each other's code reviews when they arrive.
I have gone so far as to fix unreadable code so as to make it clearer what was happening, add documentation, etc., and send the code review to the original author. This communicates the problem to the author while simultaneously solving it, and often times, communication is enough for the original author to prioritize readability in the future. I know if someone sent me some code reviews to fix crap I'd written, I'd probably scan through the rest of what they're working on and try to fix it up preemptively.
That's nice in theory, but in practice, the "top priority" of code is to meet the deadline and get shipped. Everything after that is secondary.
This depends entirely on where you work. If your organization prioritizes short-term product deadlines over long-term maintainability costs, that's a business decision that programmers aren't really in a great position to influence. Not every business is run that way. If you're really a good programmer, and value these types of things, you might consider seeking these places out.
I work at a major software company. We are engineering-focused and engineering-driven. We have a fairly rigid style guide and our source code repository enforces code reviews by people that have proven themselves capable of writing readable, maintainable code. Alarm bells go off when you add code that isn't unit tested, and reviewers can and do ask that you step up and write tests before submitting. All of this conspires to make you a better coder. After a few painful projects, you're pumping out readable AND testable code just as quickly as you were before you joined.
While the OP discusses what appears to be a social problem, there are technical solutions that get most of the way toward solving this problem.
Moving things to Mars is always going to be incredibly expensive, and if there are people willing to take the trip knowing that they'll have to work with severe power and resource restrictions, then those things are luxuries and the money can be spent on sending more useful and mission-critical things to Mars instead.
The next major milestone on Mars will be self-sufficiency. Once you can live off the land and energy production becomes cheap, you can start producing more luxury items and make fewer sacrifices, but it will be quite a while before it becomes cost-effective to build up enough infrastructure for effectively limitless fresh water, heat, power, etc.
Can't you buy organic-labeled food? Can't sellers of non-GMO food just label their food non-GMO? Why is that inadequate?
My biggest complaint is companies dictating to farmers what to grow, how to grow it, and producing plants that cannot grow on their own, you must buy our special seeds and special "germination spray" each year....
None of this is forced onto farmers. Farmers always have the ability to switch away from GM seed and are never required to start their farming business with GM seed. Farmers choose to buy seed from companies that dictate how they use it, because that seed produces a product that makes them more money, either by being more valuable, or costing less for them to grow. Generally, consumers prefer the GM produce, either because they feel it's "better", or because it's cheaper.
The very concept is just wrongful. It's already a species that doesn't do well farmed. You end up with an inferior product.
What do you mean by "inferior"? Even assuming that the resulting salmon will be less tasty than the unfarmed, wild salmon, if the modified salmon is considerably cheaper, then people may still find that it's a better value. If the product is truly inferior and not worth the price, it will fail on the market and the problem will be solved that way.
In my opinion the superficial style elements mentioned in the summary only help the pedantic control freak types.
OTOH, the superficial style elements should be the easy ones to adapt to. If you haven't learned the organization's style guide, expect a code review to be a bit painful. Ideally, that should stop once you learn to anticipate what the reviewer is likely to bitch about, and alter your coding style accordingly. If you've utterly failed to do that, resulting in painful code review after painful code review, that's a sign to me that you're incapable of working in that organization.
There are some bits of personal flair that I don't think anyone is interested in forcing, but consistency in things like variable names does indeed help everyone else that's reading your code. If someone doesn't realize that Alice's coding style is to use trailing underscores for member fields, but Bob's style is to use a leading lower-case m, it's never going to be clear who wrote what and whether something that looks like a local variable is actually a local variable unless you know *everyone*'s personal style, and you know that none of them conflict and all of them actually signal things like this.
Disagree. There are different naming conventions for things like constants and class members. The point of these conventions is to make it clear from the name of the variable what the variable represents. If you aren't confident that the code base is consistently following the same conventions, you have no confidence that something that appears to be a local variable is actually a local variable, which means you need to spend more time poking through code in order to understand it.
Consistency begets readability, and readability begets maintainability.
If there's no icon on the notification bar, then GPS should not be on and it should not be draining your battery. Check the 'battery usage' screen (if this exists on your version of Android) to see what's responsible for your battery drain. It is unlikely that disabling GPS will improve your battery life if you aren't using any apps that also use GPS, but with as many Android devices out there as there are, a bug is always possible. I'd encourage you to try and be scientific about it. If your version of Android doesn't have a battery status thing in the settings that plots your battery level over time, get an app that does that, and watch the slope of that line with GPS enabled and disabled (give it a few hours in both settings without using the phone).
It could make sense if all money leaving corporations and ending up with people got taxed at the same rate.
I agree, provided you allow businesses to consider the dividend an expense.
The problem is that a public company is owned by the shareholders. A dollar earned by the company is a dollar earned by the shareholders, and you'll see that reflected in the value of the shares owned by the shareholder. Corporate dividends are paid out of profits. The corporation has already paid an income tax on those profits. It's essentially transferring money from the shareholders to the shareholders, so why should it be taxed a second time? Salaries paid from the corporate to its employees are considered an expense, and only taxed once. Why do dividends deserve the extra tax?
Seriously, if Google really cared about spreading their products as widely as possible they'd be spending cubic dollars on lobbying for copyright and patent reform. But they don't seem really interested in being a leader in doing this.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/22/google-facebook-spent-record-amounts-on-d-c-lobbying-in-q1-2012/
There is a moral requirement to pay sufficient taxes, so yes it is an outrage that people get away with not doing it. With any luck that hole will soon be fixed legally so it's also a legal requirement too.
It is an outrage against whom? Do you believe that companies should donate money to the government when this objective "moral requirement" requires that they pay more than is legally required?
What if a company is looking to build a new factory, and a locality really needs the jobs, and so they offer a tax break for the company in exchange for building their factory there. Do you think a moral obligation exists for the company to ignore that tax break and pay what they would have paid without it?
I think the OP's point was that you could replace "US" with any other country, and your "benefits of citizenship" argument would still stand. Yet, none of these other countries require that you pay income tax if you neither live nor work there. The US is still an anomaly in that regard.
It's not a philosophy at all to Google. It's a business model. Let's call a spade a spade.
It can be both. People don't cease to be passionate about things when they become employed.
So if Google stood up and said "we're not playing the patent game anymore", and got rid of all of their patents, what do you think would happen? Until the system changes, it would be kind of stupid to just sit back and get destroyed by everyone else's patent litigation. Participation doesn't mean that their primary goal isn't changing the system.
you should instead write to your politician asking that the European Union finally comes up with a solution for EU-level taxes
In addition, wasn't this system one of the reasons the EU was founded in the first place? Companies didn't like the idea of having to deal with 20 different tax systems as they tried to sell to people all over Europe, so when the EU was founded they said companies located anywhere in the EU could participate in an EU-wide market and not have to worry about 20 different tax systems.
And so, Ireland comes along and decides they want more businesses to settle there, so as to bring them more jobs, so they set a low corporate tax rate, and companies come running. All of this seems to be to be working as intended. If you want to change it, change the way the EU works, don't get all pissy at companies that are using the system as you designed it to be used.
I'm starting to suspect we're using two different definitions of "rule of law". Here are a couple of excerpts from the wikipedia article about it that explain how I'm using it:
Formalists hold that the law must be prospective, well-known, and have characteristics of generality, equality, and certainty. ... ... ... according to political science professor Li Shuguang: "The difference....is that, under the rule of law, the law is preeminent and can serve as a check against the abuse of power. Under rule by law, the law is a mere tool for a government, that suppresses in a legalistic fashion."
According to the functional view, a society in which government officers have a great deal of discretion has a low degree of "rule of law", whereas a society in which government officers have little discretion has a high degree of "rule of law".
"Discretionary enforcement" of the law in the US is limited to situations like speeding, or marijuana possession. Due to the (explicit and intentional) separation of roles of police, prosecutor and judiciary, it's hard to prevent enforcement of serious offenses without a grand conspiracy, and even then, the victim can appeal to the FBI and bring another layer of oversight to bear on the problem. It's similarly hard to escape being prosecuted for something serious. In China you have one Party overseeing everything.
Further, understanding a system, and believing it to be applied consistently, is not a requirement for a rule of law. It just means your citizens and your system of justice and equity have grown accustomed to each other. For you, "don't piss off the Party" might be a perfectly understandable rule, and punishment for pissing off the party may be quite consistently metered, but that isn't what rule of law means.
Just because the Chinese write down and consistently enforce some laws does not mean they have a respectable rule of law. The key difference here is that people and companies operating in China must respect both the written law, as well as the Party. Enforcement of the written law is at the discretion of the Party. If you offend the rulers, you are punished at least as surely as if you had violated a written law (and there are plenty of written laws that can be made to apply to any situation where you fall out of the Party's favor, in the event losing your job or your license to operate isn't enough). China's constitution has good intentions, but does practically nothing to restrain the Party from being able to enact any law it desires with no bill of rights or meaningful judiciary able to stop them, and things like licensing of businesses or employment are intentionally at the discretion of the Party.
Regardless of how you define "rule of law", the fact is that operating a business in China puts you at the mercy of the Party, not the laws of China.
UK has no written constitution [independent.co.uk] and its doing well.
Just because the UK lacks a single constitutional document does not mean the UK lacks the rule of law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom#Parliamentary_supremacy_and_the_rule_of_law
Should China have the "rule of law", just because some western countries have it?
No. China should have the rule of law because the rule of law brings stability and predictability to the way people are governed. In the absence of the rule of law, you have governments and police that are arbitrary and unpredictable, acting based on the whims of the rulers rather than on the deliberated and well-documented intent of a legislature. Without the rule of law corruption and greed are allowed to exist without challenge by the people.
Some governments in the west have ignored their own rules too. Just saying.
Tu quoque, another logical fallacy.
But how would you catch them?
Science majors in high-demand fields should be given subsidized loads because they are likely to get good paying jobs and will be able to pay off the loans.
By the same token, banks should be climbing over themselves trying to lend to these individuals, because they are low risk, so they shouldn't need subsidized loans.
Agreed. Something else I've observed is that nobody talks to students about the financial implications of their choice. Everyone says "get a degree in something that you'll love doing.. don't think about the money." But you should be thinking about the money. Part of the process of selecting a degree plan should be the economics of the decision:
1. Here's the likely cost of this degree
2. Here are the jobs that recipients of this degree are statistically more likely to get
3. Here are the salaries and the salary trends for this type of job, and an analysis of where things are likely to go in 10 or 20 years.
4. Based on the above, here's how cost-effective the degree is (factoring in the opportunity cost of going to school in the first place)
5. And here are alternatives to your chosen degree or job