what features? matchmaking is about the only thing better in sc2 worth mentioning and you are comparing games created 12 years apart (good matchmaking was present in wc3 already). Sc1 was pretty much the state of the rts art when it came out. With SC1 you could play on any of 4 available gateways (now regions 60bucks a pop) plus there was lan allowing you to create ad-hoc lan parties anywhere.
And you must be joking about the quality of sc1 story. Maybe it was not a literary nobel prize material but it's leaps and bounds above the sc2 level - it had memorable characters, superior dialogues and a lot of stuff was going on in the universe. Sc2 is a disaster story-wise - it is highly illogical, inconsistent and it pissed all over the lore established in sc1. Also out of 26 missions maybe 10 push story forward in a meaningful way, the rest is a filler doing nothing more but inflating the number of missions to justify 60 bucks, not to mention that many missions are just remade custom map modes from sc/wc3 times. Granted, mechanics are superior but again, 12 years passed and there are different standards now.
care to explain what's wrong with kespa? ok, it treats players like shit but: - it's Korean organization and doesn't have much weight outside SK - it was created mainly by hardware/IT companies as a marketing vehicle for their products so it does not operate at a gigantic profit - it singlehandedly created viable e-sport business around BroodWar and did all the required legwork to organize leagues, tournaments, teams and tv coverage - it knows its shit - on the other hand legit tournaments of SC2 (including blizzard's own) look ungodly amateurish (dropped connections play huge part in that) - it argues that its business is gameplay, which is the creation of players not blizzard, end of story. No rights violation because all copies of BroodWar were paid for - it earned blizzard tons of money and reputation thanks to free advertising of BroodWar - the game belongs to a quite unpopular genre as far as general public is concerned (RTS) and would be abandoned and forgotten by the masses 3 years after release. Blizzard should be kissing their ass, not rent-seeking.
Do you think those 15 million copies during the last 12 years sold all by themselves? Does NBA pay Spalding for the game devices called balls or it's the other way around - Spalding sponsoring NBA for the increased exposure so all the b-ball playing niggaz want to have one? Don't cheer for blizzard because in case of SC2 it did an end run around kespa at the paying customer's rights expense. Blizzard should do what it does best - develop quality games - and stay out of competitive scene. Their shameless money squeezing hurts viability of competitive gaming more than it helps.
coal has low 'density' of radioactivity but multiply it by hundeds of millions tons that are burned every year and release all kinds of nasty shit straight to the atmosphere. On the other hand in nuclear reactors the whole radioactivity is pretty much contained inside and the outside world never experiences it under normal conditions.
how many instances of a given app you want to have? nautilus, terminal, browsers, gedit, IMs, IDEs gimp, you name it - they all usually have only one instance running. It makes a lot of sense to run the app when there is no instance running/bring back already existing instances. That's what existing docks and pinned-to-taskbar apps do in win7 so some people are already familiar with such behavior.
If you want to make sure new instance pops up every time you activate the launcher - middle click it or select proper option from context menu.
problem is that the governments around the world are getting fatter and many many people employed on taxpayer's expense don't do anything of value. They pass shitloads of meaningless regulations so they get to do anything like rubberstamping piles of paper to justify their existence. USA fared well when all levels of administration were worth 5% of gdp, now the govt is involved in 40+% if i am not mistaken. In Poland there was like 150k bureaucrats in 1989 - we are talking about a socialist state that laughed at economic soundness. Guess what - that number approaches 600k today in a free democratic country. Such a ridiculous growth puts huge burden on economy and to make things worse, salaries are much better than those in the private sector, which has to pay for all that with ever increasing taxes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Paul#Voting_Rights_Act He felt the federal interference mandated by the bill was costly and unjustified because the situation for minorities voting is much different than when the bill was passed 40 years ago. The bill also mandated bilingual voting ballots upon request, and in a letter opposing the bill for this reason, 80 members of Congress including Paul objected to the costly implications of requiring bilingual ballots. In one example cited in the letter, the members detailed how Los Angeles spent $2.1 million for the 2004 election to provide ballots in seven different languages and more than 2,000 translators, although one of the requirements of gaining United States citizenship is ability to read in English, and another California district spent $30,000 on translating ballots per election despite receiving only one request for Spanish documents in 16 years.
Opposed to Civil Rights Act of 1964.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul188.html The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government unprecedented power over the hiring, employee relations, and customer service practices of every business in the country. The result was a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society. The federal government has no legitimate authority to infringe on the rights of private property owners to use their property as they please and to form (or not form) contracts with terms mutually agreeable to all parties. The rights of all private property owners, even those whose actions decent people find abhorrent, must be respected if we are to maintain a free society. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society. Federal bureaucrats and judges cannot read minds to see if actions are motivated by racism. Therefore, the only way the federal government could ensure an employer was not violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to ensure that the racial composition of a business's workforce matched the racial composition of a bureaucrat or judge's defined body of potential employees. Thus, bureaucrats began forcing employers to hire by racial quota. Racial quotas have not contributed to racial harmony or advanced the goal of a color-blind society. Instead, these quotas encouraged racial balkanization, and fostered racial strife.
Paul introduced the Sanctity of Life Act of 2005, a bill that would have defined human life to begin at conception, and removed challenges to prohibitions on abortion from federal court jurisdiction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Paul#Abortion-related_legislation Paul calls himself "strongly pro-life" and "an unshakable foe of abortion." However, he believes regulation of medical decisions about maternal or fetal health is "best handled at the state level." He believes that, for the most part, states should retain jurisdiction, in accordance with the U.S. Constitution.
so the man is a hardcore follower of the constitution (a truly rare trait these days) and a supporter of strong property rights - how uncool...
isn't the constitution the supreme law of the land? And what about politicians taking offices swearing to uphold the constitution? If you don't like it, amend it, not wipe your ass with it.
Governments are in bed with corporations already, you need to limit the power of government to make it not worthwhile to corrupt its members to do favors, otherwise corporations will always perceive that spending money on politicians has an extremely good ROI.
And yes, there are such parties in Europe. In Poland there are 2 with a total support of 1-2%. These 2 parties are usually considered loonies because libertarianism offends average person's beliefs too much and they will never enter the parliament. They are marginalized/misrepresented in mainstream media and on top of that in elections there is a high pass filter in place (5% for parties, 7% for coalitions) supposedly to make parliament more stable. In reality this causes progressing americanization of politics where weaker parties are left out or even fold while few big ones rise to even greater prominence and new fresh people/ideas can't enter the parliament. Now we have 2 major parties (1 sorta spineless fake liberal with 40-50% support, 1 sorta xenophobic wacko religious socialist at about 20-30%) that play the game plus few smaller ones to act as a filler in coalitions (fork of the wacko one, postcomunists and countryside farmers).
poor excuse, i am amazed that people fall for that. If they cared about user latency they would incorporate LAN which proved invaluable at various tournaments - battle.net drops people frequently during official games, happened at like 10 different high profile events, including blizzard's own (so much for e-sports angle that blizzard reportedly takes seriously) most people would use the lowest latency server either way but online tournaments where the best of the best compete wouldn't be such a pain in the ass. Not to mention that sc2 has high latency built in already, like 200ms. In sc1 it was like that too and community hacked in so called lan latency that brought delay to sub-100ms range to improve responsiveness. Whole competitive community played at iccup (russian 3rd party server) - NA, EU, S.Korea... you name it and it worked just fine.
region locking is a trick from mercantilist playbook, dvd regions reincarnated - global battle.net would allow to import the game from cheaper countries, that's all.
sorry but he speaks the truth In some European countries like France, Germany or UK they have a problem with fast growing population of muslims who don't intend to assimilate at all but are first to suck to social system dry. I have absolutely no sympathy for parasitic kind of muslims. I have only one thing to say to such people: "You don't like us and our rules? Start to work and respect OUR rules or gtfo to your desert you came from, you can have any rules you want there and you won't have to use our infidel euros" Think about it, taxpayer pays their upkeep and all they do is to sit whole day in a mosque, criticise the filthy west and bitch and moan how they are entitled to things without making any concessions. And they multiply like mad, putting ever growing burden on taxpayers, while people who support them and their lifestyle don't (not to mention their growing voting power)
That is one of the inherent problems with civilized social system and multiculturalism - it requires everybody playing nice and share common value system, but there is always someone who will try to ruthlessly exploit it at taxpayer's expense and doesn't feel bad about it. You should crack down on ungrateful parasites hard, not to accept them and make concessions one after another.
agreed, also when switching conditions rapidly (e.g. going from hot outside to cool climate of shopping malls) you ask for getting sick.
not to mention that depending totally on electricity for cooling in the middle of hot summer can have disastrous effects when the power goes away. I had a 'pleasure' to travel on modern electric train with sealed windows where everything was powered. You couldn't even enter the bathroom without the electricity (doors), also no water, no toilet flushing. Air conditioning drew so much power that it brought the power grid in train to its knees and *everything* failed. Imagine being locked for few hours in a box with a temperature of 50C. This happened in poland but i have read similar stories about german trains.
I'll take good old fashioned windows and doors for cooling purposes any day. Being modern and electrified for the sake of it doesn't make any sense.
it's not because of free market but because of 'winner takes all' and '2nd is the 1st loser' rules in political system. Without such pressure lovers of green vases in a free market would be catered to for their lower but not insignificant market share.
i've seen plains full of wind turbines in Austria and i must say it was a very sad view. Beautiful grassland, hills and mountains in the background - a place where you'd imagine to see stereotypical cows grazing, but everything is overshadowed by tidy rows of huge towers. Landscape is destroyed aesthetically and on top of that at any given time 10-20% of turbines were broken, which means they are very costly and labor intensive to maintain. And how many square kms of windfarms you need to match single nuclear facility? Wind is unstable, it will never be used as a core source of energy, unless you build also expensive infrastructure to buffer tons of overproduced energy for the times when wind doesn't blow. Another thing: wind turbines are reported to kill birds and bats even with the pressure waves they create, if the animal gets too close their lungs simply explode, no physical contact is required to maim.
so you apparently think that average person lives under the rock in some desolate place. Firefox in europe is at 40% mark, it's hard not to know about the browser that 2 in 5 use for some time already. Besides why do you think that average person who is ignorant in case of firefox, suddenly knows that Google is a multibillion company and not that internet/search thingie you type stuff in and get results, maybe email too.
SENEGAL: Frozen chicken imports threaten local farmers’ livelihoods
The poultry parts -- unwanted by Europe and America where consumers often prefer the breast meat -- are offloaded in Africa to be hawked by 'banabana' street vendors or at markets for a fraction of the price of locally-reared birds. [...] It's not that the local producers cannot satisfy the demand, it's that they cannot do it as cheaply.
Although American and European poultry farmers do not receive direct subsidies, the grains used to feed their chickens do qualify for state aid. And this assistance means that even though the frozen chicken has to travel thousands of miles to reach West African shores, it can still sell for half the price of local meat.
"globalism" and "free trade" always seems to mean "transfer wealth away from the US". It is not the mutual trade and prosperity that was sold to us when NAFTA and other proposals were getting off the ground.
wait what? and decades of dirt cheap chinese stuff didn't improve your standards of living? I bet you think that world hegemony, protectionism, exporting inflation abroad and printing dollars 24/7 at 0 cost to pay for oil and real goods from China is so much better than good ol' competition, right? One problem with that though: it is a lousy deal for the rest of the world - you know, the other 6billion people. American standard of living and levels of consumption can't be supported by the current productivity of American economy, which replaced productive, wealth increasing sectors in its GDP with fluff (intellectual bullshit, financial instruments and other virtual shit useful only to inflate GDP) - standard of living has to come down. Once the global equilibrium accounting for vast asian markets and plentiful workforce is found, it will be the way up for everyone from then on. There are billions of people eager to work hard to improve their lives, why should every lazy, brainless moron of the west be entitled to riches beyond the cognitive abilities of an average asian peasant/factory worker just because he was lucky to be born in the right place?
and now the undeserving companies have the government by the balls in perpetuity - thanks for setting up the precedent that incentivizes even more privatization of profits and socialization of losses. Expect rerun of the show every few years down the road, but with even better special effects - now in true 3d!
if burying works better than investing then there is something seriously wrong with the monetary system. Paper money allows politicians and banking system to impose inflation tax that slowly eats away people's purchasing power - don't be naive to think that wages keep up with inflation. Bugus government numbers are bogus.
wait what? Are you saying that producing paper money somehow creates new value as opposed to using gold? How did humanity manage to move from caves given that gold and silver were almost universally used as a store of value for few thousands years and fiat money is only a recent invention? Do you imply that the idea of investing didn't exist back then, not to mention 19th century USA on gold standard that experienced unmatched economic growth AND falling prices?
and then FDIC runs out of money, feds come to the rescue with quantitative-eased (aka printed) money to cover the difference and purchasing power of every dollar in existence goes down - you've lost again, thanks for playing.
Slashdot Mirror
what features?
matchmaking is about the only thing better in sc2 worth mentioning and you are comparing games created 12 years apart (good matchmaking was present in wc3 already). Sc1 was pretty much the state of the rts art when it came out. With SC1 you could play on any of 4 available gateways (now regions 60bucks a pop) plus there was lan allowing you to create ad-hoc lan parties anywhere.
And you must be joking about the quality of sc1 story. Maybe it was not a literary nobel prize material but it's leaps and bounds above the sc2 level - it had memorable characters, superior dialogues and a lot of stuff was going on in the universe. Sc2 is a disaster story-wise - it is highly illogical, inconsistent and it pissed all over the lore established in sc1. Also out of 26 missions maybe 10 push story forward in a meaningful way, the rest is a filler doing nothing more but inflating the number of missions to justify 60 bucks, not to mention that many missions are just remade custom map modes from sc/wc3 times. Granted, mechanics are superior but again, 12 years passed and there are different standards now.
care to explain what's wrong with kespa? ok, it treats players like shit but:
- it's Korean organization and doesn't have much weight outside SK
- it was created mainly by hardware/IT companies as a marketing vehicle for their products so it does not operate at a gigantic profit
- it singlehandedly created viable e-sport business around BroodWar and did all the required legwork to organize leagues, tournaments, teams and tv coverage
- it knows its shit - on the other hand legit tournaments of SC2 (including blizzard's own) look ungodly amateurish (dropped connections play huge part in that)
- it argues that its business is gameplay, which is the creation of players not blizzard, end of story. No rights violation because all copies of BroodWar were paid for
- it earned blizzard tons of money and reputation thanks to free advertising of BroodWar - the game belongs to a quite unpopular genre as far as general public is concerned (RTS) and would be abandoned and forgotten by the masses 3 years after release. Blizzard should be kissing their ass, not rent-seeking.
Do you think those 15 million copies during the last 12 years sold all by themselves?
Does NBA pay Spalding for the game devices called balls or it's the other way around - Spalding sponsoring NBA for the increased exposure so all the b-ball playing niggaz want to have one?
Don't cheer for blizzard because in case of SC2 it did an end run around kespa at the paying customer's rights expense. Blizzard should do what it does best - develop quality games - and stay out of competitive scene. Their shameless money squeezing hurts viability of competitive gaming more than it helps.
coal has low 'density' of radioactivity but multiply it by hundeds of millions tons that are burned every year and release all kinds of nasty shit straight to the atmosphere. On the other hand in nuclear reactors the whole radioactivity is pretty much contained inside and the outside world never experiences it under normal conditions.
how many instances of a given app you want to have? nautilus, terminal, browsers, gedit, IMs, IDEs gimp, you name it - they all usually have only one instance running. It makes a lot of sense to run the app when there is no instance running/bring back already existing instances. That's what existing docks and pinned-to-taskbar apps do in win7 so some people are already familiar with such behavior.
If you want to make sure new instance pops up every time you activate the launcher - middle click it or select proper option from context menu.
add the US constitution to that list
problem is that the governments around the world are getting fatter and many many people employed on taxpayer's expense don't do anything of value. They pass shitloads of meaningless regulations so they get to do anything like rubberstamping piles of paper to justify their existence. USA fared well when all levels of administration were worth 5% of gdp, now the govt is involved in 40+% if i am not mistaken.
In Poland there was like 150k bureaucrats in 1989 - we are talking about a socialist state that laughed at economic soundness. Guess what - that number approaches 600k today in a free democratic country.
Such a ridiculous growth puts huge burden on economy and to make things worse, salaries are much better than those in the private sector, which has to pay for all that with ever increasing taxes.
damn, i messed up a bit. 1st point is mislabeled Voting Rights Act, obviously it should be not Civil Rights Act
have you read it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Paul
Opposed to Civil Rights Act of 1964.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Paul#Voting_Rights_Act
He felt the federal interference mandated by the bill was costly and unjustified because the situation for minorities voting is much different than when the bill was passed 40 years ago.
The bill also mandated bilingual voting ballots upon request, and in a letter opposing the bill for this reason, 80 members of Congress including Paul objected to the costly implications of requiring bilingual ballots. In one example cited in the letter, the members detailed how Los Angeles spent $2.1 million for the 2004 election to provide ballots in seven different languages and more than 2,000 translators, although one of the requirements of gaining United States citizenship is ability to read in English, and another California district spent $30,000 on translating ballots per election despite receiving only one request for Spanish documents in 16 years.
Opposed to Civil Rights Act of 1964.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul188.html
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government unprecedented power over the hiring, employee relations, and customer service practices of every business in the country. The result was a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society. The federal government has no legitimate authority to infringe on the rights of private property owners to use their property as they please and to form (or not form) contracts with terms mutually agreeable to all parties. The rights of all private property owners, even those whose actions decent people find abhorrent, must be respected if we are to maintain a free society.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society. Federal bureaucrats and judges cannot read minds to see if actions are motivated by racism. Therefore, the only way the federal government could ensure an employer was not violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to ensure that the racial composition of a business's workforce matched the racial composition of a bureaucrat or judge's defined body of potential employees. Thus, bureaucrats began forcing employers to hire by racial quota. Racial quotas have not contributed to racial harmony or advanced the goal of a color-blind society. Instead, these quotas encouraged racial balkanization, and fostered racial strife.
Paul introduced the Sanctity of Life Act of 2005, a bill that would have defined human life to begin at conception, and removed challenges to prohibitions on abortion from federal court jurisdiction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Paul#Abortion-related_legislation
Paul calls himself "strongly pro-life" and "an unshakable foe of abortion." However, he believes regulation of medical decisions about maternal or fetal health is "best handled at the state level." He believes that, for the most part, states should retain jurisdiction, in accordance with the U.S. Constitution.
so the man is a hardcore follower of the constitution (a truly rare trait these days) and a supporter of strong property rights - how uncool...
isn't the constitution the supreme law of the land? And what about politicians taking offices swearing to uphold the constitution?
If you don't like it, amend it, not wipe your ass with it.
Governments are in bed with corporations already, you need to limit the power of government to make it not worthwhile to corrupt its members to do favors, otherwise corporations will always perceive that spending money on politicians has an extremely good ROI.
And yes, there are such parties in Europe. In Poland there are 2 with a total support of 1-2%.
These 2 parties are usually considered loonies because libertarianism offends average person's beliefs too much and they will never enter the parliament. They are marginalized/misrepresented in mainstream media and on top of that in elections there is a high pass filter in place (5% for parties, 7% for coalitions) supposedly to make parliament more stable. In reality this causes progressing americanization of politics where weaker parties are left out or even fold while few big ones rise to even greater prominence and new fresh people/ideas can't enter the parliament. Now we have 2 major parties (1 sorta spineless fake liberal with 40-50% support, 1 sorta xenophobic wacko religious socialist at about 20-30%) that play the game plus few smaller ones to act as a filler in coalitions (fork of the wacko one, postcomunists and countryside farmers).
poor excuse, i am amazed that people fall for that. If they cared about user latency they would incorporate LAN which proved invaluable at various tournaments - battle.net drops people frequently during official games, happened at like 10 different high profile events, including blizzard's own (so much for e-sports angle that blizzard reportedly takes seriously)
most people would use the lowest latency server either way but online tournaments where the best of the best compete wouldn't be such a pain in the ass. Not to mention that sc2 has high latency built in already, like 200ms. In sc1 it was like that too and community hacked in so called lan latency that brought delay to sub-100ms range to improve responsiveness. Whole competitive community played at iccup (russian 3rd party server) - NA, EU, S.Korea... you name it and it worked just fine.
region locking is a trick from mercantilist playbook, dvd regions reincarnated - global battle.net would allow to import the game from cheaper countries, that's all.
sorry but he speaks the truth
In some European countries like France, Germany or UK they have a problem with fast growing population of muslims who don't intend to assimilate at all but are first to suck to social system dry. I have absolutely no sympathy for parasitic kind of muslims.
I have only one thing to say to such people: "You don't like us and our rules? Start to work and respect OUR rules or gtfo to your desert you came from, you can have any rules you want there and you won't have to use our infidel euros"
Think about it, taxpayer pays their upkeep and all they do is to sit whole day in a mosque, criticise the filthy west and bitch and moan how they are entitled to things without making any concessions. And they multiply like mad, putting ever growing burden on taxpayers, while people who support them and their lifestyle don't (not to mention their growing voting power)
That is one of the inherent problems with civilized social system and multiculturalism - it requires everybody playing nice and share common value system, but there is always someone who will try to ruthlessly exploit it at taxpayer's expense and doesn't feel bad about it. You should crack down on ungrateful parasites hard, not to accept them and make concessions one after another.
I'm pretty sure people do all of those things you just mentioned.
ftfy
what?
economics 101 - if there is no competition, prices rise
agreed, also when switching conditions rapidly (e.g. going from hot outside to cool climate of shopping malls) you ask for getting sick.
not to mention that depending totally on electricity for cooling in the middle of hot summer can have disastrous effects when the power goes away.
I had a 'pleasure' to travel on modern electric train with sealed windows where everything was powered. You couldn't even enter the bathroom without the electricity (doors), also no water, no toilet flushing. Air conditioning drew so much power that it brought the power grid in train to its knees and *everything* failed. Imagine being locked for few hours in a box with a temperature of 50C. This happened in poland but i have read similar stories about german trains.
I'll take good old fashioned windows and doors for cooling purposes any day. Being modern and electrified for the sake of it doesn't make any sense.
it's not because of free market but because of 'winner takes all' and '2nd is the 1st loser' rules in political system. Without such pressure lovers of green vases in a free market would be catered to for their lower but not insignificant market share.
i've seen plains full of wind turbines in Austria and i must say it was a very sad view. Beautiful grassland, hills and mountains in the background - a place where you'd imagine to see stereotypical cows grazing, but everything is overshadowed by tidy rows of huge towers. Landscape is destroyed aesthetically and on top of that at any given time 10-20% of turbines were broken, which means they are very costly and labor intensive to maintain. And how many square kms of windfarms you need to match single nuclear facility?
Wind is unstable, it will never be used as a core source of energy, unless you build also expensive infrastructure to buffer tons of overproduced energy for the times when wind doesn't blow.
Another thing: wind turbines are reported to kill birds and bats even with the pressure waves they create, if the animal gets too close their lungs simply explode, no physical contact is required to maim.
so you apparently think that average person lives under the rock in some desolate place. Firefox in europe is at 40% mark, it's hard not to know about the browser that 2 in 5 use for some time already. Besides why do you think that average person who is ignorant in case of firefox, suddenly knows that Google is a multibillion company and not that internet/search thingie you type stuff in and get results, maybe email too.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=57603
SENEGAL: Frozen chicken imports threaten local farmers’ livelihoods
The poultry parts -- unwanted by Europe and America where consumers often prefer the breast meat -- are offloaded in Africa to be hawked by 'banabana' street vendors or at markets for a fraction of the price of locally-reared birds.
[...]
It's not that the local producers cannot satisfy the demand, it's that they cannot do it as cheaply.
Although American and European poultry farmers do not receive direct subsidies, the grains used to feed their chickens do qualify for state aid. And this assistance means that even though the frozen chicken has to travel thousands of miles to reach West African shores, it can still sell for half the price of local meat.
so, you were saying?
"globalism" and "free trade" always seems to mean "transfer wealth away from the US". It is not the mutual trade and prosperity that was sold to us when NAFTA and other proposals were getting off the ground.
wait what? and decades of dirt cheap chinese stuff didn't improve your standards of living?
I bet you think that world hegemony, protectionism, exporting inflation abroad and printing dollars 24/7 at 0 cost to pay for oil and real goods from China is so much better than good ol' competition, right? One problem with that though: it is a lousy deal for the rest of the world - you know, the other 6billion people. American standard of living and levels of consumption can't be supported by the current productivity of American economy, which replaced productive, wealth increasing sectors in its GDP with fluff (intellectual bullshit, financial instruments and other virtual shit useful only to inflate GDP) - standard of living has to come down. Once the global equilibrium accounting for vast asian markets and plentiful workforce is found, it will be the way up for everyone from then on.
There are billions of people eager to work hard to improve their lives, why should every lazy, brainless moron of the west be entitled to riches beyond the cognitive abilities of an average asian peasant/factory worker just because he was lucky to be born in the right place?
and now the undeserving companies have the government by the balls in perpetuity - thanks for setting up the precedent that incentivizes even more privatization of profits and socialization of losses. Expect rerun of the show every few years down the road, but with even better special effects - now in true 3d!
if burying works better than investing then there is something seriously wrong with the monetary system. Paper money allows politicians and banking system to impose inflation tax that slowly eats away people's purchasing power - don't be naive to think that wages keep up with inflation. Bugus government numbers are bogus.
wait what?
Are you saying that producing paper money somehow creates new value as opposed to using gold?
How did humanity manage to move from caves given that gold and silver were almost universally used as a store of value for few thousands years and fiat money is only a recent invention? Do you imply that the idea of investing didn't exist back then, not to mention 19th century USA on gold standard that experienced unmatched economic growth AND falling prices?
and then FDIC runs out of money, feds come to the rescue with quantitative-eased (aka printed) money to cover the difference and purchasing power of every dollar in existence goes down - you've lost again, thanks for playing.
maybe food and energy - you know, these daily expenditures?