The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.
The destruction of the European economy and the USA's brief time of ignoring intellectual property rights had nothing at all to do with that.
Let us remember why we have centralized control: the greed of the rich was harming the majority of the citizens.
Huh? You're claiming that the entire 19th century was caused by that?
The centralized control that we have in the U.S. today is the result of a violation of contract. After researching the agreements that the states and the people made when forming this nation it is difficult to find anything which grants Congress the power to control whatever it wishes. To argue that the constitution is no longer a valid contract is to argue that we are a nation ruled by men, not laws.
One question that could be asked is, how come 'distribution' has become such a huge percentage of the retail price? The answer is not increases in manufacturing technologies, it is that the factory is now several thousand more miles and an ocean away. This makes the distribution substantially more costly for several reasons:
There are additional shipping costs, including ocean freight, customs fees, and tariffs.
Increased lead times mean that forecasting must be further out, usually at least 90 days. This results in more manpower required to estimate the amount of goods to be purchased. It also means that there will be more mistakes made in the form of over-forecasting on some products and under-forecasting on others, both of which come with very real costs.
Because of the long lead times, orders usually have to be larger in quantity than would be made from a domestically located factory.
Usually when doing business overseas, it is customary to pay cash before the product leaves the factory, or pay on a letter of credit (that's how Wal-Mart pays) which operates pretty much like cash for the customer. This, combined with increased lead times and larger order quantities, means that the cost of money is also greater.
I'd also like to add that Amazon is actually not an example of streamlined distribution. Amazon ships small volumes of products, usually one or two at a time, to each address. Wal-Mart ships pallet loads of product to a central location for customers to pick up. The Wal-Mart model is far less expensive. If you calculate the cost of shipping one UPS trailer based on even their discounted rates and compare that with Wal-Mart, there is simply no comparison. Wal-Mart appears to have woken up to this fact and is now offering to ship special orders from their website to their stores at no charge.
Another consideration is the cost of manufacturing. Why has this come down so much? Many of the things that are so much lower are actually made by hand or largely by hand, or have dropped dramatically in price even when technology has produced no notable increases in efficiency during the same period. This is because the U.S. Federal Government has increased the cost to make things here at the same time that other countries have made it less expensive to make things. See my A.C. post here which explains much of this.
I do not condone any barriers to trade, in fact I'm part of that group of people who believe that free trade breaks down all barriers. We should not put any tariffs on any imports at all as this will benefit our nation greatly. The number of people who work in the steel industry and benefit from the tariff is insignificant to the number of people who benefit from lower cost steel products.
I think we are still in the industrial age. The advancements in information technology have mostly just increased the speed of transactions and R&D, but the core principle is still the same: mass production of real world products. We do have the addition of digital products, but this is a comparatively small piece of the pie and usually requires lots of hardware to make it work.
But that is the cause - our nation prospered greatly before D.C. became so powerful. We went from a bankrupt, 3rd world nation to the most powerful nation on Earth. All without the centralized control.
I find that terms such as free trade, capitalism, etc., are thrown around a bit too loosely. Most of the strongest proponents of free trade warned long ago that developing nations will overtake the U.S. Milton Friedman said that a foreign worker can learn the job of any American worker. Peter Schiff goes into great detail in his books to explain how the trade deficit is basically the annual amount of American wealth transferred overseas every year. The 'free marketers' you are referring to are likely neocons who spew all kinds of drivel to gain popular support of conservatives.
America already is in the service industry. A Chinese factory I do sales and marketing for purchased another factory that made a similar product, but a much newer technology that is used in common electronic devices (the old products were for automobiles). When I began selling these newer products I discovered that there are pretty much zero consumer electronics companies that use this component that even do their engineering in the U.S. This was a huge wake up call when I realized that most of the companies in the U.S. only do sales, marketing, and distribution - that's a very scary position for a nation to be in.
The cause of the employment problem is that we have too many federal regulations on employment and not enough legal immigrants[pdf]. Forcing employers to pay their workers at higher rates than employers in other countries just makes the employer uncompetitive in the marketplace, thus sending the production overseas, and in many cases the rest of the company goes with it. Charging a high tax rate to pay for entitlements such as Social Security and high income taxes makes the employees even more expensive. On top of that, there are federal requirements on unemployment insurance and worker's compensation insurance, plus a tax code labyrinth of epic proportions. The reality is that when we put these requirements onto the employers, we lose the employers, thus in an effort to guarantee worker safety, the worker loses the job.
America will likely continue its transition into a 3rd world nation with very serious inflation and very high unemployment rates unless something changes dramatically, but it is not the fault of the corporations. Blaming a corporation makes as much sense as blaming a building. The issue is not with the corporations, but rather with the control that Washington D.C. exercises over our economy. If we eliminate the central control, then we would recover from this death roll and return to prosperity.
Also, I should point out that the statement "corporations have essentially dismantled US tech and manufacturing, which, for most of America's history, have been the backbone of this country" makes no sense because that backbone was corporations, so you are claiming that they are the backbone of our success and the cause of our failure, which makes no sense and is not true.
In Bad Kreuznacnh, Germany, in 2004, my apartment building didn't even allow dial-up. This was something I couldn't even imagine, but the stupid phone plug was not compatible with any of the modems I purchased at Dr. Best, and I later learned that the building code did not allow internet over the phone line.
When I left San Jose in 2002 there was only dial-up as an option in the two neighborhoods that I had lived in. AT&T had wired up much of the city, but the city council wasn't letting them conduct business.
RCN wired fiber up all over San Francisco, and how long was it before the city let them offer their services?
The problem in the U.S. isn't just the issue of the FCC's limiting competition, it's corrupt city councils and citizens too busy doing other things to care.
Is that why every time I search for something obscure I always get a NexTag search for the same term at the top the results, followed by pages of absolute gibberish? IMHO, the only thing that made searching easier was Wikipedia, because most of the rest of the searches I do Google isn't much better than anyone else, and I don't find that the overall search experience to be much improved over the last decade. I wish Google would stop making office software, mail programs, phones, toothbrushes, and whatever else and pour their resources into something that actually saves me time.
Yes, I do know what 400 KB/sec equals. My connection is advertised as 20 mbps down and 2 mbps up. I can pretty much always get better than 10 mbps down, except in the evenings when I get 4 or less (occasionally 500 kbps). However, since I work from home it's not the end of the world that it's slower in the evenings.
If ISP's are struggling to "fat enough pipe to them", how would "100Mbps to everyone should help everyone" be true?
I think 100 mbps would pretty much be a gimmick to be used by the politicians as a numerical measure of how much they are contributing to 'progress', as well as a nice subsidy for their campaign contributors. No matter that actual speeds seen by users will not be notably increased.
My ISP is Charter, and I think they bank on the fact that hardly any user bothers to check the actual speed of the connection.
Well, my ISP is crap, but it's rarely lower than 10 mbps and only usually during evenings. Fast servers, like MS and Google, usually max out what the ISP can handle, but pretty much everything else, including YouTube, is pretty slow. Even DirecTV limits their upload rate to 7.5 mbps.
It is by far the most reasonable argument on this entire page. There is nowhere in the constitution that grants Congress the power to create and fund an organization such as NASA. I guess the familiar saw, "people spend more time and energy researching cameras and cell phones than their own rights and governing documents," is especially true here on slashdot. No wonder my site has only ever gotten 3 clicks from this site.
I wholeheartedly agree. And rest assured, some day, hopefully in the very distant future,/. will be reporting on the man's obituary, and all these same critics will be commenting on how much they enjoyed growing up in the universe that he created and how grateful they are that such a man ever lived.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently you're not familiar with no-fault insurance.
No-fault insurance
There is no such thing as a 'constitutional' convention'. There is only an amendment convention.
Article V
Too often we use the term "he got off" when we should really be saying "the police are incompetent".
What is in the caches on the supreme court judges' computers?
Dickens wrote fiction.
Your argument still fails the constitutional check in that the Constitution does not allow Congress to do most of the things it does.
The destruction of the European economy and the USA's brief time of ignoring intellectual property rights had nothing at all to do with that.
Let us remember why we have centralized control: the greed of the rich was harming the majority of the citizens.
Huh? You're claiming that the entire 19th century was caused by that?
The centralized control that we have in the U.S. today is the result of a violation of contract. After researching the agreements that the states and the people made when forming this nation it is difficult to find anything which grants Congress the power to control whatever it wishes. To argue that the constitution is no longer a valid contract is to argue that we are a nation ruled by men, not laws.
One question that could be asked is, how come 'distribution' has become such a huge percentage of the retail price? The answer is not increases in manufacturing technologies, it is that the factory is now several thousand more miles and an ocean away. This makes the distribution substantially more costly for several reasons:
There are additional shipping costs, including ocean freight, customs fees, and tariffs.
Increased lead times mean that forecasting must be further out, usually at least 90 days. This results in more manpower required to estimate the amount of goods to be purchased. It also means that there will be more mistakes made in the form of over-forecasting on some products and under-forecasting on others, both of which come with very real costs.
Because of the long lead times, orders usually have to be larger in quantity than would be made from a domestically located factory.
Usually when doing business overseas, it is customary to pay cash before the product leaves the factory, or pay on a letter of credit (that's how Wal-Mart pays) which operates pretty much like cash for the customer. This, combined with increased lead times and larger order quantities, means that the cost of money is also greater.
I'd also like to add that Amazon is actually not an example of streamlined distribution. Amazon ships small volumes of products, usually one or two at a time, to each address. Wal-Mart ships pallet loads of product to a central location for customers to pick up. The Wal-Mart model is far less expensive. If you calculate the cost of shipping one UPS trailer based on even their discounted rates and compare that with Wal-Mart, there is simply no comparison. Wal-Mart appears to have woken up to this fact and is now offering to ship special orders from their website to their stores at no charge.
Another consideration is the cost of manufacturing. Why has this come down so much? Many of the things that are so much lower are actually made by hand or largely by hand, or have dropped dramatically in price even when technology has produced no notable increases in efficiency during the same period. This is because the U.S. Federal Government has increased the cost to make things here at the same time that other countries have made it less expensive to make things. See my A.C. post here which explains much of this.
I do not condone any barriers to trade, in fact I'm part of that group of people who believe that free trade breaks down all barriers. We should not put any tariffs on any imports at all as this will benefit our nation greatly. The number of people who work in the steel industry and benefit from the tariff is insignificant to the number of people who benefit from lower cost steel products.
I think we are still in the industrial age. The advancements in information technology have mostly just increased the speed of transactions and R&D, but the core principle is still the same: mass production of real world products. We do have the addition of digital products, but this is a comparatively small piece of the pie and usually requires lots of hardware to make it work.
But then we turn into the USSR. Things didn't work out so well for them.
But that is the cause - our nation prospered greatly before D.C. became so powerful. We went from a bankrupt, 3rd world nation to the most powerful nation on Earth. All without the centralized control.
I find that terms such as free trade, capitalism, etc., are thrown around a bit too loosely. Most of the strongest proponents of free trade warned long ago that developing nations will overtake the U.S. Milton Friedman said that a foreign worker can learn the job of any American worker. Peter Schiff goes into great detail in his books to explain how the trade deficit is basically the annual amount of American wealth transferred overseas every year. The 'free marketers' you are referring to are likely neocons who spew all kinds of drivel to gain popular support of conservatives.
America already is in the service industry. A Chinese factory I do sales and marketing for purchased another factory that made a similar product, but a much newer technology that is used in common electronic devices (the old products were for automobiles). When I began selling these newer products I discovered that there are pretty much zero consumer electronics companies that use this component that even do their engineering in the U.S. This was a huge wake up call when I realized that most of the companies in the U.S. only do sales, marketing, and distribution - that's a very scary position for a nation to be in.
The cause of the employment problem is that we have too many federal regulations on employment and not enough legal immigrants[pdf]. Forcing employers to pay their workers at higher rates than employers in other countries just makes the employer uncompetitive in the marketplace, thus sending the production overseas, and in many cases the rest of the company goes with it. Charging a high tax rate to pay for entitlements such as Social Security and high income taxes makes the employees even more expensive. On top of that, there are federal requirements on unemployment insurance and worker's compensation insurance, plus a tax code labyrinth of epic proportions. The reality is that when we put these requirements onto the employers, we lose the employers, thus in an effort to guarantee worker safety, the worker loses the job.
America will likely continue its transition into a 3rd world nation with very serious inflation and very high unemployment rates unless something changes dramatically, but it is not the fault of the corporations. Blaming a corporation makes as much sense as blaming a building. The issue is not with the corporations, but rather with the control that Washington D.C. exercises over our economy. If we eliminate the central control, then we would recover from this death roll and return to prosperity.
Also, I should point out that the statement "corporations have essentially dismantled US tech and manufacturing, which, for most of America's history, have been the backbone of this country" makes no sense because that backbone was corporations, so you are claiming that they are the backbone of our success and the cause of our failure, which makes no sense and is not true.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZzfhQuW2eE
In Bad Kreuznacnh, Germany, in 2004, my apartment building didn't even allow dial-up. This was something I couldn't even imagine, but the stupid phone plug was not compatible with any of the modems I purchased at Dr. Best, and I later learned that the building code did not allow internet over the phone line.
When I left San Jose in 2002 there was only dial-up as an option in the two neighborhoods that I had lived in. AT&T had wired up much of the city, but the city council wasn't letting them conduct business.
RCN wired fiber up all over San Francisco, and how long was it before the city let them offer their services?
The problem in the U.S. isn't just the issue of the FCC's limiting competition, it's corrupt city councils and citizens too busy doing other things to care.
Is that why every time I search for something obscure I always get a NexTag search for the same term at the top the results, followed by pages of absolute gibberish? IMHO, the only thing that made searching easier was Wikipedia, because most of the rest of the searches I do Google isn't much better than anyone else, and I don't find that the overall search experience to be much improved over the last decade. I wish Google would stop making office software, mail programs, phones, toothbrushes, and whatever else and pour their resources into something that actually saves me time.
thus laws from the normal world don't apply.
Yes, I do know what 400 KB/sec equals. My connection is advertised as 20 mbps down and 2 mbps up. I can pretty much always get better than 10 mbps down, except in the evenings when I get 4 or less (occasionally 500 kbps). However, since I work from home it's not the end of the world that it's slower in the evenings.
If ISP's are struggling to "fat enough pipe to them", how would "100Mbps to everyone should help everyone" be true?
I think 100 mbps would pretty much be a gimmick to be used by the politicians as a numerical measure of how much they are contributing to 'progress', as well as a nice subsidy for their campaign contributors. No matter that actual speeds seen by users will not be notably increased.
My ISP is Charter, and I think they bank on the fact that hardly any user bothers to check the actual speed of the connection.
Well, my ISP is crap, but it's rarely lower than 10 mbps and only usually during evenings. Fast servers, like MS and Google, usually max out what the ISP can handle, but pretty much everything else, including YouTube, is pretty slow. Even DirecTV limits their upload rate to 7.5 mbps.
I rarely get anything served to me at higher than 400 KB/sec.
It is by far the most reasonable argument on this entire page. There is nowhere in the constitution that grants Congress the power to create and fund an organization such as NASA. I guess the familiar saw, "people spend more time and energy researching cameras and cell phones than their own rights and governing documents," is especially true here on slashdot. No wonder my site has only ever gotten 3 clicks from this site.
The constitution does not allow Congress to fund NASA. This is not a conservative for liberal opinion; it is a statement of fact.
The money is printed by the bank
Really?
I wholeheartedly agree. And rest assured, some day, hopefully in the very distant future, /. will be reporting on the man's obituary, and all these same critics will be commenting on how much they enjoyed growing up in the universe that he created and how grateful they are that such a man ever lived.
Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil?
Google is nearly as ubiquitous and a tool of the state
"Life is like a roll of toilet paper: the older you get, the faster it goes."
And right after that we'll boycott all the Chevron stations for 3 days.