Any system that lets people starve to death when they want to work but there are no jobs, or the jobs don't pay enough for food, or lets people die of treatable diseases, is crap.
Since there's no national health program, no Social Security, no unemployment benefits, and almost no welfare, sounds like it might suck to be part of the 7.8% unemployed. Good thing they probably have 3 generations living in one apartment or many elderly would die much sooner.
Sounds to me like the poor have a worse quality of life than the poor in the USA. That's a bad thing.
Its Econ 101 that if the only difference between two factories is that one has better working conditions which cost more, the other factory can sell the product for less. How much of HKs success has been from undercutting nations that want to take better care of their people?
So you can't envision a future country where the means of production are owned by the government but there is representative democracy for the people instead of dictators and his inner circle?
Like for example if all city and country owned municipal water systems were instead owned by the country's government? Or municipal power, or telephones, or airlines?
The fact that there are currently municipal water and power systems providing cheaper services than the corporate competition is proof that privatization isn't always better. The very fact that corporations are in business to make a profit is part of the problem. In a not-for-profit municipal water or power system, there should still be rewards for good performance, but a million bucks to a CEO is money that could have stayed in people's pockets.
Now just expand the concept to other services and forms of production.
There's a good reason I said modified communism. It's because I don't like what Stalin did either. I'm impressed by Cuba's health care system, but having a dictator is not a good thing. Castro has plenty of faults and failings.
In a nutshell, because if Congress pushed to make China play on a level field, like others said, it would have to make the USA play on that same field. But I'm adding that legislation to level the field wouldn't get passed unless it also tried to help the Chinese workers. After all, there's no way corporations will want to pay higher American wages. So to save American jobs, some additional part of the legislation would hurt upper management's salaries because corporations would have to pay more when foreign wages and or working conditions improve.
And Reagan got the economy moving by spending a trillion or three dollars that we didn't have. We have to pay it back eventually don't we? Meanwhile the interest on it last year was 321 BILLION DOLLARS! That's how much was paid out! That money could have been spent in far better ways.
Kerry's plan also included big tax hikes which would have clobbered the economy and resulted in a reduction of tax revenues.
Do you think taking an additional 5% from someone who makes $300,000 or more a year is going to cause them to stop saving and investing? Keep in mind that money saved in a bank account isn't helping the economy directly. Yes banks loan it out, but banks aren't running short of money to loan. So that's surplus savings being kept from the economy. Now perhaps some of that 5% would have been invested. That would hurt the economy except that the US government would it instead, meaning it still goes back into the economy.
So your argument that the economy would get clobbered doesn't hold up.
Communism has never been tried on a global scale, which is part of why it hasn't worked out very well. China is exploiting capitalism, sucking up lots of dollars and technology and giving its people jobs. Then by sometimes ignoring patents and intellectual property, its companies gain technology and market share. What China should work towards is socialism, where it uses all the wealth its pulling in to better the lives of all its people.
Now that we have computers and can better allocate resources, modified communism could work if done on a global scale. But when non-communist countries try to upset the balance, say by an arms race, communism has to divert resources and it becomes harder to provide for the People.
Forgot to connect the dots... If corporations pressed Congress to level the playing field, the resulting legislation might call for the Chinese to pay higher wages or provide safer working conditions. Those advantages are a large part of why it's cheaper to outsource. Neocons and many businesspeople want to outsource for personal gain, whereas bettering workplace conditions worldwide would cost corporations money.
Why exactly is the Chinese government allowed to fund this company?
Because American managers and CEOs are self-serving and would rather have a global playing field on which to profit instead of just the domestic market. You see they'd rather outsource their companies to save money, except for the management jobs. They get rich, most Americans suffer, and in the long run the country goes to hell becuase the school system falls apart.
Under the pure capitalism, there is no minimum wage, which does in fact mean that Nike and Levis can move their garment factories back here, and there's plenty of employment. But since the jobs pay 3rd world wages, the country becomes a third world nation where the middle class barely exists, the owners and managers live like kings, and everybody else takes it up the ass.
It has been cheap gasoline that enabled suburban sprawl, business parks, and shopping centers five miles from homes. The luxury of raising a family in a personal suburban oasis, or out in a rural area sixty miles from where jobs are is going to get a lot more expensive whether we like it or not. I agree that most cities haven't been designed for high oil prices, but now they're going to have to change. In fact as it costs more to drive, fewer people will want to live so far away from city centers, or their jobs. Perhaps the price of suburban and rural homes will fall, or perhaps businesses will move closer to the homes.
In Omaha, people need to start finding neighboors working in the same direction and driving each other to the city center or bus stops on alternating days. No busses? Better get them. Concurrently, perhaps more businesses will start providing vans or shuttles from transit hubs? In the SF Bay Area both Sun Microsystems in Fremont and Bayer Pharmaceuticals in Berkeley have shuttles from BART (the above and below ground subway) Now these are large companies, but what if smaller companies in a business park all agreed to pool funds for vans? These are options that will be considered as gas prices rise.
Unions are an entity that can abuse corporations. Corporations are an entity that can abuse employees. Turnabout is fair play. Free markets aren't total saints you know.
Have you looked at the reviews PC Gamer has of small, independant games? Half of them are bad enough that almost nobody will buy them. Half of the better half are very specialized and if they bring in enough money to pay the bills I'll be surprised. That leaves at most 25% that might allow the producers to save for retirement. Of course if one's game is part of the 75%, one either gets financially hurt, or is treading water while growing older. Sounds like great odds, and I thingk I'm being generous with the odds of having a good game.
Why is that everyone is so brainwashed today that they think you need a movie-quality flashy 3D game to be sellable? Of all my favorite games, not a SINGLE ONE fits that profile. As I keep saying: flashy expensive graphics don't matter. The game matters. It matters what the story is about. It matters if gameplay is exciting.
Why should I care about your favorite games? Shouldn't I care about how many copies different kinds of games are selling? To sell a lot of copies today, looking good is almost a requirement. It's hard to sell a game if the advertising looks lousy. It's hard to sell a game with great word-of-mouth if retailers won't stock it because of how it looks.
I don't like that iTunes lets me customize pretty much nothing compared to Winamp or Foobar2000. I love BSplayer for video because I can customize _everything_. I have twenty Firefox extensions for more and faster control as I browse. For OSX, how available are free third-party apps that let me customize it when I think differently from Apple?
But by normalize, I believe it just adjusts the "volume knob" once for the whole song. This causes clipping on some of the loud parts of an otherwise quiet song.
An Apple Shuffle is $99. If a cellphone can duplicate that simple functionality and only cost $50 more than a similar model that does everything but mp3s, that would be a good deal to me.
If I wanted a low-end, HD-based camcorder which used the same HD to playback video, and could use a TV module for playing and saving TV, even better. Yeah it might get lost, stolen, or crushed, but if it costs $700 instead of $400 + 400 + 100(TV), I might think it's worth it.
Combine all of the above in one device for considerably less than the individual parts, and it might be worth the risk, depending on my lifestyle and plans for using it.
So because a small percentage of games need more you think it's worth the cost of having 384 or 512 instead of 356? Without the OS much less RAM is needed. As for price, if Micron is selling GDDR3 to ATI for XX dollars a stick, don't think MS can talk them down too much lower. The good stuff is almost always going to cost more. The few extra dollars then gets doubled when it's sold to Target, and doubled again when we buy the console.
The fear of getting sued by RIAA. If there's 10 million people using P2P in the USA for copyright infringement, and that dropped to 500,000 users, a thousand lawsuits every year targeting those sharing the most would make many people very nervous. Scare the infringement into hiding, requiring people to know each other, and then there will be less available. People will start buying again.
Define been around. HDTV broadcasts in either 720p or 1080i. For fast motion 720p looks better. The low and mid-range HDTV's cannot handle 1080p. I know hi-def DVD's will be available for the players, but will they be interlaced, like the early DVDs were? Will they be progressive, but only at 720 lines? Moron.
64MB was not conservative when it came out. 64MB was the most any PC video card had back then, but the xbox ran at lower resolution. Also, console RAM isn't the same grade as PC3200. This generation it'll be faster, GDDR3, the same as what's in the latest video cards. Like others said, the good stuff is more expensive.
I care about the games, not what they're played on. I don't expect Xenon to come with a keyboard and mouse, but since the xbox used modified USB, it would be easy for them to sell an adapter to use any keyboard, or gouge me an extra ten bucks for their own Xenonified version. If MS actually releases a more expensive Media Center version with Tivo functionality and word processing, they'll have gotten people to buy the both the software and hardware from them. That's owning the PC market. MS bought WebTV and it failed, but this could succeed, and I won't have to pay $200 every two years for a new video card, and $300 every three years for a new CPU, mobo, and RAM. Just $400 every five years for a console, and if I keep a PC, it won't need the latest video card.
There are already TVs and projectors that can do 1080p, they just cost several thousand dollars. In three years they'll probably be only a thousand. It would be nice if one of the next-gen consoles includes that capability. For that matter, anyone know if next-gen DVD will store the movies at 1080p, but then use hardware to interlace it for the majority of HDTV sets? I'm keeping my fingers crossed, so I can buy a projector and ditch the overpriced theaters.
Back to the Nextbox, rumor has it there's going to be a Media Center version. What if all versions supported a keyboard and mouse? It would decimate the PC gaming market! No more complaining about using a gamepad for shooters. Yeah resolution would be limited to 1920x1080, but that's not so bad, especially if there's finally a way to hook it up to a monitor. Now Microsoft might not want to hurt the PC market, but I bet Sony wouldn't. Yet Sony is just a bit too strange to try this.
Slashdot Mirror
Any system that lets people starve to death when they want to work but there are no jobs, or the jobs don't pay enough for food, or lets people die of treatable diseases, is crap.
--ZING!
It sounds like HK's environment is a mess. They only started working on cleaning it up in 1989.
Sounds like working 48 or more hours per week is expected there. There's also a lack of protections for workers.
Since there's no national health program, no Social Security, no unemployment benefits, and almost no welfare, sounds like it might suck to be part of the 7.8% unemployed. Good thing they probably have 3 generations living in one apartment or many elderly would die much sooner.
Sounds to me like the poor have a worse quality of life than the poor in the USA. That's a bad thing.
Its Econ 101 that if the only difference between two factories is that one has better working conditions which cost more, the other factory can sell the product for less. How much of HKs success has been from undercutting nations that want to take better care of their people?
So you can't envision a future country where the means of production are owned by the government but there is representative democracy for the people instead of dictators and his inner circle?
Like for example if all city and country owned municipal water systems were instead owned by the country's government? Or municipal power, or telephones, or airlines?
The fact that there are currently municipal water and power systems providing cheaper services than the corporate competition is proof that privatization isn't always better. The very fact that corporations are in business to make a profit is part of the problem. In a not-for-profit municipal water or power system, there should still be rewards for good performance, but a million bucks to a CEO is money that could have stayed in people's pockets.
Now just expand the concept to other services and forms of production.
There's a good reason I said modified communism. It's because I don't like what Stalin did either. I'm impressed by Cuba's health care system, but having a dictator is not a good thing. Castro has plenty of faults and failings.
In a nutshell, because if Congress pushed to make China play on a level field, like others said, it would have to make the USA play on that same field. But I'm adding that legislation to level the field wouldn't get passed unless it also tried to help the Chinese workers. After all, there's no way corporations will want to pay higher American wages. So to save American jobs, some additional part of the legislation would hurt upper management's salaries because corporations would have to pay more when foreign wages and or working conditions improve.
And Reagan got the economy moving by spending a trillion or three dollars that we didn't have. We have to pay it back eventually don't we? Meanwhile the interest on it last year was 321 BILLION DOLLARS! That's how much was paid out! That money could have been spent in far better ways.
Kerry's plan also included big tax hikes which would have clobbered the economy and resulted in a reduction of tax revenues.
Do you think taking an additional 5% from someone who makes $300,000 or more a year is going to cause them to stop saving and investing? Keep in mind that money saved in a bank account isn't helping the economy directly. Yes banks loan it out, but banks aren't running short of money to loan. So that's surplus savings being kept from the economy. Now perhaps some of that 5% would have been invested. That would hurt the economy except that the US government would it instead, meaning it still goes back into the economy.
So your argument that the economy would get clobbered doesn't hold up.
Communism has never been tried on a global scale, which is part of why it hasn't worked out very well. China is exploiting capitalism, sucking up lots of dollars and technology and giving its people jobs. Then by sometimes ignoring patents and intellectual property, its companies gain technology and market share. What China should work towards is socialism, where it uses all the wealth its pulling in to better the lives of all its people.
Now that we have computers and can better allocate resources, modified communism could work if done on a global scale. But when non-communist countries try to upset the balance, say by an arms race, communism has to divert resources and it becomes harder to provide for the People.
Forgot to connect the dots... If corporations pressed Congress to level the playing field, the resulting legislation might call for the Chinese to pay higher wages or provide safer working conditions. Those advantages are a large part of why it's cheaper to outsource. Neocons and many businesspeople want to outsource for personal gain, whereas bettering workplace conditions worldwide would cost corporations money.
Why exactly is the Chinese government allowed to fund this company?
Because American managers and CEOs are self-serving and would rather have a global playing field on which to profit instead of just the domestic market. You see they'd rather outsource their companies to save money, except for the management jobs. They get rich, most Americans suffer, and in the long run the country goes to hell becuase the school system falls apart.
Under the pure capitalism, there is no minimum wage, which does in fact mean that Nike and Levis can move their garment factories back here, and there's plenty of employment. But since the jobs pay 3rd world wages, the country becomes a third world nation where the middle class barely exists, the owners and managers live like kings, and everybody else takes it up the ass.
It has been cheap gasoline that enabled suburban sprawl, business parks, and shopping centers five miles from homes. The luxury of raising a family in a personal suburban oasis, or out in a rural area sixty miles from where jobs are is going to get a lot more expensive whether we like it or not. I agree that most cities haven't been designed for high oil prices, but now they're going to have to change. In fact as it costs more to drive, fewer people will want to live so far away from city centers, or their jobs. Perhaps the price of suburban and rural homes will fall, or perhaps businesses will move closer to the homes.
In Omaha, people need to start finding neighboors working in the same direction and driving each other to the city center or bus stops on alternating days. No busses? Better get them. Concurrently, perhaps more businesses will start providing vans or shuttles from transit hubs? In the SF Bay Area both Sun Microsystems in Fremont and Bayer Pharmaceuticals in Berkeley have shuttles from BART (the above and below ground subway) Now these are large companies, but what if smaller companies in a business park all agreed to pool funds for vans? These are options that will be considered as gas prices rise.
Yeah, but why? Why didn't they stick with Tapes, then CDs?
Unions are an entity that can abuse corporations. Corporations are an entity that can abuse employees. Turnabout is fair play. Free markets aren't total saints you know.
Have you looked at the reviews PC Gamer has of small, independant games? Half of them are bad enough that almost nobody will buy them. Half of the better half are very specialized and if they bring in enough money to pay the bills I'll be surprised. That leaves at most 25% that might allow the producers to save for retirement. Of course if one's game is part of the 75%, one either gets financially hurt, or is treading water while growing older. Sounds like great odds, and I thingk I'm being generous with the odds of having a good game.
Why is that everyone is so brainwashed today that they think you need a movie-quality flashy 3D game to be sellable? Of all my favorite games, not a SINGLE ONE fits that profile. As I keep saying: flashy expensive graphics don't matter. The game matters. It matters what the story is about. It matters if gameplay is exciting.
Why should I care about your favorite games? Shouldn't I care about how many copies different kinds of games are selling? To sell a lot of copies today, looking good is almost a requirement. It's hard to sell a game if the advertising looks lousy. It's hard to sell a game with great word-of-mouth if retailers won't stock it because of how it looks.
I don't like that iTunes lets me customize pretty much nothing compared to Winamp or Foobar2000. I love BSplayer for video because I can customize _everything_. I have twenty Firefox extensions for more and faster control as I browse. For OSX, how available are free third-party apps that let me customize it when I think differently from Apple?
But by normalize, I believe it just adjusts the "volume knob" once for the whole song. This causes clipping on some of the loud parts of an otherwise quiet song.
An Apple Shuffle is $99. If a cellphone can duplicate that simple functionality and only cost $50 more than a similar model that does everything but mp3s, that would be a good deal to me.
If I wanted a low-end, HD-based camcorder which used the same HD to playback video, and could use a TV module for playing and saving TV, even better. Yeah it might get lost, stolen, or crushed, but if it costs $700 instead of $400 + 400 + 100(TV), I might think it's worth it.
Combine all of the above in one device for considerably less than the individual parts, and it might be worth the risk, depending on my lifestyle and plans for using it.
So because a small percentage of games need more you think it's worth the cost of having 384 or 512 instead of 356? Without the OS much less RAM is needed. As for price, if Micron is selling GDDR3 to ATI for XX dollars a stick, don't think MS can talk them down too much lower. The good stuff is almost always going to cost more. The few extra dollars then gets doubled when it's sold to Target, and doubled again when we buy the console.
Been to Japan or Europe? CDs already cost different amounts than in the USA, after currency conversion.
The online store are charging different amounts too. 99 Canadian cents there, 99 US cents, 99/100ths of a Euro, 99/100ths of a pound in England...
How will the bandwith costs compare to manufacturing a CD, liner, case, and transporting it to stores?
The fear of getting sued by RIAA. If there's 10 million people using P2P in the USA for copyright infringement, and that dropped to 500,000 users, a thousand lawsuits every year targeting those sharing the most would make many people very nervous. Scare the infringement into hiding, requiring people to know each other, and then there will be less available. People will start buying again.
Define been around. HDTV broadcasts in either 720p or 1080i. For fast motion 720p looks better. The low and mid-range HDTV's cannot handle 1080p. I know hi-def DVD's will be available for the players, but will they be interlaced, like the early DVDs were? Will they be progressive, but only at 720 lines? Moron.
64MB was not conservative when it came out. 64MB was the most any PC video card had back then, but the xbox ran at lower resolution. Also, console RAM isn't the same grade as PC3200. This generation it'll be faster, GDDR3, the same as what's in the latest video cards. Like others said, the good stuff is more expensive.
I care about the games, not what they're played on. I don't expect Xenon to come with a keyboard and mouse, but since the xbox used modified USB, it would be easy for them to sell an adapter to use any keyboard, or gouge me an extra ten bucks for their own Xenonified version. If MS actually releases a more expensive Media Center version with Tivo functionality and word processing, they'll have gotten people to buy the both the software and hardware from them. That's owning the PC market. MS bought WebTV and it failed, but this could succeed, and I won't have to pay $200 every two years for a new video card, and $300 every three years for a new CPU, mobo, and RAM. Just $400 every five years for a console, and if I keep a PC, it won't need the latest video card.
There are already TVs and projectors that can do 1080p, they just cost several thousand dollars. In three years they'll probably be only a thousand. It would be nice if one of the next-gen consoles includes that capability. For that matter, anyone know if next-gen DVD will store the movies at 1080p, but then use hardware to interlace it for the majority of HDTV sets? I'm keeping my fingers crossed, so I can buy a projector and ditch the overpriced theaters.
Back to the Nextbox, rumor has it there's going to be a Media Center version. What if all versions supported a keyboard and mouse? It would decimate the PC gaming market! No more complaining about using a gamepad for shooters. Yeah resolution would be limited to 1920x1080, but that's not so bad, especially if there's finally a way to hook it up to a monitor. Now Microsoft might not want to hurt the PC market, but I bet Sony wouldn't. Yet Sony is just a bit too strange to try this.
Free wife? No thanks I'll pass.
If only there was free girlfriends somewhere. I'd rove over there quick.